[HN Gopher] MIT asks arXiv to take down preprint of paper on AI ...
___________________________________________________________________
MIT asks arXiv to take down preprint of paper on AI and scientific
discovery
Author : carabiner
Score : 188 points
Date : 2025-05-16 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (economics.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (economics.mit.edu)
| pvg wrote:
| The paper had an HN thread a few months ago
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115310
| tsurba wrote:
| Nice that someone realized then already it sounds sus
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128532
| mmooss wrote:
| That's not a signal: There always are comments saying the
| research is suspect.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product
| Innovation [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115310 - Nov 2024 (47
| comments)
| intoamplitudes wrote:
| First impressions:
|
| 1. The data in most of the plots (see the appendix) look fake.
| Real life data does not look that clean.
|
| 2. In May of 2022, 6 months before chatGPT put genAI in the
| spotlight, how does a second-year PhD student manage to convince
| a large materials lab firm to conduct an experiment with over
| 1,000 of its employees? What was the model used? It only says
| GANs+diffusion. Most of the technical details are just high-level
| general explanations of what these concepts are, nothing
| specific.
|
| "Following a short pilot program, the lab began a large-scale
| rollout of the model in May of 2022." Anyone who has worked at a
| large company knows -- this just does not happen.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The data in most of the plots (see the appendix) look fak
|
| Could a Benford's Law analysis apply here to detect that?
| constantcrying wrote:
| How would you apply it, why would it be applicable?
| btrettel wrote:
| On point 2, the study being apparently impossible to conduct as
| described was also a problem for Michael LaCour. Seems like an
| underappreciated fraud-detection heuristic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Changes_Minds
|
| https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
|
| > As we examined the study's data in planning our own studies,
| two features surprised us: voters' survey responses exhibit
| much higher test-retest reliabilities than we have observed in
| any other panel survey data, and the response and reinterview
| rates of the panel survey were significantly higher than we
| expected.
|
| > The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many
| aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and
| Green (2014).
| constantcrying wrote:
| A month by month record of scientists time spend on different
| tasks is on its face absurd. The proposed methodology,
| automatic textual analysis of scientists written records,
| giving you a year worth of a near constant time split pre AI is
| totally unbelievable.
|
| The data quality for that would need to be unimaginably high.
| mzs wrote:
| % gunzip -c arXiv-2412.17866v1.tar.gz | tar xOf - main.tex |
| grep '\bI have\b' To summarize, I have established three
| facts. First, AI substantially increases the average rate of
| materials discovery. Second, it disproportionately benefits
| researchers with high initial productivity. Third, this
| heterogeneity is driven almost entirely by differences in
| judgment. To understand the mechanisms behind these results, I
| investigate the dynamics of human-AI collaboration in science.
| \item Compared to other methods I have used, the AI tool
| generates potential materials that are more likely to possess
| desirable properties. \item The AI tool generates
| potential materials with physical structures that are more
| distinct than those produced by other methods I have used.
| % gunzip -c arXiv-2412.17866v1.tar.gz | tar xOf - main.tex |
| grep '\b I \b' | wc 25 1858 12791 %
| rafram wrote:
| Not sure what you're trying to say.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Maybe the point is that it is rare for a paper to have the
| pronoun "I" so many times. Usually the pronoun "we" is used
| even when there is a single author.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It's a single author. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17866
| muhdeeb wrote:
| Agreed! It's pretty alien. I've seen brilliant single
| author work, but nothing that uses "I" unless it's a blog
| post. The formal papers are always the singular "we".
| Feels very communal that way!
|
| Nice to include the giants we stand on as implied
| coauthors.
| kragen wrote:
| Not being an academic, my (silent) reaction to singular
| "we" in academic writing is usually, "We? Do you have a
| mouse in your pocket? Or do you think you're royalty?"
| It's nice to hear of your more charitable interpretation.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| There are, notably, two different if frequently confused
| "academic we" conventions, distinguished by their
| clusivity[1]: the inclusive "academic we" in
| constructions such as "thus we see that ..." refers to
| the author(s) and the reader (or the lecturer and the
| listener) collectively and is completely reasonable; the
| exclusive "academic we" referring only to the single
| author themselves, is indeed a somewhat stupid version of
| the "royal we" and is prohibited by some journals (though
| also required by others).
