Dan Sugalski
Remember that "paper" that got circulated a few weeks ago which theoretically found that using LLMs made you stupid? Also remember thinking maybe it was a little sus since it so solidly reinforced your priors? Well... @grimalkina and @analog_ashley did an excellent dissection of it on their excellent Change, Technically podcast. Regardless of your view of the paper I really, *really* recommend the episode on it: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17378968-you-deserve-better-brain-research
You deserve better brain research - Change, Technically

SHOW NOTES:For an example of a consideration of learning with information searching, a paper by Saskia Giebl and co-authors explored students learning basic programming concepts aided with a search engine and how active problem-solving before the ...

Buzzsprout
Jun 30, 2025 at 4:51pmWeb
Show threadDan SugalskiJun 30, 2025
You'd think I was recommending it because it's always fun to listen to people professionally and competently rip nonsense to shreds, and you'd be right! But... *more* important than that they're really clear about *why* the paper is problematic, in ways that you can apply to other papers (hopefully much less problematic) that you may find. Evaluating a paper's methods and presentation to work out how sus it is is hard, and frankly a lot of us (definitely including me) don't have those skills.
Show threadDan SugalskiJun 30, 2025

So... listen! Take notes! And the next time you've got a paper to read you can use these as a reference to work out whether the paper's got some fundamental flaws you may not have noticed because you'd not ever gone through the whole "writing an academic paper" process.

And, as a bonus, if you have to write something technical you can use these skills/notes to help make your paper/doc/writeup better.

Show threadDan SugalskiJun 30, 2025

Am I saying that if I wrote a paper that I'd likely have made a number of these mistakes and had someone read it and shake their head sadly and tsk with pity that I'd goofed something?

Yes. Yes I am. At least now I am less likely to make those mistakes accidentally. So that's nice.