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Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

As an ex-academic (not mathematician), this really resonates. Every generation of researchers has to outperform the researcher generation before them - there are fully tenured profs out there who, with their track record, wouldn't get a postdoc nowadays. It's just a ratchet where every generation has to be more outstanding than the previous one, so yeah, you suddenly need 'triple the conferences'. Eventually that ratcheting reflects on your self-worth and you start calling yourself mediocre, even though you vastly outperform the previous generation. It's an extremely unfair game designed by careless people.

Throw AI into the mix and your self-worth crashes. Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous, and I sit here and wonder what's the point.

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All research and progress boils down to Brownian Loop Soup. Someone/something having a result showing a connection does not mean they have explored "the way" to do it.

Not even the most elegant mathematically perfect solution is guaranteed to be the best way to crack a problem, or provide a definite answer.

Meandering paths through whatever we set our minds to do and serendipity is the way of human beings for the past few hundred millennia.

> Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous

Could you share more about that?

Sure! I was building a workflow that assesses human gene model accuracy. Which part is supported by what evidence? Important for drug development; if we want to change $THING it better exist in the first place.

I came up with a set of rules, collated external databases, and then slowly (Claude-code assisted) built a Nextflow pipeline that gives me an automated report, which I then manually expand by 'human' assessment of the evidence.

Claude Science prompted with 'assess this gene' came up pretty much with the same rules, built a report, and did the manual assessment of evidence pitfalls for about 10% of a Claude Max subscription's tokens in about 15 minutes. Some details differ from my report - a different tool here or there - but overall, what we needed out of these reports is in the Claude Science report.

Consider that if this was ran from your machine - it would have all of your memories and might be relying on the past 2 months. I'd be curious what would happen if it was run independently.

(I am assuming they didn't train on your prompts, which is always a worry)

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