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Mathematics Without Mathematicians

borretti.me

51–57 of 57 posts

Re: Mathematics Without Mathematicians

#51
post #40

The word “cope” shows up nine times in this short post. It was frankly annoying to the point it’s hard to take the arguments seriously, because it’s starting from an obvious base of “people who disagree are all wrong and their arguments aren’t worth taking seriously”. It’s akin to the subset of cryptocurrency proponents who fervently argue that people who are against cryptocurrencies have that opinion because they’re…

> it’s starting from an obvious base of “people who disagree are all wrong and their arguments aren’t worth taking seriously”. Taking arguments seriously doesn't necessitate agreement.

> Taking arguments seriously doesn't necessitate agreement.

I agree. That’s what I’m saying, so I don’t think I understand what you mean. Mind clarifying the point you’re making?

To try to clarify, what I do mean that is that disagreement does necessitate at least some measure of taking arguments seriously. Some arguments maybe don’t deserve to be taken seriously, but you need to first be open to taking them seriously so you can decide.

In other words, if you go into an argument with the initial mindset of taking it seriously, by the end you’ll be able to decide if it should be taken seriously or not; but if your initial mindset is to not take it seriously, most likely you won’t be open to understand the nuance of what is being said. Thus, the former leads to productive discussion while the latter does not.

Re: Mathematics Without Mathematicians

#52
post #29
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bringing elitism into it for what benefit? Its more like were giving away the ability to drive our own destiny.

The “ism” requires something beyond simply recognizing the distinction, which OP didn’t do. Its not “elitism” to recognize that, for most people, the world around them might as well be magic. “Ism” would be if they went further and said we should treat people better if they’re higher IQ. In fact, the point was the opposite. AI could erase the class distinctions that exist for the cognitive elite.

I'd go even further: even the ‘cognitive elite’ (the university educated? researchers?) understand only a thin spike of frontier human knowledge, even if they might understand it very deeply. Outside their specialty and maybe a slightly raised background level of general education, the world is still magic. No one human understands even a significant chunk of human frontier knowledge. That's why we build artificial societies comprising many humans to make complex decisions.

Illustrations: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Re: Mathematics Without Mathematicians

#53
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s starting from an obvious base of “people who disagree are all wrong and their arguments aren’t worth taking seriously”. Taking arguments seriously doesn't necessitate agreement.

> Taking arguments seriously doesn't necessitate agreement. I agree. That’s what I’m saying, so I don’t think I understand what you mean. Mind clarifying the point you’re making? To try to clarify, what I do mean that is that dis agreement does necessitate at least some measure of taking arguments seriously. Some arguments maybe don’t deserve to be taken seriously, but you need to first be open to taking them serious…

Ah, I get it. Your emphasis is on the "cope" framing. You say that, but it didn't click for some reason. Don't mind me.

I suppose I have also interpreted downplaying of AI's impact as largely coping too.

The arrivals of machines that can outthink us (or will soon) only 80 years after the invention of the transistor is so clearly (to me) a change incomparable to anything that has happened prior. It is very hard to relate to arguments that downplay the complete upheaval to the order of life on Earth that non-biological cognition and interests herald.

It does not seem surprising to me, in the sense that we humans ourselves, and our technology, are of a different order than anything that came before. We have not stopped accelerating change. AI is (will soon be) building directly on that. But we will no longer be a bottleneck.

My strong impression, is the faster things change, the more people tune out that the change isn't stopping. Some of that reversal-response must involve coping. Perhaps another reason is that faster-than-us change is challenging to imagine.

But your point is valid. False or uncertain assumptions of "cope" motivations don't help anything.

Re: Mathematics Without Mathematicians

#54
post #12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AIs will become better at explaining math before they become better at doing math I am not so sure. I am talking about math with AI and I feel as a math teacher, it is terrible. It introduces new notation and concepts faster than I can ask for definitions. It doesn't provide many examples. Sometimes it realizes it made a mistake in a guess and the confusion compounds. Maybe it's just my (in)experience - but I would…

It's another example of Moravec's Paradox. Explaining something to another person uses capabilities that go back millions of years. Mathematics goes back thousands of years. Evolution has made us very good at verbal communication, not so good at proving theorems. So it should have been expected that machines would have an easier time proving results than explaining them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_para…

I'm not convinced it applies in the example given before your comment, because I 'm not convinced in his interpretation of the observed lower performance -that they are poor explainers- even though I believe his observations.

