you are complaining about a problem with this paper without explaining what it is.
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When I say “how” I mean like how u/glouwbug mentioned: Formatting. But more so Structure.
When I read artifacts by Frontier Labs I notice a trend towards deteriorating lexicographic architecture. Like how a textbook or larger tomb is constructed for the reader to navigate.
Instead, now I see continuous monotonic text. It’s as if the author expects us to chuck the artifact into an LLM in order for it to inform us of meaning.
I feel like this is a common format for social sciences or economics papers, e.g. most of the papers I've seen on ssrn.com have a similar structure.
To be sure, I always did find those a bit hard to read (they seem to never have evolved past the stage where papers were read on, y'know, paper instead of screens) but I think this paper is simply keeping with the conventions for studies on this subject matter.
Single column PDF. This is the frontier.
I find single column much easier to read than dual. Though the line spacing is too much in this concrete example.
It’s an econ paper. What do you want? A page of Claude slop with the small caps subtitles?
Is it an "econ paper?" I'm sorry for the continued contrarian route here but I ask it in earnest. Are we compromising our standards of economic papers to fit the fad?
Like how I gestured in my top-level comment, are we being an economic analysis or seeming an economic analysis. I regard the efforts of Frontier Labs with suspicion because a lot of their marketing efforts around "Artificial Intelligence" appear (to me) as acquisitive and power hungry to a fault: they are all consuming in that every author on this paper has a superscript 1 to denote association with OpenAI.
Yes with an extra helping of emdashes!
Granted I didn't comb over it but to me the big issue was that it was just a big data dump without any material attempt at meaningful analysis.
That and all the figures were at the bottom which was kind of annoying.
The figures down 80 scrolls towards the bottom is what bothered me also.
Most of the time with studies, the figures are where you should go first. It's not uncommon to find cases where the text makes claims that the numbers don't support. It also, pre AI era, took at least some extra effort to make data visualizations, so the authors would focus on visualizing the most useful/impactful/interesting data sets.
It did make me ask why I wanted to see them while reading, and if there was any value in just reading the text without the images filling in the blanks (and possibly biasing what I was focusing on).
Concluded that I still want to see the images right around the time the are referenced.
Likely just formatting
this paper sucks. It was written by capital E Economists and has some very bad figures that are all hidden at the bottom.
Making valid complaints would require actually reading it.