Felix

Hart has been doing this a long time. He is only here to get fodder for Twitter.

Worknight and Microslop

It's arguably even worse here, as the common understanding is that such reviews represent an excellent source of information to guide decision-making. Which they do. When done well.

It's so damn on the nose that it's hard to believe that they'd even be daring enough to try it. And yet.

as fallible as human beings are, and as much as we can struggle to communicate complex ideas, I don't think the simplified summaries that a chatbot offers can do justice to the actual content. And in order to be able to tell whether it does do justice to it, I'd have to read the literature anyway.

I'm not a professional philosopher, but I really got into the grounding literature around 2018. It was a struggle because, although I did philosophy in uni, I didn't engage with it academically much since finishing. But it was fun! And I learned a lot. Now, would I just ask ChatGPT? No, because ...

also designing studies, writing, reading, etc. Basically, most of what research is.

actually counted as meaningful data was the second.

You can probably imagine the sort of system that would obviate the need for this sort of work. But that alone doesn't seem to be what Nacke is talking about when he talks about grunt work. When he talks about grunt work, he means that, but ...

tying them to the variables that were of interest. The number 12 might have been written down and I had no way of knowing whether that was the raw score, scaled score, or something else entirely. It was a mess. So, photocopying it was the first bit of grunt work. Trying to figure out what ...

And I realised it was grunt work almost immediately. A moth flew out of the first box I opened. Looking through the files I had to photocopy, it was clear that the data I needed wasn't recorded in a standard way. In some files, there was no indication of what the scores represented—no way of ...

It's an unhealthy lifestyle, filled with regret.

No such systems were in place, which is exactly why I was carrying archive boxes out of a hospital basement and photocopying their contents. That was grunt work.

When I think of "grunt work" in relation to research, I think of the time I spent photocopying 20-year-old neuropsych assessment reports (and the accompanying results). Arduous, time-consuming, unpleasant, and unneeded if there are systems already in place to capture that data.

by engaging my own mind and trying to bring it into conversation with others who have written on the subject. This doesn't seem like "grunt work" to me. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but then I don't know that you can claim to be carrying out research at all.

I don't understand the appeal of surrendering all that to an unthinking machine. I want to be able to write for myself (even if the end result isn't as polished as I might have wanted), to read papers for myself (even if some of them are a struggle to get through), to think through the problems ...

You shouldn't do a research degree if you're this incurious about the world. Yes, there are certain elements of it that might be "grunt work" that would be useful to automate. But designing experiments, writing, and reading are not that—they are crucial to you being able to say something worthwhile.

I'm building posting.

"Quarter was building writing."

"Building writing"? Does he mean just writing?

Note the pro- Iraq War posters on the union building.

My student union was a replacement for the union that was forced into liquidation by the state (bsky.app/profile/ostr...). 🙃

You are probably right. After I finished studying, I started teaching at uni, and did that for many years. And it just seemed like things had declined even further from when I had started. By the time I finished teaching (2023), it wasn't even recognisable.

Like, these people are losers. This cannot be emphasised enough. Imagine being at an "elite institution" and *this* is how you spend your time. It's embarrassing.

Them, not you lol

It's such a bizarre and destructive hobby. Touch the quadrangle grass.

I started uni in 2009 and unfortunately things must have declined by that point, at least where I studied. A small but vocal group would say bigoted nonsense, largely to emphasise how edgy they were. Most people saw it as cringe though.

It's such a weird hobby.

It's a system designed to lock out evidence, while constantly raising alarm about the supposed paucity of it.

The fourth point is important. Because scuppering the programs needed to collect, analyse, and interpret the data and grow the evidence base means that their putative empirical concerns can't be addressed. Because they've prevented them from being addressed.

"I'm on X because I'm an independent thinker! Which is why I outsource all my opinions to Grok, an AI tweaked by Elon Musk to reflect his own opinions back at him"

what other comparable health systems around the world have increasingly recognised as crucial—engaging with consumers, carers, and supporters in more than just a "consultative" manner. Don't focus on the reviews; focus on the institution that commissioned them and how it's lost your trust.