That's because we don't really have a left, not since Ronald Reagan. Clinton was more conservative than Nixon, and Obama was more conservative than Clinton.
Don't cry---run for office and do as great a job as Mamdani is doing, or find a Georgist who can and support them. Its pretty clear that people are open to giving alternatives a chance to show they can do better.
But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.
> But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.
PR and communications is a necessary component to demonstrate the value being delivered to your constituents, but the work must still be done. Mamdani is using his position and tenure to prove that Democratic Socialism can and does work, in one of the largest cities in the world, for other potential candidates, and for the voters who might support them. He froze the rent for over 2 million renters, and has recovered in ~$130M in wage theft for delivery workers from DoorDash alone. He's implemented universal childcare for 2-year-olds. He has established enforcement against deceptive and abusive landlord practices, hidden junk fees and misleading charges, and illegal auto-renewals and subscriptions.
"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast." This will be the case study for every mayoral election over the next decade, and who to vote for: putting promise into practice.
(as of this comment, Mamdani polls at ~69% for favorability)
It is almost a cliche' that New Yorker's hate their Mayors. I was there for the 3 which were previous to Mamdani, and everybody hated them.
I thought that Mamdani would set back the cause of Democratic Socialism by 100 years, because surely, after 2 weeks, everybody would just start hating him and the mainstream of both parties could point to him as an obvious warning.
But he's the most popular politician in the country. That doesn't happen by good P.R. It happens when that pothole which has been there for 3 mayors suddenly gets fixed.
There is only a finite number of times you can see:
1. A pothole get fixed Mamdani has repaired over 200,000 of them.
2. Your landlord finally repairs that leaky roof. Mamdani has had landlords do $34 million worth of repairs and upkeep they were legally obliged to do.
3. Or Door Dash finally paid you for those hours you worked....
...yeah, that only happens a finite number of times before you ask yourself? Why didn't any of the other mayors do that? What were the other mayers doing with that 8.5% income tax I pay to live in this city?
And from there it's just a short step to asking "why has government taken all my money in taxes and given me nothing in return?"
It's not P.R. man. It is an existential threat to the mainstream politicians.
Agreed. There are multiple senses for "simple" and on of those senses is "small". It is actually a very useful sense too, as Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov/Chaitin-style inductive reasoning has shown.
And it is important not to just make snappy quips by equivocating.
You are not wrong. But this has by no means proven its up to the standard of being publishable in a machine learning journal. Its on arXiv.org, which, lets face it, at the end of the day is a vanity press.
Calling the arxiv a vanity press shows you aren't a researcher. In math and physics all the best stuff is on the arxiv and the general level is well above the level of most journals. Journals mainly serve as accreditation and many are basically mediocre - the review process resta more value than it adds overall.
What is your definition of a vanity press? Mine is that it will publish anything from anybody.
Sure, there's lots of good stuff on there. But there's lots which is not good. Publishing there is not doing science. Science requires peer review.
Its a wonderful resource, but when overworked journalists (or worse, AI) just picks up a paper from there and writes a breathless article on how cool this new idea is, it is misleading to the general public.
Worse, it can get the general public (and from the comments here, even people working in the field) to forget what science is and why arXiv is not a scientific journal.
In math and theoretical physics the arxiv is the default place to publish and where one goes to find the best and most current work. Papers take a long time to review (years) particularly hard and good papers and publication in journals mainly serves the needs of bean counting dean's and quality control morons in the administration. Actual scientific communication is via the arxiv. Self selection mitigates most ills you describe someone who regularly posts crap on the arxiv will do themselves damage professionally and disappear.
The pace of things is moving along so rapidly right now, I’m not sure that waiting for peer reviews is always a wise move. Doubly so if there’s a paywall; why limit your article’s impact by placing it where practitioners’ agents might not be able to access it? The rapid progress right now is challenging for conventional academic processes.
