David W. Hogg on why we do astrophysics (in the face of LLMs and the lack of clinical value)

David W. Hogg, who takes his role as scientific gadfly seriously, recently (February 2026) released an interesting rumination on science, LLMs, and the human component of research. David W. Hogg. 2026. Why we do astrophysics? arXiv 2602.10181. I like that his first move is to insert an ungrammatical question mark into the title to question the whole process. There is a lot to unpack here, starting with the claim that LLMs “show no signs of intelligence.” I seriously don’t know what “signs” people are looking for other than the ability to converse in 200 languages fluently in just about any subject known to humanity. But like most AI benchmarks, we tossed out the Turing Test as soon as a computer could make a passable go of it. One comment I can get behind is, “a data scientist who has taken an astronomy class might be better prepared [to deal with astrophysics data and modeling] than an astronomer who has taken a data science class.” The usual feeling among scientists is the opposite,…