Show me science

This is Jessica. Lately I’m thinking about how AI review changes the scientific evaluation process, and by extension what authors are incentivized to report. Some speculate that the scientific paper, as a summary of the research for other humans, may be on the verge of becoming obsolete or at least less important. Instead, we may see more raw summaries of just the facts. The idea is that if LLMs are increasingly the consumers of research, we don’t really need all the baggage of narrative and illustration to make things more relatable to humans. Last November, Tom Dietterich asked for opinions on social media about what arXiv should do about papers that are bulleted lists, like this: Some of the impetus to reduce narrative in papers predates LLMs. E.g., even before the appearance of chatbots in 2022, people were arguing that we should get rid of or restructure Discussion sections in scientific papers, because authors are often tempted to use them to drift into rhetoric (“spin”) and…