“ I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself”
100% yes. They brag about it!
The Dark Night of Mathematics
201–210 of 321 posts
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.…
> 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.
Ahem. From TFA:
"There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical."
And in the comments he writes
"I am drawing on the subjective accounts of many mathematicians and my own experience. If it helps, my intuition is that the ineffable, divine and mystical are immanent and not transcendent."
> 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.
I tend to agree, but many professional mathematicians don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Platonism
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a slippery slope. Having only fun things to do make them obviously boring. The human being craves contrast. That assuming what you've said is true, which is not. In a work environment, you're forced to optimize whatever that there is, regardless if it's fun or not. Moreover, there is always fun to be had even in tasks you've found boring beforehand.
> Having only fun things to do make them obviously boring. This doesn't really pan out the way you think it does as people can always choose to do boring things if they want ( if there's even any truth to your assertion). Unless your argument is something along the lines of humans need to be forced to do things they don't want so they're able to find fun in anything, which I think is pretty... wild.
I do think humans need to be forced to do things they don't want. You don't need to believe my words. Just watch how many people get bored in their long vacations.
If all you do is having fun, it's obvious you'll need a new bar over and over (which is literally happening nowadays).
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#204The idea of ordering theorems like doordash is funny, kudos to the author for that :-) Anyway, your "spiritual journey" doesn't matter. We'll automate mathematics because we can, because it's useful. Don't like it? Well, should have not chosen a capitalist economic system that rewards scientific progress so much.
> We'll automate mathematics because we can, because it's useful.
No, it's not useful. Proving the Riemann hypothesis has no practical application whatsoever. Neither has any of the thousand Erdős problems. Or the Goldbach conjecture. Or the Collatz conjecture. Etc.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done. It's funny seeing office workers here on HN have this sort of opinion and contrasting that with blue collar workers, ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is.
Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty. Now imagine replacing ice cream, or steak, or fresh berries, or whatever you enjoyed eating, with something like Soylent or Huel with a side of puréed kale. Your nutrition may actually improve, but something would be lost, won't it?
> Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty.
Im pretty sure the taste is an evolutionary indicator of nutritional value (we now know how to cheat to make food that tastes really good but isn’t really healthy). But it’s not really an accident that some food tastes good.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#206This is the first I've ever heard math connected to the spiritual. For all my life it has been this rigorous thing grounded in reality in such a way that only people who think a certain way could even approach. Now those people are having this strange "crisis" because AI is being more rigorous than humans I guess. I find it... wild. My, but how the mighty have fallen.
The history of mathematics is tightly coupled to spirituality... some more famous examples off the top of my head are Cantor, Euclid, and Euler, but there are probably hundreds of examples of folks who explicitly tied their faith to their research. I definitely don't think there's anything inconsistent with mathematical and theological thinking. That actually strikes me as a very strange idea?
Ramunajan a particularly notable example.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The stochastic text generator perspective is ... bunk. Not saying that harshly, but it confuses the form of a problem with a form of solution. There is no inhibition of "understanding" because of a form of a problem. If solving a problem requires complex modeling/understanding, that is what happens (assuming performance is achieved). It also confuses stochastic models with the geometric transforms and topological fol…
Are you numeric? Biological computationalism disagrees with substrate independence.
> Biological computationalism disagrees with substrate independence.
Don't leave me hanging, post citations! I welcome fringe theories when confident statements are followed by the conclusive evidence they imply. If that isn't possible, send chocolate.
But, yes, I can count. And I am comfortable with natural forms, all the way to asymptotic limits. However, I don't put up with uncomputable/undefinable reals. Are you not numeric?
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#208Apologies is this is a simpleton question, but how does this differ than most of the mechanical work previously done by hand, but is now automated?
> There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.
“ one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable” that’s my question, what about the other ways that have been automated away. Is there something special about mathematics or is it the authors first encounter with obsolescence?
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#209This is the first I've ever heard math connected to the spiritual. For all my life it has been this rigorous thing grounded in reality in such a way that only people who think a certain way could even approach. Now those people are having this strange "crisis" because AI is being more rigorous than humans I guess. I find it... wild. My, but how the mighty have fallen.
The history of mathematics is tightly coupled to spirituality... some more famous examples off the top of my head are Cantor, Euclid, and Euler, but there are probably hundreds of examples of folks who explicitly tied their faith to their research. I definitely don't think there's anything inconsistent with mathematical and theological thinking. That actually strikes me as a very strange idea?
Would those persons mentioned have found themselves in a state of crisis if they were alive today? And it still doesn't touch on the core question: what does math and spirituality really have in common (beyond the extrinsic connection someone may make because they're emotionally overwhelmed by the "beauty" of the golden ratio appearing in nature, for example)?
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Having only fun things to do make them obviously boring. This doesn't really pan out the way you think it does as people can always choose to do boring things if they want ( if there's even any truth to your assertion). Unless your argument is something along the lines of humans need to be forced to do things they don't want so they're able to find fun in anything, which I think is pretty... wild.
I do think humans need to be forced to do things they don't want. You don't need to believe my words. Just watch how many people get bored in their long vacations. If all you do is having fun, it's obvious you'll need a new bar over and over (which is literally happening nowadays).
That sounds like systematic conditioning. Before there was actually a system, say back in cave people days, how did they operate without the system? During medieval days when monarchies were the rage, how did the royalty - and nobles to an extent - operate when they had serfs doing everything for them? Coming to more modern history, what about slave masters/mistresses?
Throughout history there has always been at least one group in societies (if not the whole) who didn't have to do anything they didn't want, and said groups have survived through the centuries. Now we're just at the point where it's very feasible for all in any given society to once again not have to be forced into anything and still thrive. What's needed is for that incompatible system that conditions forced labour to be thrown out.