Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dark Night of Mathematics

kirwinhampshire.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 321 posts

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#281

Post by lioeters »

tptacek wrote: post #275
xorcist wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for proving my point by fixating on the raw sewage part. Contrary to what you think, no plumber would abstain from fixing plumbing permanently, even if it meant no more wading through said sewage.

I gotta admit here I'm completely lost on what we're debating.

Sorry for the harsh tone in a comment above, reading it over I see that was unnecessary and rude. I did enjoy the story of the plumbers during the regular flooding in Chicago, much respect to their hard work.

While we may not agree on the question of the magical genie of all knowledge, whether an artist or scientist would/should welcome its gift (or bargain with the devil) for an instant answer - it was interesting to note that we implicitly knew the genie is not just a theoretical thought experiment, but a real thing that is happening.

The genie's out of the bottle, that much we can agree on, I think. Sooner or later it has the potential to become a better plumber, artist, and scientist, more skilled and knowledgeable than any living person. A day may come when a magnificent AI artist will wow the world with its creations, and even skeptics will have to admit that, damn, that is impressive. But then again, so what? I'd rather have the genie wading through sewage to fix plumbing, so that a plumber could spend more time with their family and pursue that novel they've been dreaming of writing, or painting in the backyard, or working on a mad science project in the basement.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#282

Post by jlev1 »

compiler-devel wrote: post #261
Jtarii wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit weird that your first reaction to a human expressing genuine emotional pain is glee.

I’m also a human expressing genuine emotion. Why is one more valid than the other?

Your emotion isn’t invalid, it’s merely bad, assholeish, brings shame upon you. But it is “valid” in the sense that the reader of your comment can see that you are, at least, sincere in your gloating at another person’s despair.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#283

Post by tptacek »

lioeters wrote: post #281
tptacek wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta admit here I'm completely lost on what we're debating.

Sorry for the harsh tone in a comment above, reading it over I see that was unnecessary and rude. I did enjoy the story of the plumbers during the regular flooding in Chicago, much respect to their hard work. While we may not agree on the question of the magical genie of all knowledge, whether an artist or scientist would/should welcome its gift (or bargain with the devil) for an instant answer - it was interesting t…

I believe this too: that the current moment with LLMs is destabilizing to all sorts of knowledge work, and especially to non-bench-work sciences, but that over the long run it's just going to raise the game. I'm not a person who thinks LLMs are going to moot all human scientific endeavor. I know those people exist (both on the anti-AI and especially pro-AI side). That's not where I'm coming from.

I just think knocking out unsolved problems in mathematics is an absolute good. Imagine, in a more grounded analogy, a whole family of neo-Ramanujans discovered somewhere in Namibia, and then tearing through all the open problems, upturning a bunch of careers in the west in the process. It's hard to argue that would be a bad thing (I think we'd call it miraculous). But AI has a partisan valence that sometimes obscures what's happening.

I appreciate the generous response. My tone couldn't have been any better (and I didn't really read yours as harsh, just spirited). Way to be an excellent HN'er! :)

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#284

Post by piloto_ciego »

card_zero wrote: post #264
piloto_ciego wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might be a philosophical kind of "can't". You need to believe that what you do is valuable.

No, you don’t.

You do not need to believe what you do is valuable. That’s capitalism talking, infesting your head.

For the vast majority of us, we are imminently replaceable at the drop of a hat. We aren’t the special unique and individually “important” people we imagined ourselves to be.

There are 8.5b of us! How could we be? We aren’t special, we will be replaced when we’re gone. That’s OK!

If we can be replaced when we are gone, we can replace “work” while we are still here too.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#285

Post by piloto_ciego »

fzeroracer wrote: post #175
piloto_ciego wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, capitalism is the system.

AI is just another tool that’s being applied to it. But you have to think beyond the old transactional nature to get passed that. Capitalist realism is extremely hard to overcome, but it doesn’t have to be like this.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#286

Post by simonw »

xerox13ster wrote: post #279
simonw wrote: post #125

> I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. Another case of Deep Blue.

Can you expound more on what you mean by that? The phrase resonated and I want to know more.

It's a phrase for "the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work." https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/deep-blue/

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#287

Post by piloto_ciego »

majormajor wrote: post #195
piloto_ciego wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system. AI helps enable the system. It makes it easier for the haves to justify a lack of sharing—or need to share—with the have-nots. "There are more tools available for you to do more work faster than ever! I'm not a greedy hoarder partying while others suffer because of my choices, you're just not dedicated enough to learning and using those new tools! Th…

I mean, those people are right in a way.

Capitalism is dog eat dog, the system is dog eat dog. In the jungle you have to adapt or die.

If we want to change that, we must change the system, because nobody is going to stop using these tools.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#288

Post by lubujackson »

I think the hand-wringing is a bit premature.

Some mathematicians (like SWEs) view AI as a boost to their ability to explore and understand possibilities - it is a great tool. Others see it as taking the soul out of what they do (loss of flow or craft). Most worry about losing their jobs.

I think for both mathematicians and SWEs, there is real loss for how we worked in the past, but I don't think job loss will be quite as severe as feared (and may actually increase). Because we still need, more than ever, people who understand the output and, more importantly, can ask the right questions.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#290

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

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.

I currently, emphasis on currently, feel like I can leverage LLMs in a very satisfying way to a deeper overview and more data about fields I'm already familiar with and that's pretty cool. I can produce more for some value of "more".

But can I be sure that what's output will continue to be what "I produce", either in terms of the thing going entirely beyond me or in terms of now having a spin different from what I'm after? I mean, mathematicians would have mostly the problem of feeling useless. Economists, say, could have the problem of both feeling and feel their viewpoint is excluded if not what-becomes-the-mainstream.

Post reply on HN