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, it's the exclusive version that bugs me: "We tested
| the samples to failure on an INTRON tester under
| quasistatic conditions." It's nice to hear some journals
| prohibit it.
| fooker wrote:
| A physicist with a similar mindset used to add his cats
| to his papers because of this dilemma.
| andy99 wrote:
| You might want to read the story of F. D. C. Willard http
| s://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard#Background
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's rare that "I" is used because usually papers have
| multiple authors, and also the academic community has a
| weird collective delusion that you _have_ to use "we"...
| but there are still a reasonable number of papers that
| use "I".
| raphman wrote:
| FWIW, in the q&a after a talk, he claims that it was a GNN
| (graph neural network), not a GAN.
|
| (In this q&a, the audience does not really question the
| validity of the research.)
|
| https://doi.org/10.52843/cassyni.n74lq7
| mncharity wrote:
| Wayback of the Sloan School seminar page shows him doing one
| on February 24, 2025. I wonder how that went.
|
| I miss google search's Cache. As with the seminar, several
| other hits on MIT pages have been removed. I'm reminded of a
| PBS News Hour story, on free fusion energy from water in your
| basement (yes, really), which was memory holed shortly after.
| The next-ish night they seemed rather put out, protesting
| they had verified the story... with "a scientist".
|
| That cassyni talk link... I've seen _a lot_ of MIT talks (a
| favorite mind candy), and though Sloan was underrepresented,
| that looked... more than a little odd. MIT Q &A norms are
| diverse, from the subtle question you won't appreciate if you
| haven't already spotted the fatal flaw, to bluntness leaving
| the speaker in tears. I wonder if there's a seminar tape.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Oh interesting. I haven't talked to any recent graduates but
| I would expect an MIT PhD student to be more articulate and
| not say "like" every other word.
|
| There was a question at the end that made him a little
| uncomfortable:
|
| [1:00:20] Q: Did you use academic labs only
| or did you use private labs? A: (uncomfortable
| pause) Oh private, yeah, so like all corporate, yeah...
| Q: So, no academic labs? A: I think it's a good
| question (scratches head uncomfortably, seemingly trying to
| hide), what this would look like in an academic setting,
| cause like, ... the goals are driven by what product we're
| going make ... academia is all, like "we're looking around
| trying to create cool stuff"...
|
| My 8 year-old is more articulated than this person. Perhaps
| they are just nervous, I'll give them that I guess.
| raphman wrote:
| Oh, he also claimed that he got IRB approval from "MIT's
| Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects under
| ID E-5842. JEL Codes: O31, O32, O33, J24, L65." before
| conducting this research, i.e., at a time when he wasn't even a
| PhD student.
| 3s wrote:
| I agree with point 1, at least superficially. But re: point 2,
| there are a lot of companies with close connections to MIT (and
| other big institutions like Stanford) that are interested in
| deploying cutting edge research experiments, especially if they
| already have established ties with the lab/PI
| gowld wrote:
| Bad OP Title
|
| Better title:
|
| MIT disavows heavily-discussed economics preprint paper about
| Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Discovery.
| jdhwosnhw wrote:
| It's the title of the original article...
| dang wrote:
| I've attempted to put a neutral title at the top of this page.
| If someone can come up with a better (i.e. more accurate and
| neutral) one, we can change it again.
|
| (Since press release titles about negative news tend to
| studiously avoid saying anything, we tend to classify them in
| the "misleading" bucket of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which
| justifies rewriting them.)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Perhaps replace "take down" with "withdraw" (arXiv's
| mechanism to deal with _bad_ papers post-publication; what
| MIT calls for) or "retract" (the mechanism that traditional
| journals employ and similar to previous; a common term in
| academia). In arXiv's way of handling papers, "removal" and
| "withdraw" are distinct[0] and, based on some comments in
| this thread, current title seems to create confusion that is
| about the former.
|
| [0]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/withdraw.html: "Articles
| that have been announced and made public cannot be completely
| removed. A withdrawal creates a new version of the paper
| marked as withdrawn."
| Twirrim wrote:
| That would be contrary to HN's guidlines "please use the
| original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't
| editorialize."
| ipsum2 wrote:
| MIT's article is quite scant on details. WSJ has more
| information, but still no specifics:
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mit-says-it-no-longer-stands-beh...
|
| > The paper was championed by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu, who
| won the 2024 economics Nobel, and David Autor. The two said _they
| were approached in January by a computer scientist with
| experience in materials science who questioned how the technology
| worked_ , and how a lab that he wasn't aware of had experienced
| gains in innovation. Unable to resolve those concerns, they
| brought it to the attention of MIT, which began conducting a
| review.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/r63jR
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| > by a former second-year PhD student
|
| Seems pretty serious if they kicked him out.
