Thread

Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers authored with Claude

49 points · 74 comments · xqcgrek2

phoghed · 1790944096 · focus · HN ↗
A very high number of Redditors think they know more/better than a Harvard professor and dismiss him out of hand. May someone grant us all a measure of their confidence.
1. eieje12 · 1790944631 · focus · HN ↗
  Brand names don’t mean much anymore.
  Three words: Cambridge, Jason Arday.
  1. f6v · 1790945405 · focus · HN ↗
    Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
  2. sdcfgy · 1790945518 · focus · HN ↗
    As Cambridge alumni, that one hurt when it happened. You're not wrong.
  3. [deleted] · 1790945876 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  4. sickofparadox · 1790947181 · focus · HN ↗
    At Harvard itself, Claudine Gay.
    UncleMeat · 1790953230 · focus · HN ↗
    It is a really good exercise to go through the individual things she was accused of one by one. There is one case that is maybe questionable.
2. glitchc · 1790945148 · focus · HN ↗
  Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. Each paper will need to be judged on its own merits, irrespective of the source.
  1. sdcfgy · 1790945588 · focus · HN ↗
    From my own experience, I'm not sure that is necessarily the case. Retraction Watch is also an interesting read.
    I suspect there will be citations galore shortly, faster than anyone can think.
  2. smallmancontrov · 1790948114 · focus · HN ↗
    Reputations are the answer to spam.
    Good judgement takes time, but if the time to judge exceeds the time to spam -- and it does, by many orders of magnitude -- then we should expect the approach "judge each work by its merits" to result in being overwhelmed by spam, which we already are. Reputations let you amortize the cost of acceptance and reduce the cost of rejection, giving you a fighting chance against spam that extreme open-mindedness does not.
3. goalieca · 1790945633 · focus · HN ↗
  Well, many of us in Hackernews lived through grad school. We’ve seen the games. May our AI lords enshittify things even more.
4. iLoveOncall · 1790946229 · focus · HN ↗
  It's extremely likely that a very high number of Redditors do actually know more/better than a Harvard Particle Physics professor on the topics on which he published papers, which include ecology, health, economy, geology, etc.
  This is literal slop.
  1. b3lvedere · 1790946433 · focus · HN ↗
    Is this the same as the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters eventually writing Shakespeare theory?
    iLoveOncall · 1790946560 · focus · HN ↗
    No, because the monkeys do end up writing the work correctly. There's absolutely no guarantee that any of those papers are correct in any way.
    It literally is just spam, and nothing else.
    It's like the Nobel disease: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
    b3lvedere · 1790946810 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks. Amazing examples in that weblink.
    ToValueFunfetti · 1790946914 · focus · HN ↗
    ?
    Surely, this is not correct. The monkeys are drastically less likely to produce valid words; the set of monkeys that produce valid words are much less likely to produce valid sentences, etc. etc. Very low bar to clear, but of course this is vastly better than infinite monkeys at producing good research.
    Hikikomori · 1790949395 · focus · HN ↗
    Infinite monkeys will eventually produce shakespeares work. One monkey can with infinite time.
    phoghed · 1790950907 · focus · HN ↗
    It relies entirely on infinity. Even a much smaller probability like flipping heads on a coin n times in a row quickly becomes practically impossible. How many monkeys would you need flipping coins to get 30 heads in a row?
    Now imagine that’s hitting the right letter on a keyboard many thousands of times in a row.
    I recommend the story A Short Stay in Hell
  2. phoghed · 1790956647 · focus · HN ↗
    > In these other areas, I could not rely on my own expertise to know whether what Claude found was interesting. So I found some experts and asked. With their guidance, BootLoops was able to make substantive advances in many research areas.
    Seems like he realized that as well. I suspect that you may be suffering under the same burden as the Redditors.
    > Last December, I tried using Claude as a research assistant, and found that Claude Opus 4.5 performed like a strong graduate student at 20 times the speed. Despite Claude producing a high-quality paper at the end of the experiment, it was a slog to get there. I had to correct every sentence it wrote, steer it away from irrelevant threads, and pull it back from dead ends.
    Doesn't sound like someone that's producing "slop". But we probably have different definitions of the word, because I've noticed a lot of people use to mean anything AI was involved with at all.
5. oefrha · 1790946299 · focus · HN ↗
  As a former hep-th guy from a very reputable institution I was ready to at least skim and briefly evaluate 36 particle physics papers. Turns out most of them have nothing to do with physics. It takes a special kind of personality to have the hubris to publish in so many domains at once, and most Harvard/Princeton/etc. physicists I know would probably be critical of this. Not that the disapproval would mean much.
