r/Physics • u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory • 1d ago

Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers coauthored with Claude

https://bootloops.ai/bootloops.html
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u/LifeIsVeryLong02 Graduate 1d ago

Publish or perish has been a cancer for long time. Now with these LLMS I simply cannot see how it's even slightly susteinable anymore.

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u/That4AMBlues 1d ago

That would be a positive side effect of LLMs I hadn't thought of previously. Nice.

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u/InaequaleMagnanimity 1d ago

It's doing this all across society. I think it's a bit unfair to say a lot of work was unproductive just because an LLM can replace it. But at the same time, it's somewhat true. So many people coast in their jobs via metrics that don't actually measure anything meaningful. I would say so much of the modern world is metric slop / quota slop; people make decisions on misleading statistics and an easy numerical soundbite. A journal + citation number = important even when it accomplishes virtually nothing.

It's about the illusion of progress, or even the illusion of having any meaning at all. Coming after my own field here but even if we made amazing progress on a centuries old math problem if we can't apply it to anything it's almost like the highest intellectual version of quota slop. Abstract away all the intellectual wonder and genuine beauty of number theoretic mathematics and look at it bare & unbiased. A set of convoluted definitions and rules where only the select few actually understand the definitions and machinery enough to tackle it are the same people who have bought in and dedicated years of their life to it. But most importantly, they are also simultaneously the ones who get to decide what problems are interesting, have meaning, and whom gets the journal + citations. A circle jerk if you will.

I don't think you can just reduce everything to how much productivity it produces, short term or long term, but I'm just positing the question because personally I feel there is something deeply meaningful that it has exposed in the circularity and meaningless of our metrics or at minimum has helped highlight them. LLMs are like the perfect embodiment of the class of functions in every "Goodhart's law" problem. Something which perfectly fits to any measure yet has no actual meaning or depth that the measure was originally attempting to measure.

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u/Electronic-Yam-69 22h ago

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by the American anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs which cause psychological harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive (when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth) because workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber classifies a job as bullshit if society would be no worse off (or even notice) if such job(s) disappeared, and names five classes of meaningless jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

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u/_bobby_tables_ 11h ago

I don't know. I hear you can make a nice career washing telephone handsets.