Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.

If it gets so bad that a society/academic system needs to criminalize such fraud, they have already lost that race.

The only thing that really works is a culture where this rarely if ever happens, because of the peer respect and self-respect of academics.

Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake.

In the old days scientific research was only done by self-funded rich people with tons of money and free time.

Nowadays science is mostly done by people whose income and food depends on getting grants.

When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that.

>Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake.

It works in systems where money is at stake too. You need a high trust, conscientous society. Doesn't mean that having one solves the issue entirely. The ocassional bad apple will fraud there too, but it wont be rampant enough to be a systemic problem.

>When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that.

You don't need independently wealthy scientists to expose fraud.

You just need an environment where if regular salary dependent scientists expose fraud, they're not punished for it.

If you don't have that, sure, then you need independently wealthy scientists to dare.

Sure, if culture were different, or human nature we different, we wouldn't have the problems we currently do.

However, given the culture we have, and the human tendencies we have, I think laws can make things better. Like criminalizing various sorts of fraud.

This is great. There's a big difference between levels 2-4 (where I generally operate) and levels 7-8 (where I see a lot of others operate), and I like how this level system makes that explicit.

> But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?

For all the same reasons many companies are eager to cut labor costs whenever possible. There can be a variety of bottlenecks to scaling and it's often not as simple as hire more people to make more profit, even if you have extra capital available.

The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.

> So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.

Is it actually, really? Even late 90s most stuff was garbage, and been like that for as long as I've been on the internet, or maybe I've just always been jaded. But the ratio of "garbage to non-garbage" seems constant for as long as I can remember, multiple decades at this point. The tools for finding the signal through the noise have changed over time though.

It's also all over YouTube.

I think the idea is that a vassal state (operates as though it) owes allegiance to a stronger state, while governing itself (more or less) independently.

And the stronger state exercises a lot of influence on the weaker state, especially in terms of foreign policy, and potentially provides it with protection from other strong states.

Not sure exactly how much this would apply to Taiwan in particular, but I think the idea in general can be meaningful in modern politics.

There's certainly a spectrum between allies, vassals, and directly controlled territories, but it doesn't necessarily need to be about sending troops to help in war.

My understanding is the Confederacy did not give its states the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, and did not give its states the freedom to decide whether or not to associate with each other.

I think they meant obsolete relative to economic, scientific, and engineering objectives.

That doesn't mean they don't provide any value of any kind to anyone.

Ultimately any two ambitions will compete with each other for finite time and energy. (Assuming each ambition benefits from more time and energy being spent on it, which is usually the case.)

You can be reasonably successful in multiple areas, but you can't max them all, you have to compromise somehow.

i agree. But i read the blog post as the author trying to escape having to compromise. Which, as we seemingly both think, is not possible.

I read the post as the author acknowledging the compromise, expressing frustration about it, and determining to live on the pareto frontier with his strategy of focus and discipline and so on. Sacrificing other things in order to achieve both ambitions at a high level (though not maximizing either one).

Is there something in particular I'm trying to glean from that information? If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it.

If not, I would politely keep my mouth shut, then pocket the flier to trash later, and on the way home I would complain about it to my wife.

> If so I might look it over, or snap a photo and ask my own LLM about it.

Right, exactly, that's what you'd do whether he spend 10 hours on it or 10 minutes.