  (I did learn much of my QFT from Schwartz’s QFT textbook though, so I hold him in higher regard than <insert random Harvard Physics prof here>.)
  1. famouswaffles · 1790948464 · focus · HN ↗
    The blog post should have been posted instead I think - <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-shaped-science" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-shaped-science.
    It's worth a read, and very interesting. All of the papers he posted have relevant experts of said fields on them as I understand it.
  2. obastani · 1790955812 · focus · HN ↗
    At the very least, many of the papers in other domains are co-authored with experts in that domain.
6. parthdesai · 1790946415 · focus · HN ↗
  Isn't HN similar, albeit with even more confidence?!
  1. phoghed · 1790947630 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah but I’ve earned it by learning JavaScript
7. d--b · 1790946428 · focus · HN ↗
  The professor co-wrote 36 papers (40+page each) with Claude on things ranging from clinical trials, to shared authorship between Shakespeare and the Bible, to decyphering the Voynich Manuscript.
  I didn't read the papers, and I am no specialist in any of the fields that guy meddles in, but it really does sound too good to be true. And if not, well, we're entering a new era of humanity right now.
  1. stingraycharles · 1790946717 · focus · HN ↗
    Too good to be true, or an accurate reflection of the unfortunate state of the world right now?
    d--b · 1790946866 · focus · HN ↗
    what do you mean?
    stingraycharles · 1790977310 · focus · HN ↗
    Well it seems like there’s a group of people that feel empowered by AI, but use it in all the wrong ways.
    I, for one, could not imagine submitting a paper entirely written by Claude, let alone several dozens of them at once.
    d--b · 1791056115 · focus · HN ↗
    aaah, you meant "reflection" in that sense. got it. sorry.
8. _the_inflator · 1790946503 · focus · HN ↗
  Remedial Math - I love it.
  Wisdom of the crowd has finally proven to be more valuable than some obscure title in academia. Crowds are relentless and ruthless, kind of a red team instead of a cronyism.
  PS: The infamous replication crisis deserves a honorable mention here.
9. well_ackshually · 1790946688 · focus · HN ↗
  "50 year old tenured teacher that slaps his name on literally everything his students put out believes he's uniquely qualified to criticize hegelian dialectics" is a headline you can read approximately every year in academia. He's out of his zone, with absolutely zero ability to review his "research" nor credibility to push it out.
  May someone grant me an ounce of his hubris and I'll become president of the united states. And I'm not even a citizen.
10. mcphage · 1790946832 · focus · HN ↗
  > A very high number of Redditors think they know more/better than a Harvard professor and dismiss him out of hand.
  How many different fields would you imagine a Harvard professor to be an expert in?
11. tavavex · 1790949432 · focus · HN ↗
  Seems like you're doing the same thing, dismissing the commenters out of hand (even though many of them make good or decent points - the quantity, the absurd number of unrelated fields, the weird meaningless LLMisms) while using the professor's title as a battering ram to destroy the notion that he could ever be wrong, even on things outside of his field of expertise.
  LLMs making otherwise extremely intelligent people veer off in a strange direction isn't new. When reassured by LLMs, there have been many cases where someone starts posting papers on a plethora of fields they know nothing about, making unified theories that try to tie several fields together, or get convinced they made a real breakthrough when they haven't. I don't think there's been a single counterexample so far where someone used LLMs to push out so many papers on so many topics and have them be correct. So until someone who knows something in these fields pitches in, I'm remaining skeptical by default.
  1. phoghed · 1790955210 · focus · HN ↗
    I know it's a HN rule that one must take people who don't RTFA seriously and not point it out, fortunately that doesn't extend to Reddit users.
    I read the Anthropic post yesterday. I read the Reddit comments today. I observed that many of them are being overzealously anti AI and likely didn't even click the link they were commenting on, let alone look beyond it.
    It's good to be skeptical. It's bad to jump to conclusions based on an emotional response to AI in general. It's bad to be a Redditor.
    Should they pretend that the papers are great and the guy is infallible just because of his position? No, but his prior achievements are probably a signal that they should not jump straight into the usual circle jerk.
12. readthenotes1 · 1790966265 · focus · HN ↗
  Well, Harvard hasn't exactly been a bastion of scientific integrity lately has it?

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