As promised, we now share some details why it took 32 months to get this Matters Arising published, and, since many asked, share some comments on the reply to our critique. All details can be found in this small FAQ vincentholst.github.io/the_curious_.... Below is a summary 🧵
The Curious Case of the Declining Disruption’s Disappearance
vincentholst.github.io
vincentholst.bsky.social@vincentholst.bsky.social · last mo.In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵
![What can we do?
I have a core take away I must repeat: just because somebody claims to be anti AI does not mean they are not doing entryism. Sadly, that is (in isolation) entirely consistent with entryism. Yes, these people lie about their beliefs.
I repeat this quote from Marx that I put right at the top of our work critiquing this correlationist logic from 2023:
"[A]ll science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. (Marx, 1894, p. 592)"
This is the logic of AI, of fascism, of sexism, of racism. That is, because things look a certain way, that therefore they are a certain way. Internal properties are wrongly derived from their superficial appearance. "I see that somebody has long hair, therefore I can conclude they are a woman." Or worse still: "I see the external features consistent with (what I think is) woman, and I conclude she must be stupid" — a fractal wrongness that starts with assuming that what you (naively, unquestioningly, think you) see is what you get when it comes to complex organisms. Further down in the same paper, we warn:
"Just because a model correlates with neural and behavioral data, it is not sufficient for us to infer that the model is performing cognition: correlation does not imply cognition."
Again, the core logics of AI are the same as racism and sexism, which is why these issues pop up again and again in these systems: it involves taking the simple shallow features of things we see, like skin colour, or hair length, or whatever other superficial property, and moving to very flawed conclusions. There is something addictive to this form of sheer intellectual laziness — as well as structurally beneficial to those select few within capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy — to this simplistic logic. It's easy to just point at people and call them names, I guess.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:o4hnhhoegmqcbxqzeosd23xn/bafkreid5rm4f3iyfosairopnftwxpa25kqmxaassdvprvq6jaj4hr4ipgy)