If the value of the paper is difficult to independently verify, for example, if it depends on the credibility of the author, then the academic ritual can add something. If it’s a mathematical result, one that can be automatically verified, or a machine learning technique that anyone can try with Claude code reconstructing it for them, this sort of pre-print publishing model is advantageous.
Because...science? It's not science until it passes peer review.
I'm not advocating that everybody stops posting to arXiv, and I'm not saying you can't find good stuff there. I'm just saying, it's a vanity press, there is absolutely no guarantee of the paper's quality.
And being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee. If we've learned anything from the non-reproducibility crisis, it is that a paper's origin story is no guarantee.
We all know that science is about experiments and evidence whereas peer review is a social process.
Confusing science with peer review is very unscientific. Galileo’s work did not pass the dominant socio-scientific review process of his day and we all know how that turned out. Peer review serves a purpose but peer review is not science per se — unless, perhaps, your field is sociology, and you study the social processes of science practitioners, so that peer review outcomes are the evidence that you use to study those social processes.
Peer reviewers don't generally reproduce the work in the publications they are asked to review, at least not during the review process itself. Neither do journal editors.
If you want a real vanity press, check vixra and its origin story.
ArXiv does have moderators and endorsers in each area, although they are usually light-touch, weeding out literally unreadable submissions, ones that so obviously ignore formatting guidelines that it beggars belief they could comply with a typical journal's rules, and ones that are clearly submitted to the wrong area.
Having a stable document early (a pre-print) tends to widen the scrutiny of papers that may ultimately be published to a journal whose editor's expertise lies in a very different area from the submission; this can and does lead to author corrections being made before journal publication.
There are plenty of peer-reviewed papers which are hot garbage that have found their way into prestigious high-impact journals like Nature and Science (see <https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...> for examples, and note none of the top 10 are in areas covered by the arXiv).
> being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee
Everyone in academia knows this, including the vast majority of famous professors from prestigious universities, because of online repositories like <https://retractionwatch.com/retractions-by-nobel-prize-winne...> (and much more sadly because of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>, lower-profile versions of which academic paper-writers -- and dissertation writers -- tend to encounter as they chase the history of the problem before them or read late citations to works they are relying upon). This particular part of your set of claims is is not a real problem in academia or with the arXiv in particular.
Finally, what value does publication in a predatory journal bring? Do you believe that peer review and editing were actually even performed in the majority of MDPI's most predatory journals, for example? <https://www.predatoryjournals.org/news/list-of-all-mdpi-pred...> Some papers published in some of their pay-for-publication open access journals don't even get submitted to the arXiv; one might hope this is out of embarrassment by the authors, although the (low) bar set by the arXiv itself is certainly a factor.
The remedy for a reasonably argued but wrong academic paper isn't lack of publication, failed peer review, or editorial alteration, but rather reply papers. That's the academic dialogue.
Thanks for this reply, your points are well taken and it really got me to think about this stuff.
I suppose you could view arxiv as being a way to let more people do a peer review on the papers, i.e. as one component of a more open and transparent peer review process. As such, it is certainly a welcome alternative to what the snootier journal reviews do, which is to put off reading your paper for a year, and then spend about 50 seconds looking for a reason to say "no".
But I had a narrow point to make when I said that arxiv is a vanity press: just because something is on there doesn't guarantee that it is correct, or even useful. It is a vanity press in the sense that it will publish pretty much anything--modulo obscenity and porn laws, and apparently also some sanity checking by arxiv moderators--but so does a vanity press for print books.
To your point of predatory journals, power-broker reviewers and such, yes, I have done my fair share of suffering from them. It slows down good research and passes through bad research. The system is badly in need of reform, and arxiv gives a much needed alternative.
But really, the problem is (as one of my profs said) that science is totally run on volunteer, unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are very busy, get paid nothing, it is mostly a distraction. This leads them to look for other ways of being compensated--e.g. the can try to be a power broker, a feared authority, etc.
