The Economist just published a piece arguing students are doing worse than most people think, blaming part on Covid and AI. It ends with a strong point: "That is not pragmatism; it is surrender." Is this something you are seeing in bioinformatics too? And do you think academia is adapting or surrendering?
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/06/25/students-are-doing-worse-than-you-think
Hey everyone,
When I started my PhD in bioinformatics, I came from computer engineering and had to learn life and health sciences almost from scratch. Back then, reading PubMed papers felt like trying to read a map where the legend was written in a language I didn’t speak.
I just wrote a piece on Substack about how LLMs may be changing that, especially for people teaching themselves complex fields. It also looks at the risk of treating AI like an oracle that never says “I don’t know,” and why universities may need to focus more on critical thinking, curiosity, and judgment.
Since this community sits right at the intersection of tech, biology, and learning, I’d really value blunt feedback on the core idea.
If you’re interested, the full piece is here: https://denialofwisdom.substack.com/p/decentralization-of-information-to
Do you think AI is actually helping people understand hard papers better, or are we just outsourcing thinking to a tool that sounds confident even when it shouldn’t?
Please be honest, even if you strongly disagree.