Comments

• By Chinjut 2026-02-2422:312 reply

  Note the following comment by Jerry Ling: "The effect goes away if you search properly using the original submission date instead of the most recent submission date. By using most recent submission date, your analysis is biased because we’re so close to the beginning of 2026 so ofc we will see a peak that’s just people who have recently modified their submission."

  By myhf 2026-02-2423:32

  The last-modified-date effect is even more important, because it can be used to support whatever the latest fad is, without needing to adapt data or arguments to the specifics of that fad.

  By Aurornis 2026-02-250:18

  The post has been edited with an update at the top now.

• By tummler 2026-02-259:542 reply

  Can people please not post links with vague titles like this? I had to click through and read half the article to even figure out what this was about, and I wasn’t interested.

  By Propelloni 2026-02-2510:001 reply

  Me too. So as a service to the community: the article is about a noticeable increase of submissions about high-energy theory to arXiv due to mediocre articles quickly produced with or by AI and how to deal with that.

  By egeozcan 2026-02-2510:39

  These days, it feels like, every article about something big happening is about an AI doomsday scenario, AI bubble "finally" bursting or AGI being reached.

  Maybe one exception is milestones in nuclear fusion, but even that is very much rare compared to these.

  By croes 2026-02-2510:002 reply

  But what else to do if you think the article is interesting but the rules say don’t change the title?

  By Miraltar 2026-02-2510:121 reply

  Guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" in that case I'd argue that it's linkbait so changing it is justified

  By OJFord 2026-02-2514:00

  > Looks like it is happening - AI bringing the end of theory publications

  To keep the original, with added clarity from the opening paragraph. Could use an emdash for irony.

  By Propelloni 2026-02-2510:01

  Write a short blurb what's it about? You can do that with any submission.

• By pllbnk 2026-02-256:468 reply

  In most of the world the past decades there has been no thought behind who should get university education. It has been given that after high school you should aim for university. I have studied software engineering in the most prestigious university in my country and from 100+ students in my group there were only a few (myself excluded) who actually had some interest in academic work and desire to pursue it. Most of us were just coasting - passing exams and writing mediocre papers without any goal to have those papers ever being read by someone after the graduation.

  I think that university level and other kinds of formal education should be segregated. Universities should host fewer students and being able to provide them with higher rewards for actually meaningful work and I believe that a flood of mediocre quality papers (but let's admit it, in fact they are low quality in their content and perhaps good in their presentation) will lead us to rebuild the education system.

  By oytis 2026-02-258:33

  OTOH, weakening the ties between the industry and science can harm both of them. Right now in the university people get a rough idea of how science works, and most of them then go to work in the industry, which sounds like a right proportion. Nobody is reading papers below PhD level anyway, so I don't think that it's undergrad papers that are a problem

  By OakNinja 2026-02-258:182 reply

  This is just Sturgeon’s law. If you would reduce the number of students by an order of magnitude you’d still end up with 90% junk papers.

  By oytis 2026-02-258:281 reply

  If you look at the beginning of XX century, university education was much less accessible with much fewer participants, and the results were much more impressive than today across all disciplines

  By simonask 2026-02-259:262 reply

  There was also a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit in most fields, because we basically didn't have the technology before, or simply didn't bother to look.

  By dTal 2026-02-2511:48

  There's a ton of low hanging fruit now - more than ever. Every question answered raises multiple new questions. If there is a lack of opportunity to answer interesting questions, it is certainly not because the questions aren't there.

  By oytis 2026-02-259:50

  But someone needed to realise it's a low-hanging fruit in the first place. By the end of the XIX century the general agreement was that physics was pretty much done, we are now just polishing the details.

  By noosphr 2026-02-258:561 reply

  If you have 10 papers and 9 are shit that's an afternoons worth of work. If you have 10,000 and 9,000 are shit that's three years.

  By rolandog 2026-02-2510:001 reply

  Instead of 1 reviewer, have 10; also, don't we benefit as a society when everyone is more highly educated? Sure, we have a ways to go before we get there, namely with regards to resistance to disinformation training and including more resistance to populism / fascism in the curriculum so that we have a chance to build better and more equal societies.

  By noosphr 2026-02-2512:552 reply

  The fact you couldn't get the math right on how many reviewers we'd need for the situation to not get worse kinda makes my point better than I could.

  By toledocavani 2026-02-2513:24

  I think he meant number of reviewers per paper? Not total of reviewers.

  BTW, I do think a highly educated society should give everyone capability to review or at minimum distinguish good papers

  By rolandog 2026-02-2516:05

  Sorry, I wish I could blame my callused fingers and the touchscreen, but I didn't stop to do the math, because that's not the point I was addressing.

