The Dark Night of Mathematics • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#171

Post by eointierney » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

In times past having one's photograph taken was a soul-stealing for some.

Some notions:

- finding counter-examples is one of the most exploratory uses of calculation

- there is no evidence, not even in the hands of the inimitable Terence Tao, that Approximate Intelligence (AI) is insightful rather than inferential*

- people who enjoy Mathematics, even amateurs, do so for the beauty

- AI is only good in the hands of those who can provide corrective context

- AI unchecked is a remarkably inefficient noise engine

- Mathematics will provide joy to the curious 'til the heat death of the Universe

- AI is contributing to the heat death of planet Earth

- anthropomorphism, of which I am otherwise not a fan, may yet be a saving grace as without proprioception we may not morph

- we may need to redefine the Turing Tarpit of Perlis

If any of this nonsense really troubles you return again to thermodynamics and revel in the joy of being the local universe's pinnacle of meaty evolution. And go outside and smell the flowers.

* Caveats abound

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#172

Post by skippyfish » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #22

One way to differentiate between an art or a craft and a science is that if a genie appeared and offered to trivialize all the discovery work of your career and simply give you the answers today, and you'd say "no", you're probably not doing science.

If you say "yes," you're also not doing science (anymore). Therein lies the problem with this take: most of science isn't done with the objective of getting to any specific finish line, and this is particularly true for math.

As the old saying goes, the purpose of a system is what it does, so there might be some Platonic ideal of science we can appeal to, but the practice of science by humans is about the craft as much as it is about the truth.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#173

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

Paracompact wrote: post #164

d_burfoot wrote: post #92

Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output. Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subf…

> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. Normally I'm very sympathetic to the plights of those socially affected by AI, and rarely pass up the opportunity to clown on institutional actors papering over these plights with glib cliches. But in this case, I really feel like this is a case…

[deleted]

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#174

Post by piloto_ciego » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

BobaFloutist wrote: post #144

chrisjj wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting "AI" never stopped a painter painting. Just selling.

Some painters can't paint if they can't sell.

This the problem. The need to make money in order to justify your right to survive is the problem.

Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#175

Post by fzeroracer » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:57 PM UTC

piloto_ciego wrote: post #174

BobaFloutist wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some painters can't paint if they can't sell.

This the problem. The need to make money in order to justify your right to survive is the problem. Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system.

AI IS the system; the speed with which the rich and wealthy have embedded it into every aspect of our lives and the way it has been trained off the stolen work of millions without care is only possible because it is directly entwined.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#176

Post by customguy » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

Paracompact wrote: post #164

d_burfoot wrote: post #92

Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output. Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subf…

> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. Normally I'm very sympathetic to the plights of those socially affected by AI, and rarely pass up the opportunity to clown on institutional actors papering over these plights with glib cliches. But in this case, I really feel like this is a case…

> The greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful [..] Yet I both acknowledge rather than deny the impending death of mathematics as we have engaged, it for the last couple centuries, and am far more excited than aghast.

The "yet" should be an "so obviously", since you have your greatest accomplishment behind you.

And the article isn't denying anything, it is criticising something.

> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?

I'd say that we have been in the business of not being alienated from ourselves and our work, and that that is more important than what the work is. Math, just like anything else, won't prevent the heat death of the universe. Supercomputers or wooden sticks, same outcome. So it really doesn't matter how you spend the time as much as as what, e.g. if you're an alienated cog or not. The behemoth machinery itself isn't on a journey anywhere, ultimately, anything that goes up will come down; so none of these fantasies about a point or destination can make up for the here and now.

> The author claims there is something profound and spiritual about math, and I agree; it exists prior to and above all of us, human or AI.

First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true.

"I'm hungry :(" "Oh yeah, I also am always on the lookout for new cool bands to check out! We're on the same page here." "WHAT?!"

Doing math may be a spiritual experience, "Math is is spiritual" makes no sense, and math pre-existing is flat out wrong, it ultimately rests on axioms that are simply accepted as given. Even I as a layman know that.

> The severity of this line caught me off guard. I think the author is genuinely having an emotional-social upheaval, and I feel terrible for them, but at this moment they may be having a hard time separating their trauma from their intellectual aesthetic for what math is all about.

You just turned a profound spiritual crisis into math being profound and spiritual, and now you accuse them having a trauma that makes them unable to see something you claimed that isn't even true. And that's the overall pattern I see everywhere, those who object are misrepresented or outright ignored, I never see any facing of what people actually say. So even just based on that it seems deeply anti-human, because one side in this debate isn't even showing up, hiding behind some supposedly inevitable "future" that can just be established as fact without debate.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#177

Post by chrisbrandow » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #157

jlev1 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“You shouldn’t find joy from things the way you said you do. Sounds like a you problem.”

Exactly. If they just do things for utility I struggle to see if they did it for joy in the first place. A painter still paints even if there is some perfect machine that can paint. This sounds like the same crisis many artists had when photography was invented.

Craft isn’t craft if it doesn’t produce something. So enjoying the utility of it is not a secondary aspect. That’s a key difference between craft and art.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#178

Post by bonoboTP » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #168

bonoboTP wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider "get paid to do X" to be equivalent to "you get to have your paid job and career as long as you do X". In that case research and papers qualify. Whatever is technically written in the contracts is just surface level bureaucracy. Publish or perish.

> I consider "get paid to do X" to be equivalent to "you get to have your paid job and career as long as you do X". In that case research and papers qualify. Actually, it doesn't. Both math departments I'm familiar with had faculty members who published only to get tenure, and never published again until they retired. But if they didn't teach (or taught extremely poorly), they got fired, even though they had tenure.…

If the main job is teaching, then AI being good at proving theorems should not make OP worry about his job. Only AI being good at teaching would threaten that.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#179

Post by dullcrisp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

pineaux wrote: post #110

Zsfe510asG wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we'll have free health care, boomers will rent their apartments for $100, everyone will have UBI and a Tesla with a warp drive that travels to the terraformed Mars. Hayek and Friedman predicted it!

I almost never hear the story that I find the most believable: that a small group of people will use AI to demolish the 99.999% of us.

I really only find that story believable if we were to restrict AI development and only allow a small group of people to use it.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#180

Post by xorcist » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:33 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #137

lioeters wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even wrong. Real scientists say "yes" to the genie with all the answers? And artists and crafts people don't? The entire statement is nonsense, and offers no insight into art or science. It's almost like a language model generated a plausible sentence that is grammatically correct but has no relation to the real world. Perhaps if the analogy was between science and engineering.. A plumber would say "yes" to the g…

No, I think you're pretty overconfident here. A plumber is not in fact thrilled by the genie who permanently resolves all the world's plumbing problems. I also kind of love the subtext in these responses that there is something suspect about crafts.

That thought experiment says more about your thoughts on plumbers than anything else.