[intoamplitudes]

First impressions:

1. The data in most of the plots (see the appendix) look fake. Real life data does not look that clean.

2. In May of 2022, 6 months before chatGPT put genAI in the spotlight, how does a second-year PhD student manage to convince a large materials lab firm to conduct an experiment with over 1,000 of its employees? What was the model used? It only says GANs+diffusion. Most of the technical details are just high-level general explanations of what these concepts are, nothing specific.

"Following a short pilot program, the lab began a large-scale rollout of the model in May of 2022." Anyone who has worked at a large company knows -- this just does not happen.

[btrettel]

On point 2, the study being apparently impossible to conduct as described was also a problem for Michael LaCour. Seems like an underappreciated fraud-detection heuristic.

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

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

> As we examined the study’s data in planning our own studies, two features surprised us: voters’ survey responses exhibit much higher test-retest reliabilities than we have observed in any other panel survey data, and the response and reinterview rates of the panel survey were significantly higher than we expected.

> The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green (2014).

[raphman]

FWIW, in the q&a after a talk, he claims that it was a GNN (graph neural network), not a GAN.

(In this q&a, the audience does not really question the validity of the research.)

https://doi.org/10.52843/cassyni.n74lq7

[mncharity]

Wayback of the Sloan School seminar page shows him doing one on February 24, 2025. I wonder how that went.

I miss google search's Cache. As with the seminar, several other hits on MIT pages have been removed. I'm reminded of a PBS News Hour story, on free fusion energy from water in your basement (yes, really), which was memory holed shortly after. The next-ish night they seemed rather put out, protesting they had verified the story... with "a scientist".

That cassyni talk link... I've seen a lot of MIT talks (a favorite mind candy), and though Sloan talks were underrepresented, that looked... more than a little odd. MIT Q&A norms are diverse, from the subtle question you won't appreciate if you haven't already spotted the fatal flaw, to bluntness leaving the speaker in tears. I wonder if there's a seminar tape.

[radicaldreamer]

Here’s a podcast from Sloan where David Autor is talking about the work as if it is perfectly valid

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/audio/feed-drop-how-ai-will-chan...

[mncharity]

The feed drop appears to be this podcast[1], posted Feb 3.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giGrMKDc0O0

[rdtsc]

Oh interesting. I haven't talked to any recent graduates but I would expect an MIT PhD student to be more articulate and not say "like" every other word.

There was a question at the end that made him a little uncomfortable:

[1:00:20]

   Q: Did you use academic labs only or did you use private labs?

   A: (uncomfortable pause) Oh private, yeah, so like all corporate, yeah...

   Q: So, no academic labs?

   A: I think it's a good question (scratches head uncomfortably, seemingly trying to hide), what this would look like in an academic setting, cause like, ... the goals are driven by what product we're going make ... academia is all, like "we're looking around trying to create cool stuff"...

My 8 year-old is more articulated than this person. Perhaps they are just nervous, I'll give them that I guess.

[dguest]

Don't confuse a polished TED talk from a practiced speaker with a seminar from any random person in academia. I'm sad to admit I've given talks (many recorded) that are much worse than this.

These seminar-style talks in particular have a strong Goodheart bias: academic scientists judge each other on the papers they write, but the highest honors usually come in the form of invited talks. The result is that everyone is scrambling to have their students give talks.

In larger scientific collaborations it can get a bit perverse: you want to get everyone together for discussions, but the institutes will only pay for travel if you give their students a 20 minute talk. You'll often have conferences where everyone crams into a room and listens to back-to-back 20 minute lectures for a week straight (sometimes split into multiple "parallel sessions"), and the only real questions are from a few senior people.

It's a net positive, of course: there's still some time around the lectures and even in 2025 there's no good replacement for face-to-face interaction. But I often wish more people could just go to conferences to discuss their work rather than "giving a talk" on it.

