Could A.I. be good for scientists but bad for science?

 There has been recent attention to using LLMs to generate novel (and often correct) mathematical proofs, prompted by plain English prompts.

A recent Amazon blog post by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth recounts how they have been able to collaborate with a LLM in the production of increasingly sophisticated proofs of new results. They anticipate that this is a development that will only continue to grow in usefulness. At the same time, they worry about what impact it may have both on the training of new mathematical scientists, and on the peer review process (as the cost of writing polished and correct papers falls faster than the cost of evaluating them for importance). Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first fields to feel the strain of this imbalance has been theoretical  research into machine learning models.

How AI is changing the nature of mathematical research  
What machine learning theorists learned using AI agents to generate proofs — and what comes next.

By Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth

“Specifically, how can intuition and “good taste” in scientific research be developed when AI automates many of the steps that have historically been used to train young researchers? Peer review is another challenge: AI-generated research papers, quickly churned out at scale, highlight the limitations of peer review and modern-day publishing structures and also exacerbate already emerging challenges to incentives for scientific success. Without claiming to have answers or solutions to these concerns, we are personally living through them and will discuss each in turn.
…
“Historically, people earn expertise in the mathematical sciences through struggle as junior researchers. PhD students spend years working through the details of technical arguments to gain hard-won intuitions about when a proof approach is promising, when they are being led astray by a problem, or what constitutes a novel and interesting research direction.

“But these aspects of being a researcher are exactly what AI tools are “giving away”. If doctoral students can simply ask AI for proofs — which is extremely tempting, especially when it is in service of advancing research — how do they develop the experience and skill that, for now at least, are required to use AI tools productively in the first place?
…
“Breaking and remaking peer review
“From our perspective, peer review is not only, or even primarily, a process to verify the correctness and quality of research. Rather, its purpose is to focus a scarce resource — the attention of the research community — in the right places. Science progresses as researchers build on each other’s work, but there is already too much work out there for anyone to keep up with. The publication process should help identify the most interesting and promising directions, so they can be more efficiently and thoroughly developed.
…
“AI tools make it much easier to produce work that looks polished and correct, dramatically lowering the barrier to generating “papers” that can be submitted to journals and conferences. Many of these papers are neither interesting nor actually correct — but discovering this requires significant effort from reviewers.

This is straining an already overburdened machine learning publishing ecosystem struggling with tens of thousands of submissions per venue. We have seen that reducing the time and effort needed to produce "a paper" — not necessarily a good paper — is beginning to destabilize our existing institutions for peer review. The most recent iterations of AI and ML conferences have seen the number of submissions growing by large multiples, with a significant number of papers polished by AI, but ultimately of low quality, making it surprisingly far through the review process before being noticed and called out.
“This is a problem across research fields, partially because it’s creating a market for AI-generated papers. This has in turn engendered a countermarket for AI-assisted detection of AI-generated papers — much like the familiar technological arms races around things like spam and its detection, but with the integrity of scientific publication at stake, not just the filtration of annoying or fraudulent e-mails.

…
“Without a serious, community-wide re-evaluation of peer review, AI threatens to arrest scientific progress at the community level even as it accelerates it at the level of individual researchers.” 

Moral Economics: Al Roth and Ray Fisman at Cambridge Public Library, Monday May 11

 Here's the invitation to a discussion I'll have in May with Ray Fisman, about Moral Economics.

Some of my Boston/Cambridge friends asked how to get tickets now because they're afraid it will sell out (the price is right), and others because they're afraid that if they don't come Ray and I will be speaking to an empty hall...

Alvin E. Roth at the Cambridge Public Library   Monday, May 11 at 6 pm

You can get tickets at this link. 

 

"Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Alvin E. Roth—Nobel Prize–⁠winning economist, the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University—for a discussion of his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. He will be joined in conversation by Ray Fisman—who holds the Slater Family Chair in Behavioral Economics at Boston University.
Ticketing

RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Moral Economics and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing." 

