This beautiful essay is a great jumping off point for people across all fields of scholarship to reflect on what it is we are doing and why.
https://blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/2026-08/als-ob-philosophieren-lily-hu
A short thread >>
I follow MJ Crockett and Lisa Messeri in believing science (and in fact all scholarship) to be an essentially human activity. (@alex and I write about this in The AI Con, too.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07146-0
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In other words, there is no knowing without knowers, scholarship is a giant conversation in which we speak with our colleagues sometimes slowly (in papers) sometimes faster (Q&A sessions of talks). It is not the accumulation of "facts".
We get into this some in this episode, with MJ and Lisa:
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Episode 31: Science Is a Human Endeavor (feat. Molly Crockett and Lisa Messeri), April 15 2024 - Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
Buzzsprout
Having just come back from #ACL2026, and reading Lily Hu's piece (linked at the top of this thread), I am struck by how the glib facility of LLMs is exposing a giant fissure across all academic fields, dividing us within each field based on how we conceive of what we do.
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Some of the conversations I have on this topic are students and other early career researchers asking how they can "keep up" if everyone around them is using LLMs to "speed up" their science.
To that, I want to urge folks to rethink which race they want to compete in. I know it's not that simple, because there are incentive structures that are drastically misaligned with doing deep work in most fields (and anything CS adjacent more than others, I'd guess).
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