  By qnleigh 2026-02-259:563 reply

  I dunno, I think society is best served by educating as many people as possible. I would much rather live in a world where anyone who wants a quality education can get one.

  By armchairhacker 2026-02-2510:331 reply

  We should teach people what we expect will be relevant in their lives, which includes basic math, science, government, history, and other subjects. Although some kids still won't learn, we should try. Anyone interested in a particular subject should be able to explore it further, since interest makes it relevant to them. And we should also give people mandatory but brief exposure to many difference fields, in case they become interested.

  But at a certain point, you're wasting time and effort trying (and failing) to teach students what they're unlikely to, and ultimately won't, use afterward. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink." Meanwhile, as GP noted, students who are interested in a "quality education" can't get one, because the quality is diminished by number of students, many who aren't interested. In order to provide the best education to the most people, we must optimize; cutting people who aren't learning means we can better educate those who are.

  By ndsipa_pomu 2026-02-2513:29

  The key is to focus education on actual skill learning, rather than just focussing on exam preparation which is typically learning specific "magic" words and phrases (e.g. "condensation", "the powerhouse of the cell").

  Learning specific physics formulas has its place, but learning the principles behind the formulas is far more valuable, though harder to measure.

  By oytis 2026-02-2510:181 reply

  If there is anything good I hope we can get from AI transformation it's making our approach to education less utilitarian. We should educate ourselves because it's good to be educated, and because it's good to be around educated people, not because education gets you a good job or makes you are more valuable unit in the economy

  By DarkNova6 2026-02-2511:56

  Or AI will double down in the Dunning Krueger effect, where true mastery not only diminishes, but people collectively take low erfort AI answers as the baseline truth.

  By AdamN 2026-02-2510:35

  Agree - but in the US so much more could and should be done at the primary and secondary level before we even talk about the tertiary one. It's actually pretty good compared to other developed countries but a lot could be gotten out of more investment there.

  By vostrocity 2026-02-256:591 reply

  This will probably happen naturally as knowledge work declines.

  By leptons 2026-02-258:20

  I'm not convinced that will really happen. "AI" just doesn't give reliable output, and even if humans don't either, they are still far less prone to error. And errors matter, a lot.

  By initramfs2 2026-02-2610:19

  Indeed. Also the usual criticism about education not being adequate training for the workforce bla bla is simply because education is not to train a worker in the first place. There's no way to train someone other than to let them do the damn job. Yes teaching mathematics and reading and writing is probably a prerequisite but how is Shakespeare relevant? It's just a confusion of two things: learning for the sake of learning, and learning for the sake of employability.

  I'm not arguing for one or the other. I'm just saying that I would also hate it if university CS for example just became a web bootcamp to churn out as many code monkeys as fast as possible. There is a place for just vocational training, and there is another place for a more platonic kind of learning, and just sending everyone off to university and tying employability to a degree is really stupid.

  Alas it can't be fixed now, because 1. For profit universities 2. HR needing a quick filter 3. States needing to standardize some kind of path for kids

  By ngc248 2026-02-257:391 reply

  looks like history runs in cycles ... Knowledge was strictly guarded and the powers that be used to decide who gets an education. Looks like you are espousing the same, discounting all the good that has come about because of open education.

  By pllbnk 2026-02-259:40

  I feel that you didn't read my comment carefully enough (although I could have been more clear). To me university was really good and eye-opening but looking back, I had no place in academia. A good college would have been better. Consuming knowledge and creating knowledge are in somewhat different categories and most people are consumers.

  By ktimespi 2026-02-257:032 reply

  This comes across as elitist

  By ido 2026-02-257:101 reply

  It can come across as elitist and be true at the same time.

  By ktimespi 2026-02-257:151 reply

  I don't think it is true either, considering the broad claims made.

  The thing to be changed is research incentives, not getting the bar even higher. Take the Francesca Gino case, for example. I don't think anyone can argue that Harvard's bar is "not high enough".

  By ido 2026-02-2511:03

  I didn't read it as simply making the bar higher for entering universities. For example here in Germany there are Universitäten (Universities) and Fachhochsculen (sort of like vocational academies, but they still award bachlor and master degrees).

  Most people who studied computer science with me at university weren't interested in computer science at all but just wanted a good vocational training for entering the lucrative carrer of "software developer". I think it would benefit both them and employers if they would have instead attended a good vocational school for software development.

  By pllbnk 2026-02-259:36

  I didn't mean that at all. I am a regular developer who got into this field at a lucky time and am as worried about the future employment prospects as many are.

  By cess11 2026-02-257:57

  Either the institution develops and teaches methods and traditions that are beneficial for people in general, in which case it ought to be a good idea to offer them broadly, or it is used for gatekeeping and stratifying, in which case I think it should be abolished.