alt Hacker NewsNicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far
Comments
IIUC there are not 258 academic papers published in serious peer review journals [1], only 258 "preprints" in a free preprint server. It's like posting in WordPress but using a PDF instead of html [2]. I guess they start with "abstract" and end with "References" so they looks like papers.
For some weird reason in the last few years people forgot the differences and now any PDF is an "academic paper" [3]. (I'd be more annoyed, if the internal system of the university also forgot the difference. I'm afraid to ask.)
[1] Whatever "serious" means, that's a huge can of worms.
[2] They get an doi and a version number in case of a change.
[3] A few years ago they were call "whitepapers".
Vadim Sokolov, the co-author of the paper mentioned in the post defends this insane practice and says they reviewed at least one of the 258 generated papers with their own eyes, they are thus not fake papers.
Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/#comme...
Why would someone ruin their academic credentials and reputation (at a reputable university) like this? Maybe there was nothing to begin with? Otherwise I can't understand this.
Writing is a technology that served us well for over 5000 years, but now times are a changing. Written media will cease to provide any value in the next decade i think. In person chats/Public speaking will be revered again.
Edit - people are assuming that i want this to happen. no, i don't. i am reading more than i ever did before, maybe out of rebellion. i am just stating what I THINK is to come. it might not go this way at all.
If AI submissions, then why not go a step further and have AI reviewers?
Perhaps this will help bring more scrutiny to the metric of publishing quantity not being as valuable as it has been treated.
Someone in the comments mentioned this:
> As someone who has known Nick in the past, I’m a bit surprised by this multitude of articles and books. However, I think you’ve missed a fifth possibility that would suggest gentle handling: a mental health issue. The papers and books on philosophy, religion, and issues well beyond anything econometric plus the videos on the Riemann Hypothesis suggest someone who is no longer bound by the intellectual boundaries or social mores of proper research.
I don't know whether the commenter is legit, and whether this actually happened, but I wonder if AI-psychosis (or at least, AI-amplified psychosis) might not become a real thing. People already on the edge having "productive" conversations with LLM chatbots and going down rabbit holes. It can't be a good thing, especially since LLMs are sycophants that indulge every crazy idea you have.
I'm not saying this didn't happen before, I just wonder whether LLMs enable a whole new scale of crazy.
I tried writing a simple 20 page paper with the latest Claude model over several weeks and that thing got ripped apart by legal and data science (for good reason), not going to try that again. And there I had all the numbers and analyses down and verified, just the writing itself by Claude was subpar.
Can’t imagine the utter garbage that Claude will produce when you give it a simple prompt and let it write thousand of pages.
Kind of makes me wonder about all that AGI talk if these models can’t even the work of a good PhD or postdoctoral student.
What percent of these 258 papers was funded with taxpayer money?
my Z_spiritual(T) has been unusually high recently because all of this slop is supercharging the value I've been generating through ego-confrontation and progressive liberation
Years ago I was an academic peer reviewer and hated it, you've probably seen published work thats low in quality - you wouldn't believe how low quality the unpublished crap is. I cannot even imagine the absolute bundle of garbage that must be handled by these unpaid reviewers today. We need a better system.
> Jesus Christ. I’ve heard that Cambridge University has an open position in their school of education . . . this kind of thing would fit in very well there, no?
What a disgusting, tasteless joke.
Another possible answer to the "What's in it for him?" question:
The Everest effect.
George Mallory: "The first question you will ask, and the one I have to answer is, 'What's the point of climbing Mount Everest?' And my answer should be, 'It's no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain. Oh, maybe we can learn a little about the behavior of the human body at height, and medicine can change our observations for aviation purposes. But nothing else could come of it. We will not bring back a little gold or silver or gemstones or coal or iron. We will not find soil or earth that we can grow crops that produce food. There is no point. So if you can't understand that there's something in humans that responds to the challenges of this mountain and goes to meet those challenges, then the struggle that ensues is a struggle from life itself upwards, and you won't see why we're leaving. What we get from this adventure is just joy. We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to enjoy life. That is the meaning of life and the purpose of living."
Why generate all of these papers? Because, for the first time, he can.
Doesn't have to be for the money or fame or potential for speaking engagements. It could simply be that he wants to test the limits of what's possible.
Squatting seems like the most plausible explanation. Explaining an idea to your friend at a bar doesn't make it "yours", but publishing a manuscript does.
The SSRN ID of the page linked to by the article [0] is not the same as the SSRN ID [1] linked from a chicagobooth.edu scholar by that name [2]
0. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=170...
1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=228...
2. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/p/nicholas-po...
Call me crazy, but if you can't explain the idea in 10 pages or less, you don't understand the idea.
(For instance, 58 pages, 80 pages ... I don't think of these as normal academic length if this is the main body content ...)
> “An Interdisciplinary Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition.”
If one were inclined, they could shorten the title to "AI Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition." Maybe that's an Easter egg.
AI submissions, soon AI reviewers, and shortly after only AI readers.
The guy's name is "nosloP" spelled backwards. Maybe spelled normally it's supposed to signify the opposite.