I agree about the “finds important”. Just be aware that it is slippery. Communities can and do redefine what is important in such a way that they circle around the insiders and keep out the outsiders.
An example from my life was to be in an educational technology lab where some of the professors were researching online schools. Once the Open University opened up in the UK, however, it and a few other ones were suddenly being roundly criticized by these same professors who were previously into the whole idea. The discussions struck me as a sort of search process: the professors were trying to understand how they can sideline the Open U as working on non-interesting question, and they seemed to be sort of trying out ideas with each other and seeing what might stick.
I can give other examples, but ultimately, follow Larry McNerney’s advice about this kind of thing. :) If you are approaching someone cold, you have to have your first 1-2 sentences of your message be basically a threat. Tell the reader: you must read my paper, or you’re going to really be made to look foolish! And you have to have a way to actually do that.
You can also just try a slower approach and chat people and/or an LLM for advince. I feel like there is a whole new territory for an individually curious person nowadays. GitHub is already amazing for this, but combining it with an LLM is bringing us a new world of personal craftsmanship that never existed before. Why not explore the new world instead of knocking on the door of the old one?
Lex Spoon
I was about to post something similar but will follow up here since your post is close, @Charlie Steiner .
@eggsyntax, the post is conflating two things: scientific validity, and community penetration. I think it will reach your target audience better to separate thes two things from each other.
I am going to imagine that most people in the scenario you picture are fantasizing that they will post a result and then all the scientists in an area are going to fawn over you and make your life easy from now on. This is what I mean by community penetration.
For that angle, Step 3 is the right way to go. Contact people in your target community. Write them a polite email, show them 1-2 brief things that you have done, and then ask them what to do next. This last part is really important. You don’t want to be a threat to them. You want to be an asset to them. Your goals are going to be things like co-writing a paper with them, or redefining your paper so that they can do a companion one, or at the very, very least, adding some citations in your work to theirs or to othre people that are influential in the target community.
I don’t think you have to do THAT much homework before step 3. Buidling relationships is more about a thousand little interactions than one or two ginormous ones.
I do not see a lot about related work in the post so far. I have found related work to be one of the most productive questions I can ask an LLM. Thye can show you products, papers, articles, and so on that you can go study to see what other people are already doing. This will also show you who you may want to contact for Step 3.
For Steps 1 and 2, I think another way to approach that area is to move away from teh yes/no question and over to standards of evidence. Step 2 is great for developing evidence ifi t applies, but it really depends on the area and on the nature of the idea. It is possible to ask an LLM what the standards of evidence are for an area, and it may tell you something like one of these:
* There may be a way to build a larger version of it the idea to make it less of a toy.
* There may be a variation of the problem that could be explored. A good idea will hold up under multiple contexts, not just the original one.
* There may be some kind of experiment you can try. Step 2 is terrific as written, but there are other experimental forms that also provide good evidence.
Based on what comes back here, it can be good to have a conversation with the LLM about how to go deeper on one of these angles.
OK, that’s all. Thanks for the post, and good luck with it.
I agree on the broad strokes but am not sure about Christians specifically coming out on top. I understand using that example in the article, for reasons of familiarity, but it is interesting to think about which specific belief communities win and lose in this era.
Above all, it just seems like a new world, and it seems unlikely that meme-species of the past are going to be the ones that thrive in the new world. Let’s be a little more specific than that, though.
First, traditional religions are just on the decline in general. Pew reserach reports that, globally, only Islam grew. If we dig into that, the US-specific data suggest that the growth of Islam is due to people leaving Christianity. Without Christian converts, Islam would also be on the decline, at least in the US.
My money is on two kinds of winners:
* Orthodox sects that have stood the test of time, largely due to successfully giving people a good, clean, fulfilling life, albeit a boring one. The AI can learn how and why a belief system achieves the results it does, teach a pastor how it works, and then double down on it with improved services, practices, and lessons. I don’t feel bad about this part of the future, if it happens. If something is wrong, but it works, then it’s not wrong.
* New quasi-religious strands of progress. I share Paul Graham’s intution, from back in 2004, that there are things you get in massive trouble for saying, even though other words that mean the same thing are allowed or even encouraged. AIs speed this process up and make it more virulent. The “pastors” in this case will not always be present, but the bubbles that have one will tend to have a thought leader that seeks out a population but without caring what happens to them over a century or more. This part scares me.
Let me part with a bright side of it all. Humanity is special in that we make groups that explore different ideas from each other. We are now enterring an era where there are many more such groups, exploring more such ideas, than ever before.