I used to use this (still do really) as a technique when starting undergraduate lectures. They’re there, ready to listen, but chatting away and need a moment to focus their attention.
*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…
Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.
On the first day of class in undergrad, most professors are handing out the syllabus and talking about class requirements and basically doing zero lecturing. Not my Philosophy 101 prof. The minute the class was scheduled to start, he opened the door and walked into the room saying, "The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world."
I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:
1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.
2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.
3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.
(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).
The Greek philosophers (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, et al), and the project was, as my Philosophy 101 prof said, that they wanted to learn everything there was to know. An impossible goal, obviously, but they were dreaming the impossible dream.
I could be wrong about him meaning the Greek philosophers (since I don't remember the rest of the lecture), though since it was the intro to a Philosophy 101 class that's who I assumed he meant at the time.
As for fragmented texts, at the time when the Greek philosophers were alive there were a lot more texts available to them than we now have. A lot was lost over the years, including when the library at Alexandria burned (48 BC, I believe). We know they had access to many texts we don't because they quote from them, referencing material that we no longer have access to.
But this is a side issue. The main point of my comment was how the prof managed to communicate two or three things at once by the simple action of walking into the classroom, already lecturing, precisely at the scheduled start of the class.
Larry Page was president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu engineering honor society... that's not really a frat but maybe still counts as "Greek"?
I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..."
It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.
I remember one session in particular.
This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.
This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."
The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.
"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.
He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).
Maybe good pedagogy, but the point is that's not what the Anglo-Saxons were doing. What they did (in Beowulf, and seemingly most of the time they started their sentences with hwæt) would be more like starting the lecture with: "How fun carbonyl chemistry is!"
I'm confused, isn't this the exact usage that TFA is refuting?
> Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.
Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say "So." and wait for everyone to settle down and start listening.) Even more so with things like "Yo!" or "What ho!" or "Bro!" or "Lo!". (Curious how all the options seem to end in -o.)
This is more like "So, the Spear-Danes ..." where the initial "So" has roughly the same purpose of rhetorical throat-clearing and attention-getting, but now it's part of the sentence, as if it had been "As it turns out, the Spear-Danes ..." or "You might have heard that the Spear-Danes ...".
I think the theory described in OP makes the function of "hwaet" a little different, though; not so much throat-clearing and attracting attention, as marking the sentence as exclamatory. A little like the "¡" that _begins_ an exclamation in Spanish.
Of course a word can have more than one purpose, and it could be e.g. that "hwaet" marks a sentence as exclamatory and was chosen here because it functions as a way of drawing attention.
That's great. Similar trick I've picked up is to say "blah blah blah ... is as follows:" followed by a pause and then your explanation, which is always more than the one or two words the listener might have otherwise been expecting. This technique allows you to keep the talking stick and express an idea that takes more than a few words, without someone jumping to an immediate conclusion or interrupting you.
To close the loop, I had a chemistry professor who linked concepts together in lecture with the phrase "Meaning what?" E.g., "In the alkyne molecule, the carbon atoms share a triple bond. Meaning what? Meaning that the bond is much stronger than in alkanes or alkenes..." It was less a technique for getting attention and more for holding it through a chain of reasoning. But it worked.
I have had to train myself out of doing that when recording videos. The best I've managed is that I can do it sometimes, and most of the rest of the time I leave a long enough pause after that I can cleanly edit it off.
Surely this is gross professional misconduct? If one of my postdocs did this they would be at risk of being fired. I would certainly never trust them again. If I let it get through, I should be at risk.
As a reviewer, if I see the authors lie in this way why should I trust anything else in the paper? The only ethical move is to reject immediately.
I acknowledge mistakes and so on are common but this is different league bad behaviour.
In many fields it's gross professional misconduct only in theory. This sort of thing is very common and there's never any consequence. LLM-generated citations specifically are a new problem but citations of documents that don't support the claim, contradict it, have nothing to do with it or were retracted years ago have been an issue for a long time.
