There's more low-hanging fruit in interdisciplinary work thanks to LLMs

post by ChristianKl · 2025-05-07T19:48:37.250Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

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I'm right now doing conceptual theoretical work about how the human fascia system works. While I do rely on some original conceptual insights that I have e come up with on my own, Gemini 2.5 Pro massively speeds up my conceptual work. Being able to formulate a principle or analogy and then having Gemini apply it, is very useful.

There are a bunch of scientific fields where we currently have a lot of experimental data but lack coherent theory to interlink the experimental findings. Based on my own experience, current LLMs seem already to be powerful enough to help bridge that theory gap. Being able to ask "Hey, does field XYZ have any useful insights to the problem I'm tackling?" is also very helpful for making progress in theory.

The LLMs also solve a key problems that autodidact have when it comes with existing scientific fields. If you have a new idea, they are good at telling you the main criticisms that would come from an orthodox researcher in a field. We might see a rise in interdisciplinary work that didn't happen in the past because of academia's hyperspecialization. 

People frequently say that progress in science has stalled because there's little low-hanging fruit. When it comes to doing certain interdisciplinary work, it's now a lot easier to pick the fruit. If you are right now starting a scientific career, think about what kind of interdisciplinary work you might do, where it's now easier to make progress because of the existence of LLMs. 

If you have a research question, one approach you can do is to ask a reasoning model to create a debate between two highly skilled researchers with different approaches to debate your research question. You might learn valuable insights about your research question this way. Besides taking existing researchers in the field, asking the LLM to simulate philosophers and tell the LLM that the philosophers understand all the facts about a field, might give you valuable insights of how insights that philosophers found through a lot of hard work translate into individual fields. 

It's not clear what the best approaches are to get the LLM to help you with interdisciplinary work, but there's a lot of fruit out there to be picked right now.

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