> “An Interdisciplinary Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition.”

If one were inclined, they could shorten the title to "AI Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition." Maybe that's an Easter egg.

AI submissions, soon AI reviewers, and shortly after only AI readers.

The guy's name is "nosloP" spelled backwards. Maybe spelled normally it's supposed to signify the opposite.

IIUC there are not 258 academic papers published in serious peer review journals [1], only 258 "preprints" in a free preprint server. It's like posting in WordPress but using a PDF instead of html [2]. I guess they start with "abstract" and end with "References" so they looks like papers.

For some weird reason in the last few years people forgot the differences and now any PDF is an "academic paper" [3]. (I'd be more annoyed, if the internal system of the university also forgot the difference. I'm afraid to ask.)

[1] Whatever "serious" means, that's a huge can of worms.

[2] They get an doi and a version number in case of a change.

[3] A few years ago they were call "whitepapers".

Vadim Sokolov, the co-author of the paper mentioned in the post defends this insane practice and says they reviewed at least one of the 258 generated papers with their own eyes, they are thus not fake papers.

Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/#comme...

Why would someone ruin their academic credentials and reputation (at a reputable university) like this? Maybe there was nothing to begin with? Otherwise I can't understand this.

Writing is a technology that served us well for over 5000 years, but now times are a changing. Written media will cease to provide any value in the next decade i think. In person chats/Public speaking will be revered again.

If AI submissions, then why not go a step further and have AI reviewers?

Perhaps this will help bring more scrutiny to the metric of publishing quantity not being as valuable as it has been treated.

I tried writing a simple 20 page paper with the latest Claude model over several weeks and that thing got ripped apart by legal and data science (for good reason), not going to try that again. And there I had all the numbers and analyses down and verified, just the writing itself by Claude was subpar.

Can’t imagine the utter garbage that Claude will produce when you give it a simple prompt and let it write thousand of pages.

Kind of makes me wonder about all that AGI talk if these models can’t even the work of a good PhD or postdoctoral student.

What percent of these 258 papers was funded with taxpayer money?

> Jesus Christ. I’ve heard that Cambridge University has an open position in their school of education . . . this kind of thing would fit in very well there, no?

What a disgusting, tasteless joke.

Years ago I was an academic peer reviewer and hated it, you've probably seen published work thats low in quality - you wouldn't believe how low quality the unpublished crap is. I cannot even imagine the absolute bundle of garbage that must be handled by these unpaid reviewers today. We need a better system.

Call me crazy, but if you can't explain the idea in 10 pages or less, you don't understand the idea.

(For instance, 58 pages, 80 pages ... I don't think of these as normal academic length if this is the main body content ...)

Another possible answer to the "What's in it for him?" question:

The Everest effect.

George Mallory: "The first question you will ask, and the one I have to answer is, 'What's the point of climbing Mount Everest?' And my answer should be, 'It's no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain. Oh, maybe we can learn a little about the behavior of the human body at height, and medicine can change our observations for aviation purposes. But nothing else could come of it. We will not bring back a little gold or silver or gemstones or coal or iron. We will not find soil or earth that we can grow crops that produce food. There is no point. So if you can't understand that there's something in humans that responds to the challenges of this mountain and goes to meet those challenges, then the struggle that ensues is a struggle from life itself upwards, and you won't see why we're leaving. What we get from this adventure is just joy. We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to enjoy life. That is the meaning of life and the purpose of living."

Why generate all of these papers? Because, for the first time, he can.

Doesn't have to be for the money or fame or potential for speaking engagements. It could simply be that he wants to test the limits of what's possible.

Squatting seems like the most plausible explanation. Explaining an idea to your friend at a bar doesn't make it "yours", but publishing a manuscript does.

The SSRN ID of the page linked to by the article [0] is not the same as the SSRN ID [1] linked from a chicagobooth.edu scholar by that name [2]

0. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=170...

1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=228...

2. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/p/nicholas-po...

Nicholas Polson is an anagram for Nonsocial Slop.

"Pols" backwards is "Slop".