"A major source of [false claim] transmission is the frequency with which researchers do not read the papers they cite: because they do not read them, they repeat misstatements or add their own errors, further transforming the leprechaun and adding another link in the chain to anyone seeking the original source. This can be quantified by checking statements against the original paper, and examining the spread of typos in citations: someone reading the original will fix a typo in the usual citation, or is unlikely to make the same typo, and so will not repeat it. Both methods indicate high rates of non-reading"
I first noticed this during COVID and did some blogging about it. In public health it is quite common to do things like present a number with a citation, and then the paper doesn't contain that number anywhere in it, or it does but the number was an arbitrary assumption pulled out of thin air rather than the empirical fact it was being presented as.
It was also very common for papers to open by saying something like, "Epidemiological models are a powerful tool for predicting the spread of disease" with eight different citations, and every single citation would be an unvalidated model - zero evidence that any of the cited models were actually good at prediction.
Bad citations are hardly the worst problem with these fields, but when you see how widespread it is and that nobody within the institutions cares it does lead to the reaction you're having where you just throw your hands up and declare whole fields to be writeoffs.
The abuse of claims and citations is a legitimate and common problem.
However, I think hallucinated citations pose a bigger problem, because they're fundamentally a lie by commission instead of omission, misinterpretation or misrepresentation of facts.
At the same time, it may be an accidental lie, insofar authors mistakenly used LLMs as search engines, just to support a claim that's commonly known, or that they remember well but can't find the origin of.
So, unless we reduce the pressure on publication speed, and increase the pressure for quality, we'll need to introduce more robust quality checks into peer review.
this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals
i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names
these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.
some people would say it's racist to understand this, but in my opinion when i was working with people from these cultures there was just no other way to learn to cooperate with them than to understand them, it's an incredibly confusing experience to be working with them until you understand the various differences between your own culture and theirs
PSA: Please note that the names are hallucinated author lists part of the hallucinated citations, and not names of offending authors.
AFAIK the submissions are still blinded and we don't know who the authors are. We will, surely, soon -- since ICLR maintains all submissions in public record for posterity, even if "withdrawn". They are unblinded after the review period finishes.
Either op mistakes the hallucinated citations for the authors (most likely, although there's almost no "middle eastern names" among them)
Or he checked some that do have the names listed (I found 4, all had either Chinese names or "western" names)
Anyway the great majority of papers (good or bad) I've seen have Indian or Chinese names attached, attributing bad papers to brown people having an inferior culture is just blatantly racist
The side comment is right, it's about low versus high trust societies. Even if GP made a mistake on which names are relevant, they're not being racist about it.
That's one opinion. Here's another - they were waiting with their commentary locked and loaded, and failed to even read the source material in any detail before unloading it.
They're making broad assertions about specific societies, when those assertions are in this instance in no way related to TFA.
In that case, the edit button exists. It seems rather late in the day to be erring on the side of the benefit of the doubt in every case, for things like this. Much of the population is unabashedly, vociferously, aggressively racist and proud of it, these days.
> In that case, the edit button exists. It seems rather late in the day to be erring on the side of the benefit of the doubt
The edit button exists for 2 hours and this is not a person that frequently comments.
> That's one opinion. Here's another - they were waiting with their commentary locked and loaded, and failed to even read the source material in any detail before unloading it.
Well almost a day later they replied "you can google the papers and find the arxiv articles where the authors are listed". Unless that is a blatant lie, it seems like a pretty good reason to think they're using good-faith and non-racist reasoning here.
This sort of behavior is not limited to researchers from those cultures. One of the highest profile academic frauds to date was from a German. Look up the Schön scandal.
> these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.
I have a relative who lived in a country in the East for several years, and he says that this is just factually true.
The vast majority of people who disagree with this statement have never actually lived in these cultures. They just hallucinate that they have because they want that statement to be false so badly.
...but, simultaneously, I'm also not seeing where you see the authors of the papers - I only see hallucitation authors. e.g. at the link for the first paper submission (https://openreview.net/forum?id=WPgaGP4sVS), there doesn't appear to be any authors listed. Are you confusing the hallucinated citation authors with the primary paper authors?
