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One of the great promises of LLMs is that they have reduced linguistic barriers for non-native English speakers in academia by at least an order of magnitude. Economics, my own field, is 99% in English. I have written a few papers and a book in Spanish but, for all practical purposes, these count for zero in my CV. I had to spend considerable time and effort to reach a level where I could give a 90-minute seminar in English. I could do it because economics is a math-heavy field (you can always put the equation on the slide and let the math do the work) and because Spanish is not that far from English. But I have seen incredibly brilliant students, particularly from East Asia, crash and burn in the job market because their English was below a minimum standard. I do not complain about it. As my great professor at Minnesota, Chris Phelan, loves to say: “Nobody should have told you that life is fair.” Some are born into upper-middle-class families in Hampstead, London, and some into villages in rural China. Given how different Chinese is from English, what amazes me is how smart my Chinese colleagues must be to give a 90-minute seminar in English at all. If you are a native English speaker, try to learn enough Chinese to give a five-minute talk. Then you will understand what they have accomplished. LLMs mean that an Egyptian student no longer must agonize for hours over a flowing introduction to her job market paper. Or a Korean student can prepare for interview questions without a native speaker holding her hand. We are only beginning to see the effects of this change. Native speakers (or speakers of languages close to English) have, so far, maintained a clear advantage in policy discussions. Does anyone truly believe that Paul Krugman would have become a New York Times columnist if he had been a native speaker of Japanese? Same brain, same graduate education, same contributions to economics, same academic jobs, very different impact on public opinion. Or why is economics or physics much more international than sociology, political science, or history? Because in economics or physics, you can get away with much lower linguistic skills. In history, if you cannot write English prose that meets a particular standard, you cannot publish. The resistance to LLMs in academic writing is, in many cases, the defense of the linguistic advantages of English. Let’s call a spade a spade.
El Nino strength is important, but the extraordinary, accelerating, warming of global sea surface temperatures is much more important. See Super El Nino? – mailchi.mp/caa/super-el-n… Also available on Substack: jimehansen.substack.com/p/super-el-nin…
@joefrancis505 @I4Replication Yes, I can confirm this, Joe Francis withdrew the paper, not I4R. As it is our standard process, we invited the replicated authors to write a reply, which they did. To keep things somewhat efficient, the discussion between replicator and replicated authors needs to converge....
They made claims about how my coding was full of errors, yet they were only able to identify 2 errors in 171 corrections that I made to their dataset. I subsequently asked them for a list of the errors they found, but they were either unable or unwilling to provide one.
Last fall, Nico and I were contacted by the Institute for Replication that one Joe Francis had produced a "replication" of our 2012 QJE paper showing that places that attacked their Jews in 1348/49 were anti-Semitic in the interwar period. The "replication" turned out to be GPT
This will be my penultimate replication for a while. I don't take great pleasure in it.
