"the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

We’re at the point of learning that some things that used to matter no longer do, and some things we used to think mattered never did. It’s a going to be a shock to everyone, and this same phenomenon is happening everywhere, not just academia or software engineering.

My bet: a lot of the things we used to do were habit, ceremony and gatekeeping much more than being necessities.

The author is a mathematician and I think to a certain extend the tweet reflects the current panic among (some) mathematicians. So ~~second sentence~~ third paragraph the claim that somehow ai could right now write a phd in physics or sociology is something we don't observe (at the moment). What we observe is, that ai can find counter examples to well established conjectures in mathematics quite well, but the thing is the other fields don't have the kind of well established riddles that currently produce the flashy results in mathematics.

I've seen a student using ChatGPT for almost everything in his PhD (in engineering). You have some data but you don't know what kind of statistical analysis tool to use? Ask ChatGPT. Code for the analysis? ChatGPT. How do you interpret the results? ChatGPT.

And so on. I could bet that some of his scientific questions where generated, and that's no surprise to me, it's just SO easy this way and if the PhD advisor just says "ok that's good" and no one ever complain during the PhD defense then for sure this will keep going.

But regarding OP's link, when Lemire says I kept my mouth shut. I am never rude on purpose. You can't say that and complain that academia "is blown to bits". It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.

I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states:

> Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything.

So, it sounds like nothing of much value has been lost.

I think what he really complains about is that AI is starting to show that the emperor called academia has no clothes. So much of working your way through that system has always been about being able to master largely pointless rituals.

Yet, the people on the inside have no interest in making any improvements, because academia has always been institutionally conservative. But now AI is starting to put pressure on them to rethink their way of doing things, and they really don't like it.

The largest output of a PhD has always been the training to the student, not the thesis itself, hence why we're called 'students'. Anyone claiming that a thesis can be generated by AI is missing the point. AI can also do everything an undergrad can do, we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits. At best, we say we need better modes of evaluation, and perhaps that's true for PhDs as well.

I submitted my thesis this month at a QS top 10 uni after nearly 4 years of work. LLMs were available for most of that time. I don't really feel that it has diminished the value of my thesis by much really.

I have a PhD and I completely support AI disrupting the field.

If AI disrupts your field, the culprit is most likely not AI.

Maybe old methodologies will be discarded and new ones will emerge.

Thinking back, when I first started teaching myself programming, I didn't know what to learn, so I explored the history of programming and organized it as I went.

One of the most striking things I remember is that when Stack Overflow first launched, quite a few people opposed it.

Also, I recall that in ancient Greece, Socrates criticized writing, saying it would weaken human memory.

When SO first appeared, there were many who insisted that the only proper programmer's way was to RTFM, deeply understand the system's fundamentals, and then write code. I wasn't from that generation—I belonged to the copy-paste-from-SO generation—so I can't say for sure, but I found it quite fascinating.

The cost of that friction could only be borne by a very small minority, and that minority could guarantee quality. That's why scholarship was something only the elite could pursue—and to some extent, it still is.

In the past, tasks were painful and high-friction. The results were filtered through that process, accessible only to the few who could endure it. But we tend to mistake those inefficient drops of sweat for quality. In reality, just as writing didn't diminish philosophy but rather created systems like law and philosophy, this might just be another turning point

I think Mr. Lemire's post is similar in spirit. In other words, when friction increases, the cost of production for producers also rises. So back then, everything produced through that high-friction process was easier to quality-control. But that's no longer the case.

And actually, universities were originally about 'holistic education,' but these days, they've become more about training talent for industry and managing human resources for the job market. That shift has caused problems.

In that sense, it's only natural that these problems arise at the intersection of academia and industry.

Industry usually demands 'people and technologies that can boost productivity right now.' Meanwhile, academia should ideally pursue problems worth exploring over the long term, even if they have no immediate utility. But the current state is a product of compromise.

Once university evaluations, student recruitment, research funding, and employment rates become tightly linked to industry demand, the latter starts to pressure the former. And under those conditions, the current outcome is almost inevitable—because industry increasingly wants to churn out degree stickers at lower and lower costs.

In the end, a different methodology will be needed, and whoever proposes it will become the game changer. Then new schools of thought and methodologies will emerge based on that person, and they'll gain enormous fame. I'm curious who that will be.

New things are always born by laying the past to rest. I'm always waiting for that new methodology.

> In the past, the path to a math Ph.D. cultivated resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism (…) but suddenly you can produce a passable Ph.D. thesis with the push of a button

But actually nothing changed. Or maybe a path to "resilience, resourcefulness and critical thinking". Because human brains still needs to be shaped by years of training on some quality "literature", of some form.

We still must/want to human-[re]check important results, right ? And that require years of students time dedicated to memoizing facts and doing exercises in discovering already discovered results - learning and weights tuning, in the brains.

Yes, demotivator factor is very high or maybe just more visible then usual. Especially for brain paths forming - an that process is not quite stated in university and other education...

I think that when LLMs finish words and sentences shuffling and finds most of low hanging fruits in cutting edge of research ;) then only humans can move things forward, via abstractions, syntesis or old good paradigm abandoning. Hard to imagine LLM on their own "discover" something and then drops all that "literature" it was trained on as obsolote :) In next prompt it will happily return you old texts without any influence of just discovered paradigm shift.

In XIX century we got quite stagnation in science - it was belived that everything was already discovered, explained, just some few experiments are needed because some numbers do not adds up... And that proliferated to philophy and culture via some "proofs" for atheists. But in 1905 a paper was published... Too bad politicans do not get implications of that and still was pushing communism decades later...

So we realy want humans with brain pathways shaped mostly "old way" - the only one way available for human beings - by that training called "education". As always there is resistance and pain and attempts to find a shortcuts by cheating. Maybe this is time to clearly state that brain workings training is big part of education ? Just like in gym you are repeating to trying to lift weights up to your limit and even little above, with supervisor oversight.

"...and that's a good thing."

[dead]