In that case, I would expect Eastern authors to be over-represented, because they just publish a lot more.
im not sure if you are gonna get downvoted so im sticking a limb out to cop any potential collateral damage in the name of finding out whether the common inhabitant of this forum considers the idea of low trust vs high trust societies to be inherently racist
What are you people talking about. Have you even looked at the article?
The names of the Asian/Indian people GP is referring to, are explicitly stated to be hallucinations in the article. So, high vs low trust society questions aside, the entire assertion here is explicitly wrong. These are not authors submitting hallucinated content, these are fictitious authors who are themselves hallucinations.
in general, if the question is "can I divide this heterogenous population into two mutually exclusive groups based on fuzzy subjective criteria" the answer is... no
Forgetting authors, misspelling them or the journals, putting a wrong digit etc... could be citation typos. I don't see how you add 5 non-existing authors and put a different—but conceptually plausible—journal in the bibtex.
Besides, I would think most people are using bibliographic managers like Zotero&co..., which will pull metadata through DOIs or such.
The errors look a lot more like what happens when you ask an LLM for some sources on xyz.
If a person usually uses Zotero to manage literature and finds incomplete metadata when exporting BibTeX, and with the submission deadline approaching, they use GPT to complete the metadata, leading to errors, this is indeed lazy and negligent behavior. But is it what many call deceitful and unforgivable?
I believe that once this person realizes the unreliability of using GPT to complete metadata, they will no longer use such methods in the future.
I also look forward to the community's dedicated individuals developing more comprehensive automated export tools, as copying and pasting one by one is inherently tedious and should be automated.
Currently, these individuals used incorrect automated tools and placed excessive trust in them, resulting in errors. This is a profound lesson that must never be repeated.
I think it's not uncommon to ask an LLM for the bibtex for a paper you know about, & it might mess it up, but that doesn't feel like a fireable offense
I used to work with a guy whose parents were Pakistani but who had been born in Scotland, although he had quite a strong accent from living with his grandparents for several years. People used to ask him "So where are you really from?" quite often.
"I'm from Wishie", he'd say.
"No but where are you really from?"
"Well, dinna tell onyone," he'd say, dialling up the Lanarkshire accent, "but I'm really from Newmains, but if they hear I'm from there they'll think I'm a bam"
I also wasted a lot of my youth playing Elite, so much fun. Check out the page--it also has annotated source code for Elite (a few different versions up there).
Great game, I seem to remember you could play two player using a serial cable, and my friend brought his Archimedes around, we spent literally all night playing it
I genuinely think that is the best Archimedes-only game, just pure arcade fun with split screen dogfights. Such an amazing technical grounding. In 1990!
Check out the Open University then. It’s the real thing and online. It costs and there are time constraints but they are the experts in remote teaching
> Just plot all the bloody data and be done with it
Well no, because you can compare the datasets by eye and say questionable qualitative things about them, but you can't make definitively true quantitative statements about them.
Show me two plots of data points and I can show you two people who will in good faith argue over which one has the higher mean or higher median or higher variance. Because you often can't tell.
The entire point of something like a box plot is that it does part of the quantitative analysis for you. You can see where the median is. You can see the width of the quartiles.
But there are much better ways to do this than box plots! Lots of CS papers use CDF and it's great and very informative once you get used to it (although you do need to get used to them). You can have violin plots with all the box plots elements and more. Even if you want to restrict yourself to quartiles, author's design concepts with narrow/wide bars makes much more visual sense, and still convey exactly the same information as box plots.
CDF plots are great for plotting a single distributions, but contain way too much information if you want to plot 6 distributions next to each other for easy comparison.
Violin plots are interesting but also quite complicated, since you have to arbitrarily choose a kernel shape and this artificial smoothing can make it look like you have much more data than you really do.
I really don't like the author's "alternative designs" because I think they're even more open to misinterpretation than box plots. It's hard to judge though, because the central problem is that the author is trying to represent a bimodal distribution, and shouldn't be using box plots or the 2 "alternative designs" for that.
Really pleased to have a play with this--I've so often read comments that the agenda, the calendar, on this thing was better than almost anything since, it was interesting to go and have a look. I can see the point, the year view is really good in a way that my current calendar (fantastical) doesn't quite match.
*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…
Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.