Comment by fatso784
14 days ago
My problem with this kind of work is—-obviously they do. Did anyone seriously think otherwise? I’m shocked why these are even questions deserving scientific scrutiny. Have people truly lost their critical thinking that badly already?
In history, why did scientists research gravity for so long? Were they too stupid to realize that they were obviously being pulled towards the ground? No. They hoped to learn about the details. Eventually they learned details that were not apparent from everyday experience, such as the formula for how gravity scales with mass.
It’s the same here. For example, this study concluded that most changes are safe and some are very bad, as opposed to most changes being slightly bad. That is not obvious, especially to infrequent LLM users.
Also, even “obvious” conclusions are within the scope of science. I’ve spent too long writing this already to look up an example, but I bet there have been countries in the past whose leaders chose “obviously-good” monetary policies that economic research could have shown was counterproductive. The world is complicated, and without systems of communication such as academia, it’s hard to be sure if what you see is what everyone else sees.