Um. Take a look at the authors. Every single one of them is an expert in this field. They did test this in a lab.

If you want to complain about things like this, it really helps to be specific. Given the author list, it's unlikely they made any truly spectacular errors (and also possible the system they studied is not interesting).

Earliest snapshot is from 3 hours ago, more or less, it already shows the pre-print: https://web.archive.org/web/20260923180804/https://www.anthr...

archive.is has a snapshot from 18:47, showing the link was indeed there a few hours ago. https://archive.is/XM0Nw

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Preprints are just a way to sacrifice rigor for accessibility and velocity. You can throw out "here, this is what I'm working on, here are the quick and dirty findings" really fast and with little friction.

This does skip the academic "checks and balances" like journal selection and peer review - but it can also help anyone else who's working on the adjacent topics.

If a field is moving fast, and you think there can be some value in your work for others in the near term? Preprint. If your work is too incomplete or too minor to warrant trying to polish and publish it, but you don't want to table it? Preprint. Too deep in corporate structures to care about academic "street cred", and want your work to be accessible? Preprint. Have an exciting early finding that you want to push out there, and are willing to take the rep risks of being wrong about it? Preprint.

There's a reason why preprints came to be the lifeblood of ML.

I have a similar to pagerank method I use to evaluate such papers. I look for the references to see how many authors are using their own references (past work), the idea being that people do not jump too far, they make incremental progress.

For the pre-print I could only find only one author who has a single referenced article.

Journal articles are usually behind a paywall. Preprints are a fully open workaround allowed by most journals.

> Every man and his dog can publish a pre-print and in my opinion it's academically worthless.

Sure but if you look at the authors names and see they have 50 other published papers, you can get a rough idea that it's probably equivalently good to their other work.

Until you've done it yourself, it's hard to grok just how bad the peer review process is. It's like...5% better than nothing.

Honestly you could argue peer review is worse than nothing, as it also filters out actually quality work that violates some dogma of the field.

The review time on top journals is multiple years now (your paper will go through many review loops each of which takes months). It's just totally unworkable for active research, whether you're a student or a corporation.

many drugs were discovered, evaluated and approved without understanding at all how they worked.

iirc back in the day chemists synthesized a whole bunch of random compounds, observed their effects (in mice etc., or even the chemists tasting them!) then did clinical trials to measure safety and efficacy.

high-throughput screening of chemical libraries on in vitro assays is the modern version of this. "rational" drug design, which uses understanding of mechanisms to design chemical structures for a specific purpose, largely failed back in the '80s.

I can't understand what the post-docs are suggesting.

There will always be a %age of humans who will be curious how the universe works including LLMs. Delusional to think those humans are only incentivized by degrees, or money.

Humans were curious and started the intelligence / learning explosion much much before money and degrees were invented.

once everyone lives to 200 yo there will be no need for post-docs - afterward we can just upload PI's brain to some AI.

cobblers used to make and mend shoes before shoe factories existed..

Need risk aversion to reset after risk was raised temporarily. Humans are cautious creatures

Anecdotally our US office which used to be a hub for talent is now a feeder to other locations around the world with most applications seeking opportunity outside the US, from inside the US. I've been doing this for two decades and it's never happened before at this scale. Engineering consulting.

you must not have a lot of immigrants in your circle if you have any doubt of this being true

https://www.aip.org/statistics/more-us-trained-physics-phds-...

Does this AIP report on physics PhDs count as data?

Or statnews? https://www.statnews.com/2026/05/04/trump-immigration-policy...

Or, for the other side, Europe reporting a 46% increase; 169 vs 116 us based researchers applied for ERC grants. https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/erc-2026-starting-gra...

Let's say "anything talking about your product is selling something instead of doing science"

Then we're faced with "why would a (insert whatever makes this a preprint) mean they're not selling something"? (well, at least OP is faced with that, FWIW I think there's ~infinite snarky replies available, but they're sort of uninteresting, no? :)

Sure! (presuming it's "take a look at" :)

After I entertain you by doing that, is there a steelman version of my reply you're interested in entertaining me with, by replying? Or, just the strawman?