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Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers authored with Claude

49 points · 74 comments · xqcgrek2

  1. phoghed · · 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. iLoveOncall · · 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. phoghed · · 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.

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