It’s been too long, dear readers, since you and I had a chat, a tete a tete, about what’s been going on in this little Substack. Time to get personal and reflect on the many pots I stirred the past few months—wow, has it been nine months since I last published a Regret Now?! I’ve been remiss in my duties and for that I apologize.
First, numerous essays were widely read but didn’t generate any real disagreement. So even though I live for conflict, I’ll take it as a win. To my surprise, hardly anyone batted an eye when I suggested that academic contests like selecting which students deserve grants or deciding which faculty applicants to move from a longlist to a shortlist would be better done by artificial intelligence. My argument was that AI is good at following rubrics and, you know, actually reading the application materials. Humans get swayed by prestige and name recognition far too easily. AI could be explicitly prompted to ignore that. I suspect Claude will be less impressed than I am by a candidate Harvard’s Dan Gilbert vouched for. I consider this a plus.
So, I take the lack of vitriol online or in my comment section to mean that many readers might quietly agree with my argument. If so, would anyone be brave enough to actually recommend AI (with human guidance) to adjudicate, say, applications to the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), which is open for submissions right now? If we blinded applicants and gave AI the SPSP reviewer rubric, would we trust the results of that contest more? Something tells me folks are not even close to ready for this...
