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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Why would I believe the paper that starts with a generated introduction had a real experiment behind it, and the results section was not also generated by an LLM?

The only thing keeping the science honest is the replication of experiments. If it is very cheap to describe and publish experiments that never happened, but running a real experiment to verify is costly, why would anyone try to replicate any random experiment they read about?

Unless someone comes up with a solution to reorganize the Science (or the eschaton is immanentized), I think the medium term equilibrium is going to look like even more weight given to academic credence-maintaining networks of reputation, less weight to traditional science (publishing results and judging publications on the merits of their results).

Of course, the fact that prompt-related text was left in may signal a level of incompetence or rushing that casts doubt on the quality of the actual science, and that's a fair worry.