alt Hacker NewsIt's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
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radicaldreamer • yesterday at 5:22 PM
This happens in biology all the time.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
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ahoka • yesterday at 6:39 PM
Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.
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kergonath • yesterday at 6:28 PM
That’s life. Sometimes you see it coming and ride the wave, sometimes you’re late to the party.
Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.