I think it might be taking a position in the use of AI, They don't appear to be concealing their use.

If the papers were of a uniformly high standard then I might not have a problem with it.

If they are hoping some of them are good and the review process will filter out the bad then it seems like they are not doing research, they are writing hypotheses and at pushing the work of testing them onto the reviewers.

I could also see that being done to make some sort of statement about the review process, but it's not clear if that is their goal.

He's wasting people's time, which is already the resource that many people lack any to spare. I'm not sure if he realises this part.

It's incentivized by the system. You get grants, clout, importance, job opportunities based on your publishing in major conferences. As of last year, the variance of review scores have been higher between reviewers on the same paper than between the same reviewer on different paper. So it's effectively become a coinflip. The best strategy when it's random is just to spam stuff.

Oh also at least 40% generated peer-reviews are contributing to this statistic.

Not surprising. Many academics held in high-esteem in these behavioral offshoots are nothing more than frauds to begin with. Almost every X-studies paper is equally fluff these days (see the recent frontpage CHI post) - at least these have some semblance of theory given their equations, though are still largely garbage.

A ton of academia is based on putting out slop into not so well-read journals and crossing fingers it passes some dead-exhausted postdoc TA's peer review.

More and more evidence is surfacing that suggests AI addiction is real. It may be as simple as that Nicholas Polson has developed a severe case of AI addiction.

Maybe to expose the utter uselessness of "papers".

If the past 30 years have shown us anything, it's that academic credentials and reputation are very difficult to blemish.

Polson is just pushing the knob to 11 because it's louder.

We've been in the dark ages of science for so many decades...

One of the most memorable tech talks I ever attended was by a junior engineer who had just come back to the office from a major conference. Our workplace had an unusually oral culture -- decisions were made in meetings, and not always written down; there wasn't much in the way of bug tracking or work planning at the time; people generally preferred to talk through problems instead of working them out in email, chat, or forum posting.

He was supposed to present a topic he learned about at the conference. Instead, he gave a cheeky talk which introduced the very concept of written language to the audience, as if we had never heard of it. Starting from the history of writing on tablets and so on, and ending in practical advice like, "when words are written down, you don't have to remember what they were exactly; you can just read the words again." I loved the chutzpah and could barely hold myself from chortling out loudly at some of his slides.

Oh my god, Socrates was right all along!

try speaking from your own perspective instead of assuming a universal one. your opinions, however unhinged, will come off as more genuine.

We will be worse off for it. People just are losing the ability to read well. We are regressing as a species because of billionaire's thinking machines. A few companies are evolving while the rest of us become dependent.

Your intelligence and competencey are going to be 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens a billionaire gives you access too (local, sure, they control the hardware markets as well).

Keep excercising your writing and reading muscles because it will definatley set you apart from the captive masses in the future.

Speaking is a culture that has served us well for 300 000 years or so. To note, it has been used for both good and bad..

I honestly think it's more likely that younger generations grow up seeing the ill effects of being AI-pilled for communication/writing, deciding by way of AI literacy that they want none of that, and develop better ideas on responsible use.

I really don't like AI for document writing as a whole, especially within organizations. Code can be a form of communication, but for the most part it's an engineered thing that can be re-run, tested, verified and so on. But documents drive decision-making, and decision making is often one-time. Decisions should be studied and understood, and depriving authors of much of both is not having any good effects.

Chilling.

As it always should have been. Even Plato/Socrates were intelligent enough to muse about the idea that writing has degraded our memory vs when we had to memorize entire epic poems. They had a lot of hostile stuff to say about writing in Timaeus and other works.

The fact that most teachers refuse to do in-person oral exams has always been due to laziness, incompetence, and the reality of the economics of dealing with classroom sizes where 30 is considered small.

AI voice synthesis and robots/projectors are a thing. Slop will arrive in the boardrooms and on podiums sooner than many suspect.

I’m only half joking that someone will come up with a LLM text to speech synthesizer that pauses and plays depending on if your mouth is closed/jaw is moving. Analysizes your voice to synthesize as well.