Instead I am convinced that if modern LLM teachers were given the same luxuries as human teachers, much if not most of this performance drop would disappear, and probably result in higher explanation skills in LLM's.

Which luxuries? a human teacher at a certain school / university and at a certain level has the luxury to have an understanding of what prerequisite knowledge the students already have. The educational system has already sorted them by "level" and "topic" at the start of the first session of a lecture series. Classic texts would be used for teaching materials, or the local text "inherited" from teacher to teacher, and those would already have been impedance matched to the preceding and following courses in the local educational system, such teaching aids would effectively have continuous notation conventions etc. Also compared with long-term human 1-on-1 teaching, I believe that if the educational chronology of the pupil were continuously added to its training corpus for additional post-training, so that it doesn't need to maintain ridiculous context lengths, then I don't see why an LLM wouldn't be capable of systematically introducing the conventional names of symbols it introduces, when referring for them for the first time, or providing definitions instead of referring to certified unknown-to-pupil concepts (which today an LLM can not magically guess, you have to drill into it what you know and what you don't yet).

Everyone has experienced LLM's explaining things and introducing acronyms without their expansion, and everyone has observed that such phenomena can be addressed by stating such demands in system prompts, or repairingly simply demand them in the conversation upon hitting this annoyance.

Imagine future math students (if any motivation still exists to become one) the education software making use of LLM's could train the student during the day, and itself do post-training on all its observations, trying to predict latents that describe which parts of mathematics are ready knowledge and which parts aren't for the student.

To point at a privilege vis-a-vis LLM's and then maintain a raised level of self-confidence does read like cope to me.

If one really wanted to taunt the performance of LLM's by gathering lists of such things it is incapable of, it means one can turn this around and start with collecting lists of priviliges a normal human teacher (or other job position) has vis-a-vis a naive LLM implementation of a human teacher (or other profession). For example a human teacher typically has the privilege of repeatedly teaching the same insights year after year, if different knowledge aware LLM's were connected or offered by the same service, it could build statistics of which concepts stick better and why, where things are hand-waived too much, etc... But the only result of publishing such cope-lists is providing gratis business models to whomever feels like implementing it, destroying the validity of the cope-curtain.

"Guys, I think I see zombies outside of this window!"

"Oh, just close the curtains of this window then if the McKenzie's are acting weird too... what a pity, they were the ones who showed me how closing the curtains is sufficient to keep the Zombies at bay!"

Re: Mathematics Without Mathematicians

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colonizing the solar system for resources is something that's said by people who don't understand astronomy or space technology (like Elon Musk).

Said with no rational given. The solar system readily provides both the motivation, and the means, for technological colonization. It quickly pays and provides for its own utilization. I do agree Musk's projections for biological/human colonization appear to be unrealistic. Just one challenge: it isn't clear humans can reproduce in non-Earth gravity. That is an extreme impediment.

> Said with no rational given.

Celestial mechanics suggests it can hardly be economical to move large amounts of matter around a solar system for economic goals considered in the current capitalist societies. Nor the risk, nor the energy needed are in line with the benefits.

Re: Mathematics Without Mathematicians

#56
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? You can't see the difference between "the average person doesn't understand it" and "no one understands it"?

I can see the difference. But is that a difference that matters? Why is the thin elite layer you are referring to a group anyone else should care about, any more than any other occupational minority that's been rudely displaced over the past centuries?

Someone needed to understand engineering for the industrial revolution to happen, even if most people didn't.

Re: Mathematics Without Mathematicians

#57
post #40

The word “cope” shows up nine times in this short post. It was frankly annoying to the point it’s hard to take the arguments seriously, because it’s starting from an obvious base of “people who disagree are all wrong and their arguments aren’t worth taking seriously”. It’s akin to the subset of cryptocurrency proponents who fervently argue that people who are against cryptocurrencies have that opinion because they’re…

"Cope" is just the latest negative word that's used just to say something is bad / disliked. It's greatly overused. If people actually read about coping stategies etc they'd quickly realize that coping is not a negative but a positive mechanism.
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