[jll29]

> But I often wish more people could just go to conferences to discuss their work rather than "giving a talk" on it.

Very true point. I've been wondering why academics "suffer" so much from a system that they themselves created and are actively running (unpaid, all volunteers-based). Conferences are organized by academics for academics. Grants are subitted by and evalated by academics. Journals' editorial boards are staffed by academics to review the work of their peers. Even metrics of merit are defined by scholars of scientrometrics, also academics, to rate the works of their peers. Yet we have a system where peer review has a high element of arbitrariness, lacks minimal professional standards, conferences organizers take too much of their valuable time to do a job (rotational, even!) that is often mediocre, and authors donate their papers for free to commercial publishers from which their institutions then buy these same papers back for a lot of money. After a quick analysis of these entrenched systems in my first months of doctoral studies, I questioned the intelligence of people who first created such a system and then keep complaining about it, yet they make no move to change anything.

Let's invent a new meeting format where people basically travel to a nice place with few distractions in order to discuss their research informally, no talks.

In my field (computer science), it's what workshops once were before they became mini-conferences with three minutes question time (for all the questions from the whole audience after one talk, not per person asking) after talks.

PS [edit]: I once saw two older professors discussing something on the corridor floor of a conference while talks were going on inside the various rooms. They were sitting on the floor, both held pens and there were some loose papers scattered on the floor. This was right were people coming out of talks would have had to walk over them. I had skipped that session, so I asked them what they were doing. They said "Oh, we're writing a paper. We only meet twice a yeara some conference, that's when we need to get most of our important work done." At the time I found it funny, but with the benefit of hindsight isn't it a sad state of affairs?

[ahazred8ta]

A new meeting format - the beer themed developers summits come to mind. https://redmonk.com/videos/the-2022-monktoberfest/

[ok_dad]

The "giving a talk" is to introduce newer students to these fields. If you don't introduce undergrads to real research, they never learn about the possibilities they have to study in the future. It is probably really annoying to have to do it, but I think some have forgotten that the research and results aren't the only important thing to come from research, but also the passing of knowledge and experience that is important.

[rdtsc]

> Don't confuse a polished TED talk from a practiced speaker with a seminar from any random person in academia.

I don’t expect a TED talk but we’re still talking about MIT here. I’ve seen 8 year olds more articulated. I guess where I am from being called in front of the class and having to present or talk about the homework reading is common, so perhaps why it’s seen as exotic in US to be able tie words together without saying “like” after every other word, or slump and touch the hair every 10 seconds.

[dguest]

Yeah, MIT-affiliation certainly doesn't imply good presentation skills, I agree with you there.

I wonder about this too, but I think any academic institute asks a lot of PhD students. 90% of it isn't about giving a good public talk. Especially at PhD level it's much more about actually gathering a blob of data, distilling it into a (still nonlinear) structure, and then, finally, serializing it into a paper draft. In many cases the talk is something you do at the end as a formality.

This doesn't get any simpler just because you're at an institute with a fancy name. Your hypothetical 8 year old has one chance to get a cookie and had better be pretty articulate about it. This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.

[rdtsc]

> Your hypothetical 8 year old has one chance to get a cookie and had better be pretty articulate about it. This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.

Nah, they also can explain how potential and kinetic energy works, talk about how many types of stars are out there and so on. Not hypothetical at all. They do like cookies, too!

> This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.

Well, I posit in this case their 1st out of 1 million other worries was to sound credible, because they may be asked about their methodology. Staying consistent while making things up does take considerable amount of effort and the speech will suffer. Listen to the segment I point out and see how they act. They sort of pretended they didn't hear the question at first.

[saagarjha]

Not everyone is a good public speaker. It's not like MIT selects applicants by looking at their presentation skills, or necessarily even teaches them.

[rdtsc]

The point here was that he cheated. He made things up and as soon as he was asked about methodology he pretended not to hear the question, slowed down, started to sprinkle “likes” everywhere, etc.

