Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I generally respect writing cringe blog posts Cringe is not an adjective.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cringe
"Slang"
The Dark Night of Mathematics
211–220 of 321 posts
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But the person above can produce something, they can still code by hand to make something. They're acting like that's not the case anymore.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#213Every 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…
> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?
And the way we understand the maths is to do the maths. You can't outsource the maths to AI and continue to understand it. I don't believe we can have it both ways.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#214One 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.
Tell me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem without telling me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem.
Also, in your scenario, the genie is used undermine all of human thought, destroy the ability for people to support themselves in the current economic system (which is in and of itself horrific already) , and is making people consider / commit suicide. Thats not a genie, thats a demon.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#215Every 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…
The creation is the actually enjoyable part. Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain. You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work. There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting, like mathematicians enjoy the act of proving theorems and progra…
> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
But humans (or at least some of them) get joy from that too. A lot of people enjoy being supervisors, team leaders, managers, executives - even though that’s largely deciding what to tell other people to do rather than directly doing it yourself
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#216One 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.
Tell me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem without telling me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem. Also, in your scenario, the genie is used undermine all of human thought, destroy the ability for people to support themselves in the current economic system (which is in and of itself horrific already) , and is making people consider / commit suicide. Thats not a genie, th…
You're describing craftsmanship. What's wild about this thread is the comfort with which people who disagree with me dismiss entirely the value of craft. It's as if I said "on one hand, there's science; on the other hand there's pointlessly wasting your time".
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The fact that certain aspects of work feel enjoyable is also not random. It usually indicates an elevated level of fitness for the job, a higher chance of success for a given phenotype / genotype. I can imagine that Mr Ludd had been enjoying the process of forming a complex pattern on fabric before Mr Jacquard's automatic loom made his skill irrelevant.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#218If you are a Mathematician or Theoretical Physicist, you can come up with a theory of why LLMs even work in the first place. And what to do next, after LLMs.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#219When I was in mathematics, reading other people's work was always more rewarding to me than doing my own. I would spend years on a question to get some progress, versus spending a few days or weeks reading a paper to enjoy something new. I understand not everyone is like me but I really welcome the omniscient mathematician machine people are predicting. I can't wait to ask all the questions I care about.
> When I was in mathematics, reading other people's work was always more rewarding to me than doing my own. [...] I really welcome the omniscient mathematician machine people are predicting.
Curious, as someone who relates strongly with both the OP and your first sentence: did it matter that you were reading "other people's work?" Or was it simply the satisfaction of understanding an answer?
Personally, one of the things that finally drew me to math as an undergrad (vs. high school where I thought of it as a stupid competition played by people who cared too much about showing off their smarts) was an instructor who helped me think of studying math as a conversation with a fellow human being many miles, centuries, languages, and cultures removed from me. Despite that distance, my mind was appreciating a creation that another human had cared for and poured years of their life into. There was a sort of romance to it, like the feeling of butterflies-in-the-stomach we get from seeing a multi-thousand-year-old cave painting, yet even more impressive because of the depth of the thought communicated.
I personally haven't been able to recreate that feeling from computer-generated math. Whenever I try to, I feel deeply uncomfortable (somewhat similar to the thought of eschewing human connection for an 'AI companion').
I'm more optimistic than the OP, especially when I think of new discoveries in healthcare. And I know there's enough "organic human-created math" from the last ~2k years that folks who feel the way I do can spend the rest of our lives studying only that. But it is sad to think that this multi-thousand-year project of "communicating human mathematical creations through time" has just ... ended? Or seems to be ending soon? Or at least greatly cheapened from a romantic dream into a sort of fun hobby, like recreational knitting? I can't help but share the OP's sadness that something seems to have been lost for future generations. Though a lot has been (and will be) gained as well, for sure!
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 mathem…
I stand corrected, and frankly, since that misunderstanding made me a bit "mad" on behalf that person, I think I would have written my response very very differently if I hadn't made that mistake. I want to apologise for that.
Math is still based on axioms, AFAIK, but since I the author also seems to disagree and I'm the non-mathematician here I don't think I should press on that point, either.