| dhosek wrote:
| I always wonder what happens with these high-profile
| transgressors. I once created a Google News alert for a high-
| level Apple employee who went to jail for some criminal act at
| Apple and never saw any indication of him again. I'm guessing
| his career in economics is likely over (he'd previously worked
| at the NY Fed before starting at MIT) and I wonder what he'll
| end up doing--will he be able to find some sort of white-color
| work in the future or will he be condemned to retail or food-
| service employment.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > will he be able to find some sort of white-color work in
| the future or will he be condemned to retail or food-service
| employment.
|
| Lay low for a year, work on some start-up-ish looking
| project, then use his middle name to get hired at one of the
| many AI startups? (only half joking)...
| Loughla wrote:
| White collar encompasses a lot, outside of economics or
| finance.
|
| Also, there are companies who will see that win at any cost
| mentality as a positive trait.
|
| I'm betting whoever it is, is okay now.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The MIT announcement says they asked him to retract the paper
| but he wouldn't, which led to them making the public
| statement about the paper.
|
| They may have thought they could jump into an industry job,
| including the paper and all of its good press coverage on
| their resume. Only the author can retract an arXiv paper, not
| their academic institution. It wouldn't be hard to come up
| with a story that they decided to leave the academic world
| and go into industry early.
|
| MIT coming out and calling for the paper's retraction
| certainly hampers that plan. They could leave it up and hope
| that some future employer is so enamored with their resume
| that nobody does a Google search about it, but eventually one
| of their coworkers is going to notice.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Stephen Glass, the dude who fabricated stories for _New
| Republic_ back in the late 90s, has attempted at least twice
| to become an attorney after going to law school. Both New
| York and California denied his bar applications on the
| grounds that he failed the standards for moral character. He
| nonetheless seems to be employed by a law firm, but not as a
| practicing attorney.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There are a gazillion small companies out there that hire
| white collar workers with only a rudimentary background check
| (are they a felon) and an interview that is more a vibe check
| than anything.
|
| He probably will never be someone of significance, but he
| also will probably be able to have a standard middle class
| life.
| jgerrish wrote:
| But would you want to work for a company that just does a
| vibe check, or one that raises the bar with every hire?
|
| That high-level Apple employee was probably a manager and
| oversaw hiring people.
|
| I would tell myself every day, "I wouldn't hire me."
|
| It's not self-defeating.
|
| It's not being a victim.
|
| I wouldn't let it stop me from trying.
|
| It's being accurate about what kind of company you'd want
| to build yourself, and the internal state of a lot of
| hiring managers. And with a true model of the world you can
| make better decisions.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Reading the paper (which is still up) ... the "AI" (sigh) tool
| described there would not have been particularly novel or
| unusual, even if the research was conducted several years ago. ML
| + inverse design for materials has been used for decades.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Our understanding is that only authors of papers appearing on
| arXiv can submit withdrawal requests. We have directed the author
| to submit such a request, but to date, the author has not done
| so.
|
| Between this and the subtle reference to "former second-year PhD
| student" it makes sense that they'd have to make a public
| statement.
|
| They do a good job of toeing the required line of privacy while
| also giving enough information to see what's going on.
|
| I wonder if the author thought they could leave the paper up and
| ride it into a new position while telling a story about
| voluntarily choosing to leave MIT. They probably didn't expect
| MIT to make a public statement about the paper and turn it into a
| far bigger news story than it would have been if the author
| quietly retracted it.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Seeing as how the author has signed in with an account whose
| email address is username@mit.edu, MIT could just take over the
| account.
|
| _Edit:_ this comment was only partially serious, not meant as
| legal advice to MIT.
| kragen wrote:
| That kind of thing might lead to arXiv not accepting any more
| papers from MIT, or at least any more takedowns.