The question is more about how good of a cheater he is. Not very good as keeping a story straight takes up a considerable amount of effort and speech suffers.

[gipp]

I guess you haven't seen many academic talks then? I'd easily put this on the upper 50% of them as far as public speaking goes

[esprehn]

Using the word "like" is not as bad as it seems, and it's been quite common in language for longer than we think (though usage does seem to increase with each generation).

There was a recent podcast that covered it with some experts that's a great listen:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5w1gdbhmlCyTapoQ3EkMHp

[globnomulous]

> Using the word "like" is not as bad as it seems, and it's been quite common in language for longer than we think

The word has many, many uses: filler/pause, oral punctuation, discourse marker, hedging, qualifier. It also serves an important social function, in that it can reduce perceived severity or seriousness. Young women seem to use it assure peers that they are sweet and not threatening.

I hate it. It's not uncommon to hear it more than four or five times in a single sentence.

The implied expectations are odious: eloquence is a faux pas; directness is rude; a fifth-grade vocabulary is welcoming.

[TeMPOraL]

you be all like, "eloquence is a faux pas; directness is rude; a fifth-grade vocabulary is welcoming". Then the internet be like, "yo, pretentious much?", and then they be like "eloquence is some rascist victorian shit-e", and then be like, "directness is privileged and oppressive", and then be like, "your educated vocabulary is, like, so rich and neurotypical"

then you be all like, "but! but! that's not what i mean", and then they be like, "ok boomer" and then they be sharing tiktoks of yo red face on red dit(!) and img2img you into Wojak memes

--

Couldn't resist. I feel like you feel, and I'm saddened by the fact that there seems to be no way to hold any quality standards in modern society. Yes, standards of writing and speech and culture are arbitrary, but it's valuable to have them; meanwhile, we live in times where you can't require anything of people, because there's always someone ready to argue the expectations are unfair or malicious, and there's no culturally valid counterargument to that.

[jbullock35]

When you use it as a comma, it’s bad.

[saagarjha]

That's just, like, your opinion.

[busyant]

> I would expect an MIT PhD student to be more articulate and not say "like" every other word.

Buddy, I've met MIT profs whose public speaking was so horrible, it would probably take them 30 minutes to order a glass of water.

[dguest]

That's an optimization.

See I'm thirsty, but I can drink the water later. And my grant proposal is due at midnight tonight (12:01 on Sunday, technically), and my PhD student is texting me to say that he can't log into the cluster, and we also just got the proofs back from that paper but I guess that can wait. At some point I should fill out that reimbursement form for the conference last week but first I should get back to those undergrads who said they wanted a summer ... wait water? Oh yes sure water would be great.

[rdtsc]

We’re doomed :-)

[hansvm]

https://xkcd.com/1483/

[raphman]

Oh, he also claimed that he got IRB approval from "MIT’s Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects under ID E-5842. JEL Codes: O31, O32, O33, J24, L65." before conducting this research, i.e., at a time when he wasn't even a PhD student.

[constantcrying]

A month by month record of scientists time spend on different tasks is on its face absurd. The proposed methodology, automatic textual analysis of scientists written records, giving you a year worth of a near constant time split pre AI is totally unbelievable.

The data quality for that would need to be unimaginably high.

[lumost]

If a paper is difficult to replicate in a high volume field.. will it ever be replicated? The question we should be asking is how many fraudulent papers are there in the field?

I’ve even worked in places where some ML researchers seemingly made up numbers for years on end.

[3s]

I agree with point 1, at least superficially. But re: point 2, there are a lot of companies with close connections to MIT (and other big institutions like Stanford) that are interested in deploying cutting edge research experiments, especially if they already have established ties with the lab/PI

[pixl97]

>The data in most of the plots (see the appendix) look fak

Could a Benford's Law analysis apply here to detect that?

[constantcrying]

How would you apply it, why would it be applicable?

