(Re-titling, but it’s a follow-up to my previous post) Incidentally, I notice that the most recent Answer post to Evoldir is from 2022 (https://evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/Answers.html).
There’s no reason to speculate that people who ask questions have somehow become rude and do not post a summary of answers anymore, so the most likely (and arguably Occam’s razor) explanation seems to be that it’s the asking of questions that has faded away on Evoldir as well. Indeed, the “Other” category archive (https://evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/Other.html) bears this out, at least for the last 4 months that the archive extends to. In that context, the asking of questions has persisted here for a little longer, but in principle has taken the same trajectory. This decline in posted questions obviously coincides with the advent of increasingly powerful LLMs. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, and I don’t know whether this is what trainees are using now, but I know it’s what I would try first. As a random experiment, I tried one of the more recent questions that generated a number of responses here, on model-averaging corHMM models. Original list post: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg06023.html My query to ChatGPT (free version): https://chatgpt.com/share/68b76601-2a80-8001-98ad-7ef4417db345 You all judge the answer. Anyone interested in examining this with a little more rigor? -hilmar > On Aug 24, 2025, at 4:44 PM, Hilmar Lapp via R-sig-phylo > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Apologies for chiming in a little late here. I have to say I am (and have > been for a while) in favor of moving the course announcements out of this > mailing list into a channel of its own. The main reasons in my mind include > the following: > > - Having a separate channel for course announcements seems to be the common > mechanism for distribution lists with a wide reach (case in point for our > field is evoldir). This seems to work well – people interested in receiving > these announcements opt in, everybody else doesn’t need to take (and > validate, check, monitor etc) specific action. > > - Science has become and will continue to become more interdisciplinary, more > so than ever in the age of data deluges and AI/ML. This can make it difficult > to draw a good line between courses that are and those that aren’t pertinent > to this community. And across this community, we’d probably choose different > lines. > > - It’s a little hard to say right now whether the diminishing frequency of > on-topic Q&A-style threads is a reaction to course announcements taking over > more and more and arguably most of the traffic, or an independent trend > reflecting something else. In the past, we have used frequency of posts as > evidence supporting the list’s value and usefulness. I still consider this > very valuable information to have – if this kind of forum is becoming or is > much less useful than it was in the past, we should be able to see this from > the list traffic, ideally unencumbered by confounding factors. Perhaps > chatbots can now utilize the information from the list archives (which are > public) well enough that most questions get answered this way rather than > reaching the list as a post. > > -hilmar > -- Hilmar Lapp -:- ORCID:0000-0001-9107-0714 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9107-0714> -:- GitHub:hlapp <https://github.com/hlapp> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-phylo mailing list - [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-phylo Searchable archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