The real solution would be to actually pay peer reviewers and fund them so they can actually reproduce the results. Here's how it could work: when a researcher submits a grant proposal, they budget for enough money to fund the research and enough money to peer review and reproduce it. If the research isn't good enough to warrant an attempt to validate it, then it isn't worth doing in the first place.
Thanks. Nobody ever admits when they are wrong on the internet, so I'm trying to be the change I want to see.
W.R.T. the grand historical tradition, etc, note that the great majority of people who practiced that were, like Plato, independently wealthy and otherwise idle. Those who didn't need any money.
That's why we give Judges, teachers, and Professors tenure, a guaranteed job for life. People are more likely to be fair judges of other people's performance when they don't need the money.
So I guess if you want a non-conservative fix, it would be universal guaranteed minimum income. Something we already have, BTW, but you have to be over 62 to get it.
We've tried to open it up to more than just the 1%, but we didn't really go all the way. It is really unreasonable to expect somebody who isn't independently wealthy to do free work. It is a lot of work to properly review a paper, and reproducing the results is something you simply can't do at all if you are supposed to already be working 70 hours a week generating your own research.
Of course a researcher paying reviewers would be a disastrous idea. But if the grant-awarding body would hire 3rd parties to validate that their money was actually well spent, I think it would be a win/win.
Thanks for the references on where paying reviewers has already been tried. I'd like to see others reproduce their success :-)
No paper is guaranteed to be completely accurate and correct at the time of publication; the remedy for honest errors is follow-on papers by the original authors or others in the field putting their names to formalized counter-arguments.
This is how the academic dialogue works, and it dates back to early durable records in the ancient world -- about as far before Plato as Plato's Academy is before today's universities. Innovations like academic journals come from "merely" four centuries ago, and pre-publication evaluation by peers about three hundred years ago. Anonymized pre-publication review is more recent still, and publishing schedules (as well as the needs of the submitter to have the submitted work dealt with in good time) don't admit a dialogue over some subtle point a referee takes some issue with. Moreover, such a pre-publication dialogue is generally non-public, and often also filtered through an editor. It can get messy [1].
As I'm sure you've discovered in your own post-secondary education, academia is very conservative (in the sense of "retaining what mostly works, even in the face of mounting scaling problems", foremost among those being the ever-increasing volume of publishable works generated by researchers).
Direct compensation of referees by journals has a number of pitfalls ranging from the fiddly details of how to deal with income tax liability pay (and credits towards future publication fees, etc) incurs to whether it compromises the objectivity of pre-publication evaluation (which is frankly already not very good in highly specialized areas).
Payment of reviewers by paper submitters is imho an even worse idea -- how do you preserve the anonymity of referees (especially with respect to the submitters)? Do submitters or reviewers have exposure to their (probably different) tax authorities for these transactions? (I can think of at least four national tax agencies that would view the received pay as taxable income, and also potentially subject to value-added tax on professional services. One already sees this problem with conference honoraria.)
Another -- one that already exists in the real world -- might be for institutions and grant-funders to build in support for peer review of others' work by project members. To the extent that detailed pre-publication review benefits academia, and societies that fund academia, as a whole, maybe referees should be rewarded (or even obliged) to do paid reviewing duty. One might compare the requirement to do pro bono work imposed on many practising lawyers by their regulating authorities (especially interesting are jurisdictions in which a party losing a court contest to a party represented pro bono usually must pay into a fund that supports the overall scheme).
Personally I think it would be more useful to everyone to have a solid reply paper published in due course than a blocked initial publication. My ideal is that referees aim to help submitters not accidentally professionally embarrass themselves.
Then on your reproduction idée fixe, supporting the generation of papers which confirm reproduction is something that societies could certainly work on. Many incentives to write and submit papers calling out flaws in others' work already exist, and of course could be expanded. I don't think any of that should be done with masking of the participants. Additionally, reproduction of results is often less interesting than (sometimes much) later testing of published results in significantly different ways.
