“Academic Proof-of-Work in the Age of LLMs” by LawrenceC

Written quickly as part of the Inkhaven Residency. Related: Bureaucracy as active ingredient, pain as active ingredient A widely known secret in academia is that many of the formalities serve in large part proof of work. That is, the reason expensive procedures exist is that some way of filtering must exist, and the amount of effort invested can often be a good proxy for the quality of the work. Specifically, the pool of research is vast, and good research can often be hard to identify. Even engaging in research enough to understand its quality can be expensive. As a result, people look toward signs of visible, expensive effort in order to determine whether to engage in the research at all. Why do people insist only on reading research that's published in well-formatted, well-written papers, as opposed to looking at random blog posts? Part of the answer is that good writing and formatting makes the research easier to digest, and another part is that investing the time to properly write up your results often causes the results to improve. But part of the answer is proof-of-work: surely, if your research is good, you’d be willing to put in the [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 4th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tfixo2RhNXgHzLwZx/academic-proof-of-work-in-the-age-of-llms --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.