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's not how it works in the real world. That would be a
| fraudulent request and I suspect they'd invite legal trouble
| by impersonating someone else to access a computer system.
|
| Furthermore, if the author could demonstrate to arXiv that
| the request was fraudulent, the paper would be reinstated.
| The narrative would also switch to people being angry at MIT
| for impersonating a student to do something.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >That's not how it works in the real world. That would be a
| fraudulent request and I suspect they'd invite legal
| trouble by impersonating someone else to access a computer
| system.
|
| Emails are not people. You can impersonate a person, but
| you can't impersonate an email. If I own a company and I
| issue the email dick.less@privateequity.com but then have
| to fire him... using this email address to transfer company
| assets back to someone who can be responsible for them
| isn't fraud (for that purpose, at least). How is this not
| the same issue?
| IshKebab wrote:
| If you misrepresent that you _are_ dick.less then yes
| that would be fraud. They say _only the authors_ can
| submit withdrawal requests, so you would have to present
| yourself as the author even though you aren 't. That's
| fraud.
| a2800276 wrote:
| This would be a coherent argument if the paper was
| submitted by an email address. Instead the paper was
| submitted by a person. The email address serves to
| identify the person. Only the person can redact the
| paper.
| jand wrote:
| > How is this not the same issue?
|
| Although not explicitly stated, i read previous comments
| as using dick.less@privateequity.com to cancel his
| personal Netflix account. (Let's say that
| privateequity.com allowed personal usage of company
| email.)
|
| I see a difference between accessing an email account and
| impersonating the previous account holder.
| mattl wrote:
| Are you referring to an email address or an email message
| here?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I've done it for people who used my email to sign up for
| Facebook and Instagram. Presumably now they have a more
| rigorous verification flow but they used to let people use
| any email without checking. I can't have a potential
| criminal using a social account connected to me, so
| password reset and disable the account is the only rational
| solution. Obviously this is slightly more problematic for
| an institution.
| tokai wrote:
| Impressively the paper seems to have been cited 50 times already.
| I don't mind much if its taken down or not, but with the old
| guard publishers you can at least get a redaction notice or
| comment about the issues with a paper embedded in the
| publication. If you find this paper cited somewhere and follow it
| to the source at arxiv, you will never be made aware of the
| disputes surrounding the research. Preprint servers has somewhat
| of a weakness here.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| A weakness that goes hand-in-hand with the lack of peer review.
| There's moderation but shouldn't be considered equivalent to
| it. Trusting the study means trusting the author or reviewing
| the paper yourself. If a withdraw happens, either the author
| comments on why they did it[0] or, similarly to previous,
| you've to search it yourself.
|
| [0] E.g. arxiv/0812.0848: "This paper has been withdrawn by the
| author due to a crucial definition error of Triebel space".
| coderintherye wrote:
| Nice Twitter thread from Nov '24 analyzing the paper:
| https://x.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/1856273405965693430
| andy99 wrote:
| Is there a way for not Twitter users to read these?
| madars wrote:
| Yeah, replace x.com with xcancel.com or nitter.poast.org,
| e.g., https://xcancel.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/185627340596
| 56934...
| drdeca wrote:
| Yes, https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
| raphman wrote:
| Thanks. On Twitter, Ethan Mollick seems to imply that Robert
| Palgrave might be the scientist that triggered the
| investigation.
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| I don't think arXiv should take it down even if it is fraud.
| ArXiv is more about being a permanent store than a quality judge.
| modzu wrote:
| store of what? fake scientific articles or genuine preprints?
| if the latter clean this crap up
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Earlier this year, the COD conducted a confidential internal
| review based upon allegations it received regarding certain
| aspects of this paper. While student privacy laws and MIT
| policy prohibit the disclosure of the outcome of this review,
| we are writing to inform you that MIT has no confidence in
| the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has
| no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in
| the paper. Based upon this finding, we also believe that the
| inclusion of this paper in arXiv may violate arXiv's Code of
| Conduct.
|
| It sounds like "we don't like it and won't tell you why,
| we're hiding behind MIT policy and vague notions of privacy".
|
| MIT should just demonstrate in a paper what the shortcomings
| are and print it, adding it to the citation tree of the
| original.
|
| Looking very briefly at the paper and speculating wildly, I
| could imagine that the company who were subject of it - or
| their staff - might not appreciate it and have put pressure
| on MIT??
|
| Solid amount of Streisand Effect going on here -- lots of
| attention has been bought to the paper (and that is
| everything after all!).
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Looking very briefly at the paper and speculating wildly,
| I could imagine that the company who were subject of it -
| or their staff - might not appreciate it and have put
| pressure on MIT??
|
| The apparent issue is that the data appears to have been
| entirely fabricated and is a lie. The author appears to
| simply be a fraud
| duskwuff wrote:
| > It sounds like "we don't like it and won't tell you why,
| we're hiding behind MIT policy and vague notions of
| privacy".
|
| FERPA is federal law. It is quite likely that MIT is
| legally bound to not release some pieces of evidence which
| are crucial in this case (hypothetically, for example: that
| the student's educational record is inconsistent with
| claims made in the paper).
