Philip N Cohen

tldr: Without scholarly communication -- which is, after all, SCHOLARS COMMUNICATING -- science as a social system dies in darkness.

/10

AI peer review and publication of "papers" is already happening on a rapidly growing scale. When the publication process is turned over the prompt engineers, inevitably reading itself follows, and then the social process of responding to and acting on scientific results will, too.
/9

We needed to redesign scholarly communication (procedures, units of output, incentives, publication models) before this happens - and it's already too late. These people are crushing the system and blaming the victims for not being prepared to handle the weight of their output.
/8

I see many "researchers" who produce multiple "papers" per week - and just dump them in the commons. The volume is too great to review and assess. Something has to give. Where we are going at present is that human review, by reviewers and even "authors" themselves, is what's collapsing.
/7

The authors skim the results, claim they are "responsible"
for them - and then press a button to submit the paper, immediately creating an untenable burden for the real humans trying to run a preprint server or journal - and turn to "writing" the next one.
/6

AI agents can "do" science like they propose, but the idea that it will be supervised and assessed by humans is a dangerous myth. It can't happen. This is why so many of the AI "declarations" I already see on papers are bullshit.
/5

The units of output are still "papers," and these processes immediately produce more than anyone EXCEPT MACHINES can read and evaluate. The authors of this paper - if they haven't already - will be proposing agentic "peer review" and publication tomorrow when they realize that's the only option.
/4

They fall in love with the process, trust it too much, and start rubber-stamping the results. Some scientists already "co-author" literally more papers than they have time to read. What is this agent-driven process going to do to our ACTUALLY EXISTING SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION SYSTEM? Destroy it.
/3

As soon as you start down this road, the volume of output - not just code and logic, which they describe, but results and conclusions - immediately surpasses the human capacity to read and assess it. And the people running such a process are still driven by our current institutional incentives.
/2

This proposes a way of using AI agents to produce research. Ok. But this bit is a pipe dream: "And human scientists should retain authority over — and responsibility for — framing the question, validating the path and signing off on conclusions." Here's why...
/1

Reuters• @reuters.com • 1h What the war in Iran means for your money reut.rs/4d6|6b1 What the war in Iran means for your money President Donald Trump's war in Iran risks a major blow to the global eco...

Unseemly

Local Red-tailed Hawk unimpressed by my human problems 🪶

What coders lose by relying on AI. From our event with the University of Washington Office of Public Lectures.

(with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

Beyond the Ivory Tower—How Philip Cohen’s Citizen Scholar Changed My Thinking, and Why It Matters Now Philip N. Cohen’s monograph Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists is both a reflective provocation and a practical guide for academics who want their work to matter beyond campus ga...

Very nice review of Citizen Scholar by Elizabeth Bennion (who is Director of Community Engagement at Indiana University South Bend), in Political Science Educator. "Cohen’s principles—openness, honesty, humility, care, and clarity about one’s role and limitations—are vital." Thanks!

Thank you

People need to stop complaining that there is no clear objective or plan for the war. There is, and he's saying it over and over -- it's just evil and insane. Big difference.

So maybe attacking a distant warship could be legal but not if it was unarmed and you let the survivors drown.

And the Iranian ship was unarmed, which the US knew - and they made no attempt to rescue survivors. Mass murder.

Good to hear!

They used to try to sound less anti-Semitic by saying "Judeo-Christian" but that was kind of a fig leaf

I continue to be gobsmacked at 1) how common this formulation is 2) how antisemitic and generally bigoted it is 3) and how for all the talk of anti-semitism this is never cited as an example even though it’s quite literally the original incarnation.

I don't know anything about psychology but ego depletion has the same energy as the saxophone player in our band in 1989, whose theory was that he had a limited amount of breath and so he shouldn't waste it practicing more than necessary. (Smoking weed was, fortunately, not a problem.)

Is the price of sex too damn low? The main thing to understand about this logic is that feminism is bad.

(Not trying to hijack your thread, but I have made a lifelong commitment to point this out every time I see him mentioned. I responded here: familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/p...)

Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends - Society Society -

All I know about Baumeister is his absolutely insane misogyny. If he has done anything worthwhile in addition to writing this hateful screed, I don't even want to know about it.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

"But JP! How would they prove this anyway?"
Let the regulation read: "If a panel of 3 professors finds evidence of academic dishonesty sufficiently convincing with regards to the use of AI, the student will be required to pay X to compensate for additional burdens placed on the university"

Senate debate: Mullin, Shannon pitch national abortion ban, differ on Ukraine U.S. Senate candidates Rep. Markwayne Mullin and T.W. Shannon touted their conservative credentials in a 60-minute Senate debate Aug. 3, 2022.

"Mullin also said he opposes any exceptions to an abortion ban, even if the life of the mother is at risk. He appeared to imply his own wife would opt against getting an abortion even if her life were in immediate danger."

If the government gets to decide if you have them, they're not human rights.

This is my actual objection. Our entire jobs have been transformed overnight into entirely different jobs, of far less social worth, and with zero relationship to the reason most of us got into them in the first place. All we want to do is contribute and AI billionaires are like HAHA NOPE.

a woman in a black shirt is pointing up at the word this in pink letters ALT: a woman in a black shirt is pointing up at the word this in pink letters

"What matters more than population size is the population structure...If lower fertility leads to more investments per child, higher productivity can more than compensate for the smaller number of future workers, particularly under rapid technological change." 3/3