Stephen Hubbard

i’ve been reflecting on how much my own behavior has shifted from reading scientific papers to asking AI to interpret the literature. as LLMs get better, more of our interaction with knowledge is mediated through generated summaries rather than primary sources. that shift is not just about how we consume information. it undermines the economic layer that has historically funded truth generation, across both journalism and science. in news, if LLMs can produce infinite “journalism-like” articles, the marginal value of content collapses. subscriptions erode, ads weaken. when anyone can generate something that looks like reporting, the institutions that fund actual reporting, including investigation, sourcing, and verification, start to break. the traditional business model was already cracking, and AI may collapse it entirely. in science, the same dynamic plays out. if LLMs can generate “paper-like” PDFs, the supply of plausible research explodes and signal is lost in the noise. journals and citations, already imperfect proxies for truth, become even less reliable. when publishing is cheap, it stops being a meaningful filter for correctness. the incentive shifts toward producing more papers, not more correct ones. the core issue is that our systems reward the production of content, not the generation of truth. journalists get paid to publish, not to be right. researchers are rewarded for output, filtered through peer review systems with no skin in the game. reviewers do not profit from identifying important work or lose from endorsing weak work. prediction markets offer a different architecture, one that shifts incentives from output to accuracy. instead of rewarding publication, markets reward correct forecasts. if you uncover a scoop, generate a dataset, or replicate a result, you can monetize that knowledge directly by taking a position in a market tied to the truth, then revealing the information. this changes the unit of value. it is no longer a paper or article, but a resolved question, such as whether a clinical trial succeeds or a result replicates. anyone who can answer these questions early, including journalists, researchers, labs, and AI agents, has an incentive to do the hard work of discovery and verification. this is particularly powerful for science. today, novelty is rewarded over correctness. replication is undervalued, and null results never get published. in a market system, the incentives flip such that shorting a flashy result or replicating an overlooked finding are profitable. the broader shift is that journals, news outlets, and preprint servers become oracles feeding into markets, rather than the primary locus of value capture. the economic reward flows to whoever is most accurate about reality before it is obvious. AI makes content cheap, which makes correctness more valuable. prediction markets may be one of the first mechanisms that directly reward it.

When you meet a new friend group and realize there's genuinely a friend group hierarchy worshiping one person

mild life update: I've always had a hard time with productivity. I alternate betwen long periods of faffing around and short periods of intense obsessive work. I am low conscientiousness, don't respond to emails or texts, impulsive, immediately forget projects i was working on, etc. Like, I often will go to a Fancy event and meet someone who's like 'oh how's that project going that you said you were working on 1.5 years ago' and i'm always like A) how the fuck do you remember that and B) i don't even remember that project. but now that you mention it, oh yeah, I guess I got distracted with other projects. I often have the sense that people at my level of success - not huge, but like, any success at all - are much more focused and reliable than I am. This makes sense; usually it takes conscientiousness to earn money, so having any amount of meaningful money means you've filtered out the people with low conscientiousness. I thus feel like the systems and social circles I interact with now are much less equipped to handle or understand someone like me vs. the social circles and systems that still include a bunch of poor faffers. Idk why I'm saying this. My faff levels have been pretty bad this last month and a half. I had a very stressful november for some personal reasons, and then my mom died on top of this, and then a week after that i had surgery (couldn't reschedule) which resulted in me staying indoors and not seeing anyone and not able to exercise. I left the house 2x in a period of three weeks. I'm *very* sensitive to environment and momentum, it's easy for small things to throw me off of being productive, and all of these things have fucked me up a bunch. My sleep is terrible now, partially cause i've started having nightmares/stress dreams, and this is throwing off my days even more. If I don't get good sleep i can't nap, and I can't think, and then i just spend the day playing video games in the hope next sleep will be better. I don't really get anxiety, but this last week I've been having the sense of physical stress? Like my body thinks i'm about to throw a big event and I have to LOCK IN. This last week is the first week I've very slowly been climbing back on the ball, and I'm v sensitive and trying to just do one foot in front of the other. I think prob the first step is picking some kind of structure and then sticking to it, and i'm, idk, trying to think about sticking to structure i guess. My income has been dropping cause I haven't been working and it's making me go 'ahhh o no'. I told my partner to do the 'publish one of my drafts to substack every week whether or not it's done' thing, so hopefully that panics me into writing. I think I'm gonna try a thing where I release lower-effort, more personal posts for paid-subscribers-only (substack) every ... saturday or something, and public posts every wednesday. I think i just gotta give up and post stuff even if it's terrible. As I gain more readers I feel like everything I write is higher stakes and this is dumb and ruins my ability to think well. Also underlying everything is this sudden flareup of mortality. I did quite a lot of internal work around death around ten years ago, and this has carried me far, but being there when my mom died has made things like... more real? in a sense? I'm now thinking about everyone dying, all the time. I keep trying to imagine all the people I love dying in a horrible accident and coming to terms with the life that happens after that but it's very hard and I'm not used to flinching so much. I consume a lot of history learning and it's become acutely painful whenever I do because I know at the end of the story literally everyone involved is dead. The minutia of everyday life is thrown between immense meaningfulness and total meaninglessness. I don't really know what to do? I don't know what to do in a totally new way than I didn't know what to do before. There's also some sense of like, an embarrassing lack of specialness. This is what nearly every human has gone through for all of time and now I'm part of the biggest, most cliche club ever. It feels weird to try to talk about it, it feels like trying to point out we're breathing air. Anyway, idk. My point is I'm trying to climb back on a horse, I guess.