Historical Materialism is sorry to learn of the passing of Anwar Shaikh. We repost this interview with Shaikh from 2021 and will endeavour to get something published on our website remembering his person and legacy.

Anwar Shaikh, grand économiste hétérodoxe (marxiste), est mort.

At the Green Party conference in Brighton. Polanski expected to speak in about 30

“Vote Green, watch Labour move.” The argument here - which I think is true - is that Labour is understanding more and more that the real threat they face is to their Left, and the Greens are putting actual pressure on Labour

exactly. Also anti-scientific.

Very much same. We need better academic drinking clubs for these times.

Excellent thread. Key point: AI favours stuff it has seen before, so is inherently incapable of genuine innovation; it is not intelligent in a human sense. PS - very pleased I am a retired academic 😉

Not disagreeing, those would result in higher numbers (same as US based researchers trying to flee Trumpism), but not doubling.

If there is no interview stage, it will be impossible to assess the actual competence, knowledge and ability of the applicants. AI is trained on pre-existing content, and is by definition incapable of true innovation. It does not think, it is not intelligent: it plagiarises and iterates, badly. ...

they will be very tempted themselves to turn to AI to assess the overwhelming volume of proposals. And as we know, AI has a pro-AI bias, which will mean that the proposals funded will be AI slop rather than genuine human-driven innovation and creativity.

3) implement an interview stage for shortlisted proposals as for the ERC (this is something we are doing in teaching as well btw). These measures are vital. If the reviewers are not given the ability and means to weed out AI from human-generated proposals, ...

In case it wasn't clear, academia is crumbling under the enormous flood of AI-generated content. The latest victim is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) flagship EU postdoctoral fellowships. The number of submissions has more than doubled in the past 3 years.

The academic grant system is extremely broken. 21.627 submissions... That is how many proposals the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships received this month. Two years ago it was 10,360. The budget did not move. The success rate went from around 16% to something close to 7%.

Sometimes I am not ashamed of having written things. That's one of them.