I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states:

> Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything.

So, it sounds like nothing of much value has been lost.

I think what he really complains about is that AI is starting to show that the emperor called academia has no clothes. So much of working your way through that system has always been about being able to master largely pointless rituals.

Yet, the people on the inside have no interest in making any improvements, because academia has always been institutionally conservative. But now AI is starting to put pressure on them to rethink their way of doing things, and they really don't like it.

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DrScientist 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value.

The whole point of a PhD is not to create a thesis - that's just a mechanism to measure - it's to be trained as a scientist or researcher.

Doing a degree in chemistry for example, is largely a knowledge building phase - and in my view it doesn't make you a scientist - being a scientist is about discovering new things about the world that nobody else has - ever - that's what you are learning how to do when doing a PhD.

	▲	acdha an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value. Yes - my wife’s advisor literally told her that the goal should be getting as close as you could to stapling your published papers together with an introduction. They saw this as recognizing that you had learned how to ask good questions, run experiments, and iterate on the results — and since their field had fairly expensive overhead requirements everyone was mindful of the need to repeatedly get grants to keep the experiments running.

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wanderer2323 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A good place to plug my favorite thesis to read: Okasaki’s “purely functional data structures” https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf .

Very soothing and moves fast.

	▲	naishoya 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Man, I had forgotten about this one. Thanks for the highlight, I read Okazaki's the first time about 2014/15 IIRC. Another great read is "A Theory of Regularity Structures" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.5113. by Martin Hairer. It builds on his thesis, Comportement Asymptotique d’ ´Equations `a D´eriv´ees Partielles Stochastiques. - https://www.hairer.org/papers/these.pdf The English language preprint from just prior to the French is at https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0109115 "Exponential Mixing Properties of Stochastic PDEs Through Asymptotic Coupling" great, but I read them in revers order from publication and kind of prefer them in that order. I cant disagree with the premise of the OC, however, there's a feel to Hairer's and Okasaki's insights and presentation that simply is not going to be reached via the lossy compression that is at the heart of LLM. If that sets a high bar for who gets a PhD going forward, this would be a good thing.

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b112 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the premise was, before you had to actually do some work to create the thesis. And there was always the concern that yours could be one which was read deeply, so that thesis work had to at least show that you did some work. That there was meat behind the paper.

But now, it could simply be all a couple of prompts to an LLM.

The bar is just lower for not doing the work, now.

But really, that's the fact everywhere.

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cognitiveinline 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> AI is starting to show that the emperor called academia has no clothes

Why single out academia? We're seeing vast majority of knowledge work had no clothes.

>working your way through that system >pointless rituals >rethink their way of doing things, and they really don't like it

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tempfile 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> So, it sounds like nothing of much value has been lost.

Do you actually mean this? To me this sounds like someone said "you never learn anything by reading a high school essay", and you reply "so stop writing them". The point is not the product, you obviously train people by making the product.

> AI is starting to show that the emperor called academia has no clothes.

Seriously, what are you talking about. Academia in the last century has been the most successful engine of knowledge and technology in human history. Lots of papers are junk, like lots of businesses are junk, lots of books are junk. But I don't know how any serious person can say academia has no clothes.