robwwilliams

I think the joke is that E. Holmes probably used variants of this cliche.

This is true, but perhaps not for the reason you have in mind. The “failures” are exaggerated by shoddy experimental design—mainly trying to generalize from a single fully inbred strain of mouse. Most murine research is based on this one strain: C57BL/6. This is like conducting a clinical study with one seriously inbred human subject multiple times. Very poor generality even to other types of mice, let alone to humans.

Odd that in all the comments I have read so far no on has yet mentioned the many apparently faceless octopods, chickens, turkey, lambs, pigs, goats, and cows many of us consume each week and how they ended up in our mouths; the same mouths now discussing mouse welfare. Yes, odd.

…that longer life after reproductive exhaustion is not under selection.”

Definitely a feature: Disposable soma theory of Kirkwood. Your germline is the real “you”.

Dubious. Do you have a reference or two? In general biological systems are not this simple.

Not to mention the two leading septuagenarian dictators: Putin and Xi.

LoL. We are all dancing naked on the table and hoping our clothes and wallet or purse and some of our pride will be where we left them.

No not necessary in my experience. But it can get pricey not to give Opus 5.5 some constraints.

Agree with afro88. Opus 5.5 as competent as Fable 5.1 on complex adversarial review of material and equations planted with errors. I still use both for a bit of variety.

Completely agree. I’ve had a Nature paper and a Nature Neuroscience paper published this year and the reviews from Opus were much more thorough and complete than those of the human reviewers. I still benefitted from the human reviewers, but now I consider an LLM review essential.

Ideally, but often not true of large complex studies. Typical example is that only a middle author statistician understands the details of data analysis. Also commonly true in quantitative genetics.

Actually I am in a very good position to tell. And who said “write for you”? How about “write with you as a collaborator?”.

Writing is a form of thinking and writing with an LLM makes the argumentation, discussion, and progress toward goals faster and often better in my situation.

I am stating an opinion based on 2.5 years of intense interactions and writing with Anthropic models on a difficult topic related to asynchronous computational systems.

Background: I am a neuroscientist and behavioral biologist (45 years of experience) who understands the biology of behaviors fairly well but I need to translate this background into hardware architectures that get beyond current asynchronous system (e.g., this recent neuromorphic paper in Nature Communication by Li et al., 2025, A deterministic neuromorphic architecture, doi.org/10.1038.s41467-025-65268-z).

Working AND writing with Opus and now Fable has been a blessing of sorts.

Too simple, too dogmatic at the start and at the end (“don’t use LLMs” and “then they are poison”). The middle section is all good.

Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these cases a human will need help from an LLM to think and write more deeply AND broadly. I sure do.

You could object that this form of human-LLM collaborative writing is just for one reader; the writer. True at the start but not true toward the end.

I do agree that even the frontier models do not touch a really strong human writer. Way too much gimmickry. They do not yet match individuals such as Leslie Lamport, Terry Winograd, John MacArthur, Richard Rorty, Humberto Maturana, William James, Rodney Brooks. They don’t have the depth of understanding to simplify. But give them a few more years and excursions in the real world and a concept if “now” and the situation may improve.

I often ask Fable and Opus to explain difficult topics to me as if I were the canonical dog Rover. It works.

Yes, and genetic variant generally do not act in isolation. We currently focus on the small additive effects of variants because we can with small sample sizes—and 1 million humans is marginal using a GWAS cohort to dive into epistasis. But these interaction effects among variants are critical. Now almost completely deprecated.