Source author record

Harry Collins

Harry Collins appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

ResearcherUnclaimed source record

Catalog footprint

What is connected

5works
4topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Connect this record

Log in to claim

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent papers, topics, institutions and collaborators without losing the researcher page.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Large language models eroding science understanding: an experimental study

This paper is under review in AI and Ethics This study examines whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably answer scientific questions and demonstrates how easily they can be influenced by fringe scientific material. The authors modified custom LLMs to prioritise knowledge in selected fringe papers on the Fine Structure Constant and Gravitational Waves, then compared their responses with those of domain experts and standard LLMs. The altered models produced fluent, convincing answers that contradicted scientific consensus and were difficult for non-experts to detect as misleading. The results show that LLMs are vulnerable to manipulation and cannot replace expert judgment, highlighting risks for public understanding of science and the potential spread of misinformation.

preprint2016arXiv

An Imitation Game concerning gravitational wave physics

The 'Imitation Game' is a Turing Test played with a human participant instead of a computer. Here the author, a sociologist, who has been immersed in the field of gravitational wave physics since 1972, tried to pass an Imitation Game as a gravitational wave physicist. He already passed such a test in mid-2000s but this test was more elaborate and compared his performance with that of other kinds of physicists and with other sociologists as well as gravitational wave physicists. The test was based on 8 technical questions about gravitational wave physics asked by Professor Sathyprakash of Cardiff University. Collins marks compared well with that of the other gravitational wave physicists and were markedly better than that of other classes of respondent. Collins also marked the test and it can be seen that the way he marked was also much closer to the gravitational wave physicists than other categories. Though Collins's expertise can be shown to have degraded a little in the last ten years it seems not to have degraded a lot. This is important for his most recent book on the detection of gravitational waves from a black hole binary, this being Chapter 14 of this book, which is due to by published my MIT Press in February 2017.

preprint2016arXiv

Interactional Expertise and Embodiment

In Part 1 of this paper, I introduce the idea of interactional expertise while in Part 2, I focus on its implications for philosophical theories of the importance of the body in forming our conceptual world. I argue that the way philosophers have dealt with the body turns attention away from the most important questions and that we cannot answer these questions without making the notion of socialisation, and therefore interactional expertise, a central concept in our thinking. This makes language at least as important, and often more important than bodily practice in our understanding of the world. The notion of a disembodied socialised agent leads in the direction of interesting questions while the notion of an embodied but unsocialised human actor is unimaginable.

preprint2016arXiv

Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its typed transcript

We use an extract from an interview concerning gravitational wave physics to show that the meaning of hesitancies within speech are different when spoken and when read from the corresponding transcript. When used in speech, hesitancies can indicate a pause for thought, when read in a transcript they indicate uncertainty. In a series of experiments the perceived uncertainty of the transcript was shown to be higher than the perceived uncertainty of the spoken version with almost no overlap for any respondent. We propose that finding and the method could be the beginning of a new subject we call 'Language Code Analysis' which would systematically examine how meanings change when the 'same' words are communicated via different media and symbol systems.