[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).

[kragen]

Yeah, it's the exclusive version that bugs me: "We tested the samples to failure on an INTRON tester under quasistatic conditions." It's nice to hear some journals prohibit it.

[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