[tough]

Fake data is usually too clean

[constantcrying]

And? How is that at all a relevant observation?

[tough]

Anyone looking at inly the data objectively should br able to comento terms that is distribution is unnatural, as it turns out to fake organic isnt as easy

[constantcrying]

This was about Benford's law.

[pixl97]

And what exactly do you think Benfords law is?

[mzs]

  % gunzip -c arXiv-2412.17866v1.tar.gz | tar xOf - main.tex | grep '\bI have\b'
  To summarize, I have established three facts. First, AI substantially increases the average rate of materials discovery. Second,  it  disproportionately benefits researchers with high initial productivity. Third, this heterogeneity is driven almost entirely  by differences in judgment. To understand the mechanisms behind these results, I investigate the dynamics of human-AI collaboration in science.
          \item Compared to other methods I have used, the AI tool generates potential materials that are more likely to possess desirable properties.
          \item The AI tool generates potential materials with physical structures that are more distinct than those produced by other methods I have used.
  % gunzip -c arXiv-2412.17866v1.tar.gz | tar xOf  - main.tex | grep '\b I \b' | wc
      25    1858   12791
  %

[rafram]

Not sure what you’re trying to say.

[kccqzy]

Maybe the point is that it is rare for a paper to have the pronoun "I" so many times. Usually the pronoun "we" is used even when there is a single author.

[muhdeeb]

Agreed! It’s pretty alien. I’ve seen brilliant single author work, but nothing that uses “I” unless it’s a blog post. The formal papers are always the singular “we”. Feels very communal that way!

Nice to include the giants we stand on as implied coauthors.

[kragen]

Not being an academic, my (silent) reaction to singular "we" in academic writing is usually, "We? Do you have a mouse in your pocket? Or do you think you're royalty?" It's nice to hear of your more charitable interpretation.

[mananaysiempre]

There are, notably, two different if frequently confused “academic we” conventions, distinguished by their clusivity[1]: the inclusive “academic we” in constructions such as “thus we see that ...” refers to the author(s) and the reader (or the lecturer and the listener) collectively and is completely reasonable; the exclusive “academic we” referring only to the single author themselves, is indeed a somewhat stupid version of the “royal we” and is prohibited by some journals (though also required by others).

[fooker]

A physicist with a similar mindset used to add his cats to his papers because of this dilemma.

[andy99]

You might want to read the story of F. D. C. Willard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard#Background

[IshKebab]

It's rare that "I" is used because usually papers have multiple authors, and also the academic community has a weird collective delusion that you have to use "we"... but there are still a reasonable number of papers that use "I".

[xyzzy99]

There's no "collective delusion" here. There is a long-established tradition that formal scientific writing should avoid use of first-person pronouns in general because it makes findings sound more subjective. It's taught this way from early on. This is slowly starting to change, but it's still pretty much the rule.

[cycomanic]

For a while passive voice was recommended by lots of courses and some advisors, but I reality most journals never recommended passive voice and now many (most) actively discourage it (e.g. here is the nature style guide https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/for-authors/write) , because it makes texts much more difficult to understand. It is quite funny how passive voice became prevalent, it was not common in the beginning of the 20th century but somehow become quite common especially in engineering. It is only quite recently (~10 years) that the move is to back to active voice.

[vintermann]

Yeah yeah, but it's not the interesting part here. It's not as if flaunting this convention means we can be confident you're a fraud.

[BeetleB]

> There is a long-established tradition that formal scientific writing should avoid use of first-person pronouns in general because it makes findings sound more subjective. It's taught this way from early on.

Established tradition doesn't negate "collective delusion".

And anyone who uses the use of "I" in a paper to imply anything about its authenticity is definitely indulging in some form of a delusion. It's not the norm, but is definitely permitted in most technical fields. When I was in academia no reputable journal editor would take seriously reviewer feedback that complains about the use of I.

[pbhjpbhj]

It's a single author. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17866