I've been suffering from my friend's offensive behaviours.
Hi, I've been concerned about how my friend has been generating his research paper and planning to submit it to the major journals.
Warning: English is not my first language, so it could be painful for you to read, but I appreciate you a lot if you could read this through.
I start by explaining his research approach. For context, his true passions lie in physics, but he was forced to go to med school, so he has never had the chance to properly study physics. He has some deep intuitions about physics, and he's somehow recently gotten a strong motivation to work on his own research paper and publish it to the major journals. However, I have identified many issues with his approach, and even though I point those out for him and give him my suggestions and advice, he never listens to me and he ends up offending my identity as a form of retaliation or something (I'm guessing he got offended by my suggestions for some reason).
The first issue with his research stuff is that he is developing it solely with chatGPT. Apparently, he has conversed with chatGPT in the same chat box for nearly two months about this physics research paper thing. He asked me to go through and see his entire conversations with chatGPT because he wanted me to know what he is doing and give him some technical insights. Thus, I had to go through most of them. It was very long, around 500 pages in the pdf or more, and it was already stressful. For what's inside the chat box, it seemed like he started off by asking some technical and sharp theoretical questions to chatGPT and chatGPT provided textbook-like answers. Later, he inputted lots of his speculations in the chat box that later became the central topic of his research. Somehow, the entire conversation shifted to the scuffed graph theory manipulation/simulation and parameter tuning stuff, covered with the chatGPT's physics language. Imo, what he is doing at that point is not physics anymore, but some graph theory exploration but with the restrictions he provided based on his own physics intution. It also lacks mathematical rigour and does not have a coherent structure, but I still provided him with some insights or follow-up questions that I hoped to become useful. Then he raged at me possibly because he thought those suggestions could threaten his "perfect" results that chatGPT gave him through the coding and diagram generations (He actively asks chatGPT to generate the code, execute it, and share the results in the diagrams or something, so he does not even do this coding simulation part himself, but chatGPT does that for him). He also seemed to ask chatGPT to hardcode many variables so he could obtain a specific type of outcomes, and I believe he wanted to believe that those outcomes are big deals. (As for my suggestions, one example was that he somehow wanted to fix the number of nodes at 250, likely because that's the number of nodes that consistently gave him the results he wanted to see. But I suggested that he could consider changing the number of nodes to test scale invariance and using the idea of letting N approach to infinity where N is the number of nodes. I suggested him to explore what kind of behaviours could emerge with this change on his model, but he raged at me for suggesting these. )
Regarding the first issue above, what was alarming for me was that he asked chatGPT to generate the research paper, including abstract, introduction, and even references. What scared me was that he asked chatGPT to generate the references for research papers and he even said he will never plan to take a look at those reference papers he is citing (or chatGPT is citing). To avoid academic offence, I checked to see if all references are at least existent and valid for him, and thankfully, they were all existent. But this still looks academically indecent for me. I told him about this, but he said that he can use references as decorations and that is one of the foundational skills we need for writing research paper. I didn't completely understand how citing random papers he will not even read is one of the foundational skills and I was completely lost at that point.
Next, the second issue was that while he asked me to check the entire conversations he has had with chatGPT, he only listens to and trusts whatever chatGPT says and whenever I make some suggestions from the technical point of view, he rejects all of them, offends my identity and calls me stupid. I was also so upset when he was finally admitting my point only after chatGPT somehow gave him the same suggestions as mine. He only believes in and trusts what chatGPT says not what I say, and he even offends me after I give him suggestions. Maybe I went through all his long ass conversations with chatGPT just to suffer from his offensive response. What a great waste of time and energy. I was so pissed off when that happened.
Also, on a more technical side, his graph theory exploration and simulation with various parameters do not seem to have an immediate link to physics. He could surely make up the connection between his graph model and physics, but I strongly believe that is not how it's supposed to work for his research. I suggested him to change his focus to computer science so he can still expand his paper and ideas as a computer science paper and then add physics as an appendix or application chapter. But he got angry at me for this because he did not exactly want to make his paper a "computer science" or "physics" paper so that he does not need to compete with experts in the field.
He overreacted to all my critical points of views for his research paper thing, and he even started saying "from my life experience, whoever values me tends to be smart and whoever does not fully agree with me tends to be stupid. Only truly smart people can notice how gifted and superior I am." I feel like he said this to offend me again by indirectly calling me stupid. He does this kind of stuff to me whenever I give him suggestions for his research paper.
First, I want to know if I am right to feel that he has been very unfair to me and academically a little messed up. I value his speculations, but everything else he is doing seems quite off. I really want to know how to exactly get away from him at least for this research paper stuff. Or in the worst case, I really want to cut ties with him. I also want to know if it is valid for me to feel this way. He also has some nice aspects, but I am too tired of him after this happened. Please let me know what you think.