One recent advancement in science writing (stemming from psychology through spreading) has been the pre-registered format and pre-registration.
Pre-registration often takes the form of a form—which effectively is a dialogue—where you have to answer a set of questions about your design. This forces a kind of thinking that otherwise might not happen before you run a study, which has positive outcomes in the clarity and openness of the thought processes that go into designing a study.
One consequence it can highlight that often we very unclear about how we might actually properly test a theory. In the standard paper format one can get away with this more—such as through HARKING or a review process where this is not found out.
This is relevant to philosophy but in psychology/science the format of running and reporting on an experiment is very standard.
I was thinking of a test of a good methods and results section—it would be of sufficient clarity and detail that a LLM could take your data and description and run your analysis. Of course, one should also provide your code anyway, but it is a good test even so.
So in the methods and results, then an avatar does not seem particularly helpful, unless it is effectively a more advanced version of a form.
For the introduction and discussion, a different type of thinking occurs. The trend over time has been for shorter introduction and discussion sections, even though page limits have ceased to be a limiting factor. There are a few reasons for this. But I don’t see this trend getting reversed.
Now, interesting you say you can use an avatar to get feedback on your work and so on. You don’t explicitly raise the fact that already now scientists will be using LLM’s to help them write papers. So instead of framing it as an avatar helping clarify the authors thinking, what inevitably will happen in many cases is that LLM’s will fill in thinking, and create novel thinking—in other words, a paper will have LLM’s a co-author. In terms of argument then, I think one could create a custom LLM with avatar interface designed to help authors write papers—which will do the things you suggest—give feedback, suggest ideas, along with fixing problems. And the best avatar interfaces will be personalised to the author e.g. discipline specific, and some knowledge of the author (such as learning all their past text to better predict).
And so yes, I think you are a right that will use avatars to help write text similar to what you suggest, and then readers will use avatars to help them read text. I suppose in the medium term I still see the journal article as a publication format that is going to be resistant to change. But LLM’s/avatars will be interfaces for production and consumption of them.
One recent advancement in science writing (stemming from psychology through spreading) has been the pre-registered format and pre-registration.
Pre-registration often takes the form of a form—which effectively is a dialogue—where you have to answer a set of questions about your design. This forces a kind of thinking that otherwise might not happen before you run a study, which has positive outcomes in the clarity and openness of the thought processes that go into designing a study.
One consequence it can highlight that often we very unclear about how we might actually properly test a theory. In the standard paper format one can get away with this more—such as through HARKING or a review process where this is not found out.
This is relevant to philosophy but in psychology/science the format of running and reporting on an experiment is very standard.
I was thinking of a test of a good methods and results section—it would be of sufficient clarity and detail that a LLM could take your data and description and run your analysis. Of course, one should also provide your code anyway, but it is a good test even so.
So in the methods and results, then an avatar does not seem particularly helpful, unless it is effectively a more advanced version of a form.
For the introduction and discussion, a different type of thinking occurs. The trend over time has been for shorter introduction and discussion sections, even though page limits have ceased to be a limiting factor. There are a few reasons for this. But I don’t see this trend getting reversed.
Now, interesting you say you can use an avatar to get feedback on your work and so on. You don’t explicitly raise the fact that already now scientists will be using LLM’s to help them write papers. So instead of framing it as an avatar helping clarify the authors thinking, what inevitably will happen in many cases is that LLM’s will fill in thinking, and create novel thinking—in other words, a paper will have LLM’s a co-author. In terms of argument then, I think one could create a custom LLM with avatar interface designed to help authors write papers—which will do the things you suggest—give feedback, suggest ideas, along with fixing problems. And the best avatar interfaces will be personalised to the author e.g. discipline specific, and some knowledge of the author (such as learning all their past text to better predict).
And so yes, I think you are a right that will use avatars to help write text similar to what you suggest, and then readers will use avatars to help them read text. I suppose in the medium term I still see the journal article as a publication format that is going to be resistant to change. But LLM’s/avatars will be interfaces for production and consumption of them.