(Indeed, foundational papers from more than ninety years ago are often re-proven by modern-day experiments, both as a side effect of (or opportunity arising from) pursuing the primary research goal, and as a way of testing e.g. new metrology technology, new computational tools, mathematical advances, and so on. Also, some of those foundational papers simply could not be tested with great accuracy with tools existing at the time of publication. Their publication, however, tended to drive the development of such tools, and in modern days such foundational papers are found to be good only within certain limits that could not have been explored closer to the time of publication.)
Cyberphrenology. In any two random graphs, you'll find an isomorphic graph which is can be up to log of the size of the graphs.
And if the LLM has been trained up to the limit of what data it can hold, it is going to be random. Proof below if it isn't obvious.
The entire effort of all people who are trying to understand how LLMs work, how they represent their data, its all bound to fail.
Proof: a LLM is a very good approximation of the Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov universal probability function on tokens. As such, it will be random--pure white noise--because if you found any patterns in there, you could exploit the regularity and come up with a smaller set of weights for the same LLM.
There are no patterns there to be found. They have all been factored out by training the neural net until it couldn't learn any more.
Distillation is alive and well... Earlier work on model printing also found that it's pretty easy to find smaller sets of parameters which can replicate the behavior of the entire network with pretty good fidelity.
Large parameter counts give space to explore, and give routes out of what would be local minima in a lower dimensional space.
In other words, there's no guarantee that any given trained model is a minimal representation of its training set.
I'm not claiming any arbitrary set of weights is a minimal representation. But typically, if people could achieve the same quality of results with a smaller set of weights, or weights which have been quantized to lower bit representations, etc, they would have published the smaller one instead.
You kind of are claiming they're minimal, though. Because if they're not, your statement that "if you found any patterns in there, you could exploit the regularity..." implies nothing. Yeah, the patterns are there, and people are exploiting them.
Your socioeconomic argument just doesn't hold either. People don't delay releasing models until they've minimized it to the theoretical limit. They ship it when it's good enough for whatever job they're making it for.
No kidding. Clearly there's some redundancy, or however you want to frame it, in real-world released models. That still means your argument for why they can never be interpretable is based an incorrect premise.
If the weights arn't compressed, then a smaller set of weights would perform as well. Sure, you can always induce as much symmetry and patterns as you want by bloating the data set, but that hardly gives us insight into how a set of weights which is "as full as it can be" of information.
The point of TFA is that there are regularities you can exploit in the actually existing weights of machine learning systems, not in some hypothetically maximally efficient weights. The maximally efficient weights would indeed have no structure, but that’s not what anyone is working with.
For those of you who are under the age of 25, "Nirvana" refers not to an enlightened state, but a popular rock band who had their heyday almost 40 years ago.
What am I missing here? Seems like an AI detection program would be as useful as a program which could tell whether John Henry used a sledge hammer or a steam hammer to lay a section of track.
Or whether your CPA did your taxes using Excell or just a big piece of graph paper and counting on his fingers.
What we should be doing is making tools which can tell when an AI is hallucinating, or the output doesn't really solve the problem the user wants to solve.
Not just Claude. For me, anyways, google ai and chatgpt swing from vapid to genius on a daily basis. These companies are obviously searching for some kind of sustainable business model, and trying to get us to upgrade to higher paid tiers.
Honestly, I don't know why they bother charging. Surely they are gathering more information about what people want to do and want to buy than search engines ever possibly could.
Do you want to open a "hello kitty" theme park in wyoming? People are voluntarily telling AIs every day whether that would be a valid business for not. Selling that kind of aggregated information -- heck, giving venture capital to startups they know will succeed--is surely far more profitable than nickel and diming us.
There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
They most certainly are too stupid. This is a true story. In 1995, a guy named McArther Wheeler was flabbergasted when police picked him up for robbing a bank. He said "But I put the lemon juice on my face!!" He figured that since Lemon juice was used for invisible ink, putting it on his face would make him invisible.
So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.
He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.
This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."
This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.
(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)
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