LLMs still do their best to give projects the benefit of the doubt.
There the saying that the key to doing a successful startup is to find an idea that looks stupid but that isn’t. A startup is successful when it pursues a path that other people reject to pursue but that’s valuable.
In many cases it’s probably the same for scientific breakthroughs. The ideas behind them are not pursued because the experts in the field believe that the ideas are not promising on the surface.
A lot of the posts that you find on r/LLMPhysics and rejected LW posts have the feature of sounding smart on the surface to some lay people (the person interacting with the LLM), but that don’t work. LLMs might have the feature of giving the kind of idea that sounds smart to lay people at the surface the benefit of the doubt but the kind of idea that sounds stupid to everyone on the surface evaluation no benefit of doubt.
I think it’s really important that people who feel they’ve made a breakthrough should be thinking hard about whether their ideas are able to make falsifiable predictions that existing theories don’t.
You can get a PHD in theoretical physics without developing ideas that allow you to make falsifiable predictions.
Making falsifiable predictions is one way to create value for other scientists but it’s not the only one. Larry brings the example of “There are 20 people in this classroom” as a theory, that can be novel (nobody in the literature said anything about the amount of people in this classroom) and makes falsifiable predictions (everyone who counts, will count 20 people) but is completely worthless.
Your standard has both the problem that people whom the physics community gives PHDs don’t meet it and also that plenty of work that does meet it is worthless.
I think the general principle should be that before you try to contact a researcher with your idea of a breakthrough, you should let the LLM simulate the answer of that researcher beforehand and iterate based on the objections that the LLM predicts to come from the researcher.
There the saying that the key to doing a successful startup is to find an idea that looks stupid but that isn’t. A startup is successful when it pursues a path that other people reject to pursue but that’s valuable.
In many cases it’s probably the same for scientific breakthroughs. The ideas behind them are not pursued because the experts in the field believe that the ideas are not promising on the surface.
A lot of the posts that you find on r/LLMPhysics and rejected LW posts have the feature of sounding smart on the surface to some lay people (the person interacting with the LLM), but that don’t work. LLMs might have the feature of giving the kind of idea that sounds smart to lay people at the surface the benefit of the doubt but the kind of idea that sounds stupid to everyone on the surface evaluation no benefit of doubt.
You can get a PHD in theoretical physics without developing ideas that allow you to make falsifiable predictions.
Making falsifiable predictions is one way to create value for other scientists but it’s not the only one. Larry brings the example of “There are 20 people in this classroom” as a theory, that can be novel (nobody in the literature said anything about the amount of people in this classroom) and makes falsifiable predictions (everyone who counts, will count 20 people) but is completely worthless.
Your standard has both the problem that people whom the physics community gives PHDs don’t meet it and also that plenty of work that does meet it is worthless.
I think the general principle should be that before you try to contact a researcher with your idea of a breakthrough, you should let the LLM simulate the answer of that researcher beforehand and iterate based on the objections that the LLM predicts to come from the researcher.