For many at the Manhattan Project, it was succeed or else we all die and now many AI researchers are driving for success even though we may hurt ourselves. Emotionally, this feeling is much harder to pin down — humans are not well suited for adversaries that are not compartmentalizable like a warring nation (e.g. our constant lag on climate change). The emotional complexity of the situation is a big part of why people are getting so burned out, and there’s a lot of work to be done before that’s clear
Best-paper vibes are now based on how your paper handles the critique and evaluation of the general public online. 1
There are a select few authors who get the benefit of having a following: they can immediately share their work with the world in a calibrated and accessible manner. This is the most modern form of internet dynamics driving increased power to fewer people. I
When many people were releasing many papers, it made it a little easier to estimate what was actually happening. Now, even if we assume the same amount of noise in a paper’s reporting, we’ll have more measurement errors in terms of trying to understand what it means.