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| Judging quality/fraud is the role of a journal/conference,
| not arXiv. If a paper gets rejected does it come off arXiv?
| No. If a paper is never submitted does it come off? No. If a
| paper is retracted, does it come off? No. ArXiv should avoid
| making as many subjective determinations as possible.
| andy99 wrote:
| I agree with this, it's actually a good reminder not to
| trust a preprint server. Arxiv already has an inappropriate
| air of validity, moderation will only make it worse.
|
| (Incidentally, I don't think misplaced trust in preprints
| is much of an academic issue, people that are experts in
| their field can easily judge quality for themselves. It's
| laypeople taking them at face value that's the problem.)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Actually arXiv is moderated and if policies are violated they
| may even withdraw* a paper themselves, if it wasn't declined to
| be published in first place. Regarding policies, it's mentioned
| that a "submission may be declined if the moderators determine
| it lacks originality, novelty, significance, and/or _contains
| falsified, plagiarized content or serious misrepresentations of
| data_ , affiliation, or content."
|
| *Note that this creates a new version lacking any download
| which also becomes the default but any previous ones are still
| available.
| dougb5 wrote:
| This makes me think about the credibility of single-author vs.
| multi-author papers in different disciplines. In computer
| science, a paper is seen as suspicious if there's just one author
| (at least nowadays). But in economics it seems much more common.
| Can an economist explain this for me (or perhaps a paper written
| by multiple economists?)
| type0 wrote:
| > But in economics it seems much more common
|
| non-scientific studies can't be replicated
| als0 wrote:
| What's that got to do with the number of authors?
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| A study that cannot be replicated is a study that cannot be
| falsified. Authors don't mind putting their names on them
| because there's no accountability to be held and is purely
| net positive (one more publication and additional
| citations).
| shanemhansen wrote:
| "I don't endorse this paper. Therefore you should take it down. I
| won't tell you why. Trust me bro."
|
| Whether MIT is right or wrong, the arrogance displayed is
| staggering. The only thing more shocking is that obviously this
| behavior works for them and they are used to people obeying them
| without question because they are MIT.
| levocardia wrote:
| More like "Because it involves a student, FERPA won't allow us
| to legally disclose what's going on, but we kicked the student
| out so you should take the hint and realize what was going on"
| ricksunny wrote:
| It is indeed disappointing posture the institute is putting on
| full display here.
| willb_ml wrote:
| I'm sure this works for other institutions also, not just MIT.
| Maybe the evidence they have for the request requires
| disclosing data that violates FERPA, which they obviously
| aren't allowed to do.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| The arrogance of MIT is staggering? I would say the arrogance
| of paper's author is 10x as staggering that if what Robert
| Palgrave has suggested is true.
|
| I think MIT is trying to protect its reputation as a would-be
| place of fraud-free research, unlike Harvard.
| elcritch wrote:
| In my opinion the paper shouldn't be take down. Instead a note
| should be added noting the concerns with the pre-print and that's
| it's likely fraudulent.
|
| Edit: Since the paper has been cited, others may still need to
| reference the paper to determine if it materially affects a paper
| citing it. If the paper is removed it's just a void.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > The paper was championed by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu, who
| won the 2024 economics Nobel, and David Autor. The two said they
| were approached in January by a computer scientist with
| experience in materials science who questioned how the technology
| worked, and how a lab that he wasn't aware of had experienced
| gains in innovation. Unable to resolve those concerns, they
| brought it to the attention of MIT, which began conducting a
| review.
|
| So the PhD student might have been kicked out. But what about the
| people who "championed it". If they worked with the student,
| surely they might have figured out the mythical lab full of 1000s
| material scientists might not exist, it might exist but they
| never actually used any AI tool.
| RS-232 wrote:
| MIT was well-respected until they killed Aaron Swartz in 2013 for
| setting information free.
|
| It has devolved into a pompous bastion of elitist snobs who
| relish in bullying, stifling access to information, and ruining
| lives.
|
| The paper is a red herring. The real issue here is that arXiv
| represents an ideological threat to their locus of information
| control, and this is purely a power play.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| you'd think that such a widely cited fraudulent paper might have
| caused problems in other research, but probably nobody who cited
| it actually read it anyway, so. it's turtles all the way down.
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