Anonymous Professor

1/ Many in academia are losing their marbles over AI. Most of this can be traced to just three overlapping sources of cognitive dissonance. Three big drivers:

If the average person knew how broken the peer-review system truly is, and how badly it’s deteriorated over the years, they’d never trust another peer-reviewed paper again. Science and academia are long overdue for an overhaul. The solution is AI. #academia #AcademicReform #PeerReview

@SwipeWright Nature in particular has been publishing very poor quality stuff This is why when people still play the "journal rigor" game, I laugh! There is no journal rigor... anywhere.

🚨NEW: A recent Nature profile highlighted a scholar who made a literal river the first author of her academic papers. The profile, titled “Why I made a river my co-author,” explains that Anne Poelina gives first authorship to “a source with deep knowledge about water — the river itself.” Nature actually treats this as a serious challenge to “Western and colonial views of what knowledge is and who holds it.” It gets...more insane. The river now has an ORCID (a unique researcher ID used to track an academic’s work), so its papers and citations can be catalogued like a normal human scholar. One example (among many) is a paper in PLOS Water. In the paper's author note, we are told the “Martuwarra, RiverOfLife” is “a living Ancestor Being,” that this is a “multi-species approach,” and that the river was made the first author because “without Country, without the River… there would not be a paper.” The abstract tells readers that the paper is “led by the sacred ancestral River, Martuwarra, who is given agency as a published author,” and then the human authors explain their authority is gained through “lived experience,” kinship, friendship, and a “deep and enduring relationship.” The paper concludes by rejecting “colonial approaches” to science, makes appeals to “Mother Earth,” and a calls for an ethic of “care, love, and peace” guided by Indigenous wisdom and planetary citizenship. Our science journals have become laughingstocks.

@danwilliamsphil It’s also an important engine of P-hacking, bad science practices, practicing science as a personal brand, etc. Stop romanticizing everything human and vilifying everything AI

Some half-baked thoughts about AI capabilities: Much of the discourse surrounding AI assumes that one can achieve human-like capabilities without the motivational-emotional architecture that underlies them in human beings. For example, human research and discovery are very closely connected to drives associated with ambition, status competition, envy, and so on - a complex suite of goals and feelings that is manifestly absent from state-of-the-art AI. Many seem to assume that such goals and feelings are ultimately unnecessary for AI systems to achieve “human-level” research ability. They seem to think that making discoveries essentially depends on a certain kind of intelligence, and it is merely a contingent fact about our species that people are often motivated to deploy that kind of intelligence by the desire for esteem and admiration. Maybe this is right, but I don’t think it’s obvious. With research, for example, it is plausible - and has been argued by many - that humans often irrationally invest in their own ideas instead of simply trusting in the accumulated knowledge of other people, precisely because individuals get personal “credit” - status, recognition - if their own ideas turn out to constitute discoveries. This is an extremely important engine of intellectual discovery in our species, yet it involves a set of motivations and goals that are completely alien to anything found in modern AI. I think this basic issue applies across many domains. Much of what humans do depends not just on cognitive abilities, narrowly construed, but on very complex systems of motivations, emotions, and feelings shaped by evolution, development, and culture. Although it's coherent and maybe even plausible to think that these are ultimately irrelevant for building AI systems that can match or exceed human-like capabilities, the assumption deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives.

@armondboudreaux And what you’re describing happened only after AI was introduced, right? It wasn’t happening for about 10 years prior, right?

As a college English professor at an “access institution,” I have been watching the demise of literacy in real time. (For some of that time, I have worked under administrators whose answer to the problem was to give us subtle hints that we should allow students to “use“ AI to “help them” with “writing” their papers.) As literacy has declined among my students, so has their curiosity and ability to think. I only teach at one institution, so I don’t know how representative my students are. But my gut tells me that we are heading for something apocalyptic.

Love how people think students were doing a lot of “deep thinking” and critical reflection prior to AI. What an uninformed, romanticized version of the reality

@blinky4thewin @akoustov 100%

Fired for what, exactly? For being transparent about my workflow? You're a smart guy, David. You know perfectly well that your colleagues use these tools, and that nobody will fire me. So what does this accomplish besides virtue signaling to people who privately do the same?

@OdedRechavi I stopped playing these glam journal games a while ago. I just publish so that I can contribute to the scientific conversation, regardless of where this conversation is taking place

Do we grow wiser as we age? Can we? I spent over 15 years chasing glam journals and wasted a lot of time and energy (and this chase caused a lot of frustration to my team and co-authors). I don’t want to wake up at 70 and realize my life went into convincing a few editors my work was trendy enough. Enough is enough. I'll try to be smarter.

Oh! Having a good AI is like having a super diligent research assistant who can explore propositions quickly. Its well and good, and very human, to link two things together and say 'what if'? Then feed that to AI, and drill down with subsequent probing. You really come up against the hard edges of societal main-street and economic reality.

It’s not that people who know how to think will suddenly become dull from using AI. It’s that the poor, fuzzy thinking of those who never thought clearly in the first place is now being brutally exposed by AI.

@akoustov I wouldn’t waste my energy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to have a rational discussion with someone who is highly anxious

OK folks, I see a lot of otherwise smart people apply very simplistic thinking on this issue. I understand it's visceral, but can we be more nuanced about this? I never admitted I was not writing. In fact, believe it or not, I'm doing more "artisanal human writing" now than I've ever done before. You can use AI to help your writing in various ways, from generating pushback on your ideas to suggesting examples that don't fit your narrative. Reasonable people can disagree on what the best practices are.

Future history books written 25+ years from now will make it embarrassingly obvious which scenario was more likely: A) How humanity narrowly avoided mass AI adoption and happily reverted to “simpler” technologies that somehow made life better… B) “This was the dawn of a transformative new technological era — one that many resisted out of pure fear, ignorance, and threatened self-interest.” History has never been kind to the modern Luddites. x.com/phdumbfounded/…

#AI #AcademicTwitter #HigherEd #EdTech #Academia #GenerativeAI #AIinEducation #AcademicChatter #FutureOfWork

6/ Real progress belongs to the professors who treat AI like a superpower instead of a threat: using it to iterate hypotheses faster, synthesize 10x more literature, and free up time for the stuff only humans can do: genuine mentorship, creative leaps, and chasing truth without bureaucratic drag. The marble-losers will be footnotes. The integrators will be the ones who actually move knowledge forward. What side are you on, academia?

1/ Many in academia are losing their marbles over AI. Most of this can be traced to just three overlapping sources of cognitive dissonance. Three big drivers:

that’s not what the poster is saying, nor is it what I am claiming. The poster is saying something unique has shifted, I am saying there are lots of unique things shifting all the time, it just feels to every generation like it’s more fundamental than earlier shifts because you’re living it

@PhDumbfounded @Seekthetruth101 You really think the world order is the same as the 60s-90s? The US was the apex world power with all the benefits. You can't see the world order is up for grabs again? That is literally what is happening. We're in the beginning of a reordering.

Not enough people are questioning WHAT THE FUCK happened to the world