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever (New Republic)

 As an author with a forthcoming non-fiction book, it's both depressing to read that non-fiction book sales are down, but inspiring to read of the importance of books.

The New Republic considers the (diminishing) prospects and (continuing) importance of non-fiction books.

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever
Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction, and our understanding of the world around us.  by Paul Elie

 “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4 percent in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’”

... 

"Fretful narratives about the demise of books and the rise of devices have been in play for half a century or longer. “Our world of books, like most other worlds now, is the arena of an increasingly bitter struggle for space, and for the limited reading time that a busy citizen in this electronic age can afford,” John Updike lamented when accepting the American Book Award in 1982. Narrative nonfiction in particular has faced headwinds in mass culture before. And in many respects, the challenges it faces are built in. Long fact is hard to publish and always has been. Reportage and research take time, resources, attention, and fortitude. A book can require several years to write and another year and a half to be edited, checked, printed, and publicized—only to wind up coming out during a news cycle dominated by a sex scandal, school shooting, pandemic, or war. It was as true half a century ago as it is today that readers expect to pay for fiction but are used to getting nonfiction passively through the media. 

...

"In societies where freedom is under threat, an informed citizen is countercultural and deep reading is an act of resistance. Just as protest and vigilance are essential, so is the ability to read and think. In a would-be autocracy, the autocrat aims to subsume our society’s particular narratives into his master narrative—in which his name fills the headlines, his voice and image dominate the broadcasts, and his airbrushed visage appears on the facades of government. To read a book, however, is to enter a narrative that stands outside the politics-and-media maelstrom. In a would-be autocracy, even a small bookstore—with hundreds of books, classic, recent, and current—is a space of contrary narratives, where truth is recognized as both essential and complicated." 

Stanford remembers John Roberts (1945-2026)

 Economist John Roberts, leader in organizational research, dies at 80
The Stanford professor’s work brought game theory to management practices in firms around the world. 

"Donald John Roberts, the John H. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management and International Business, Emeritus, died Jan. 23 after a long illness. He was 80.

"His start at Stanford GSB was carefully cultivated. When economics professor Robert Wilson began growing the economics faculty at the business school in the late 1970s, he had already recruited an impressive group of young scholars. But he needed someone to shape the intellectual direction of the program.

"Wilson believed Roberts was that person.

At the time, Roberts was a young professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, already known for his teaching credentials and research in economic theory. Wilson persuaded him to join Stanford in 1980, bringing him west to help build what would become one of the most influential economics groups in academia.

“John played a central role in shaping the direction of the economics group in those years,” says Wilson, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. “He had a remarkable ability to see where an idea could lead and to push it until the logic became clear.”

"Roberts remained at the school until his retirement in 2012. At Stanford GSB, he helped lead the doctoral program, mentored younger faculty, and played a central role in recruiting a generation of economists whose work reshaped the field. His four decades of research helped transform how economists study organizations and their management, bringing rigorous economic theory to questions about how firms function internally.

...
“Besides his scholarship, John was an institution builder who helped shape the intellectual culture of the school,” says David M. Kreps, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus. “John helped create an environment where both ambitious research and professional education thrived. He was the personification of balanced excellence.” 

How to revive science in America by Harvey V. Fineberg, in PNAS

 Here's a paper in the latest PNAS that begins with this epigraph:
 
“Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money, and I’ll tell you what they are.” — attributed to James W. Frick (Vice President, University of Notre Dame, 1965–1983) 

 The rest is commentary, (and a figure is worth a thousand (1,000) words). 

How to revive science in America by Harvey V. Fineberg, PNAS, March 26, 2026   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2537854123

 

 

Freedom Festival

 Passover is the Freedom Festival.

The word of the day is LIBERTY (in all it's complications)

A happy and safe Passover to all who celebrate.

 

 

Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers (1943-2026)

 Pinker writes about how Trivers introduced game-theoretic ideas into evolutionary biology (with genes as the players, and selection into subsequent generations as the payoffs). It's a well written tribute.

The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026)  by Steven Pinker 

"Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself."