Very important point, that hasn't made it into mainstream media coverage of AI. These agents "collaborated" because they were trained to do so.

“[T]he infrastructure for large-scale scholarly record contamination is already in place. Ghost names additionally [...] are indexed without verification by Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar." #scipol #scicomm #AI #HigherEducation

“[LLM] use has increased rapidly and is associated with proposals that are less semantically distinctive from recently funded work. At NIH, such proposals are more likely to be funded and to yield more publications.” #AI #scipol #scicomm #trust

A study of private grant proposal submissions and publicly released awards from NSF and NIH finds a sharp rise in LLM use since 2023. At NIH—but not at NSF—proposals created with LLMs are more likely to be funded and to yield more publications. In PNAS: ow.ly/r9EJ50ZBWoN

Students who used AI on their homework saw their average scores rise by 18% across all subjects after 6 months. But on exams, those same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not used AI on homework. economist.com/graphic-detail…

While academics and policy makers still obsess over gain-of-function work, #AI is dialing things to 15 on a ten-point scale … nytimes.com/2026/08/06/scien…

we're launching BUZZ! a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes, built to reduce our dependency on slack and github. model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source. 🐝 buzz.xyz

“… associations are generally stronger in editorial review than in peer review.”

Higher education must rethink assessment practices in response to the growing integrity challenges posed by generative #AI, argue the authors of a new #SciencePolicyForum. scim.ag/49fG3Pc

If you criticize the new college policy, you are clearly part of the problem we are trying to solve.

RT @sapinker: Breaking news: Harvard faculty votes to cap the number of A's awarded in course grades, a big step in combatting the grade in…

#AI will be academia's Chicxulub asteroid, and universities are asleep at the wheel ...

Optimistic note for the day: Agentic search will seal off filter bubbles and echo chambers to a point where the corrosive effects on deliberative democracy will be difficult to dial back ... axios.com/2026/05/19/google-… #ai #polarization #democracy #agenticAI

📷 "[T]he Germany that was the root of his greatness (and that of Goethe) is gone; Germany is dead and perhaps Mann himself, with his American passport, is now a ghost." One of the first movies in decades I wouldn't mind seeing in a theater ... theguardian.com/film/2026/ma…

Prestige bias is a major problem in academia: success in academia leads to numerous unfair advantages (eg., professors at prestigious universities have an easier time getting their papers published). But prestige bias is bigger in fields that are less scientific (eg., art, history, politics, and philosophy). In these fields, the claims of academics are hard to test so people rely more on prestige as a heuristic about the truth of their claims. In contrast, fields where claims are more testable exhibit lower concentrations of prestige markers (eg., math, physics, computer science, and medicine). This makes it easier for unknown or early career researchers to break through and have success. A new analysis finds that a 10% increase in the testability of claims in a field is associated with a 9% decrease in citation concentration. Evaluators rely less on prestige for quality assurance when the work is testable. My field is psychology is in the middle (close to biology). In the last decade, the credibility revolution has dramatically changed the field. As people published replication attempts, several the leading figures in the field lost significant prestige when their claims did not hold up to empirical scrutiny. This is actually the sign of a healthy scientific field: Prestige should not trump empirical evidence. kurtishingl.com/files/PTTS_l…

RT @sapinker: The Academic Case for Intellectual Diversity | by my colleague and fellow Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard @cafh member…

Tell me you're working in academia without telling me you're working in academia. 😜 I am also kind of excited that I just learned the term "malicious envy." tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1…

"High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness." nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/ya…

Good on @fcunion_en. I need some serious #Eiserne swag!

"At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced that they would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate based on the budget request." #scicom #scipol #highered scientificamerican.com/artic…