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AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

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Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#361

Post by andai »

grahamburger wrote: post #210
hibikir wrote: post #198

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…

People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!

I'm in a similar boat. I end up re-learning the same things over and over again.

I found a solution recently. "Critical mass." If I just don't see something frequently enough, my brain keeps deleting it.

So, if there's a fact you have trouble remembering, try memorizing it 100 times in one day. That's "inefficient", as far as memory goes, but it'll do the trick! And I like solving problems once and then moving on.

(Anki, conversely, is designed for efficiency, which means it's designed to be as painful and unrewarding as possible, but that's a rant for another time... suffice it to say if you design your software so that I constantly want to stop using it, your efficiency drops to zero!)

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#362

Post by Jensson »

Barbing wrote: post #277
dyarosla wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think I've had a truly original idea in my life. There’s no such thing as a truly original idea. It is all just combining A+B!

Cavemen came up with the initial A & B, and we’ve gone from there? (Didn’t think this through much yet!)

Cavemen invented language, language isn't just combination of concepts, it requires defining all the concepts.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#363

Post by soupspaces »

fooker wrote: post #173

This misses a very important point. It’s not just about out remembering, it’s about breadth. Mathematicians are all about depth. It’s pretty much impossible to become an expert in more than one narrow field of mathematics. AI is happily applying techniques and abstractions across these silos.

Euler would like a word. Maybe it's our institutions.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#364

Post by fsmv »

pfdietz wrote: post #96
fsmv wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of writing proofs is for advancing human understanding. A giant dump of symbols that passes the lean compiler is meaningless besides human beings understanding it.

> The entire point of writing proofs is for advancing human understanding. Proofs also enable AIs to direct search and generate knowledge. Verifiability is immensely useful for keeping AI grounded. One might imagine AI generating enormous numbers of hypotheses and then trying to prove or disprove them, and then mine that data for new abstractions and heuristics.

But what does it mean? The theorems are just symbols in lean. The conjectures humans chose are carefully selected to be the questions that are interesting and relevant to our intuition about the real world.

Math often doesn't have applications for hundreds of years and that application is only possible because people deeply understand it and how it applies to the real world.

Generating an endless list of true statements doesn't really do anything, those things are already true regardless of whether someone has written a lean program to model them.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#365

Post by preg_match »

grahamburger wrote: post #210
hibikir wrote: post #198

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…

People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!

I’m very similar. Poor memory, good on-the-fly pattern recognition. I would say reasoning but it’s not really reasoning, it’s just identifying patterns plus some quick hacky heuristics reasoning. I’ve always performed well on tests as a result, but in the real world I need to use A LOT of tools to do my job. I write everything down, notes for everything.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#366

Post by gcanyon »

andai wrote: post #361
grahamburger wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!

I'm in a similar boat. I end up re-learning the same things over and over again. I found a solution recently. "Critical mass." If I just don't see something frequently enough, my brain keeps deleting it. So, if there's a fact you have trouble remembering, try memorizing it 100 times in one day. That's "inefficient", as far as memory goes, but it'll do the trick! And I like solving problems once and then moving on. (A…

I find my memory is very selective. I wanted to get in touch with a coworker from five years ago: I had to look up his name on linkedin. My wife texted me "Hotlips died" and with no effort I texted back, "Oh no, Loretta Swit or Sally Kellerman?" Mind you, I haven't watched MASH the TV show in forever, and I haven't seen MASH the movie since my parents took me when it first came out. I have zero reason to remember Loretta Swit, let alone Sally Kellerman, but my brain hangs onto that like it matters; but a guy I worked with for two years five years ago, that my brain will drop like it's radioactive.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#367

Post by gcanyon »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #260
grahamburger wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have told me I was smart since I was a kid, but I can't remember for shit. I had a thought when I was fairly young that the only reason I was (maybe, sometimes) outperforming others intellectually is that I was habitually compensating for my poor memory by working things out on the fly, while others could rely more on rote memorization. Anyway, takes all kinds I guess!

Same. I have bad "factual" memory, but very good "conceptual" memory. I might not remember exactly what someone told me, but I probably gathered a keyword, and a feeling and idea of what they told me. Almost like it takes what they said then compresses it into my mind in a nice little multi-key lookup table.

For me it's one step removed from that: I'll remember exactly what I was told or what I read, but not at all who told me or where I read it. My brain does not care about sources.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#368

Post by pwython »

cwnyth wrote: post #344
pwython wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. "Weak detail recall but strong fluid reasoning, conceptual/gist memory, and adaptive problem-solving" is how GPT sums up what I feel. And "high fluid intelligence" is a label it gave that I won't be using anytime soon... But I like the sound of it.

You might benefit from (proper, not the multiple choice kind) aptitude testing.

What are the benefits? What would/could I do with the results?

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#369

Post by dirtbag__dad »

hibikir wrote: post #198

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…

> just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or self study, and being able to apply it to the problem at hand.

Being smart, at least in the context of the workplace, is about being checked in to whatever you’re doing, and drawing connections across your experiences.

Re: AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

#370

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #266
cauch wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "shared knowledge" means "shared knowledge between mathematicians and lay persons" (there is no much point in that, the same way a smartphone technician knows how a smartphone works deep down to the details but there is no big interest for society to have every lay persons being informed about it). I think it means "shared knowledge between mathematicians". And at this level, while there are anecdotical…

I don't get the argument. I get that there is a cultural benefit to keeping it alive. Just like we ideally want the languages represented at the universities. But keeping humans in the loop does not appear to be necessary in order to call it science, and certainly not in order to have progress or dessiminate that progress. I don't have a problem with people doing math. As long that we don't idiomatically hold on to t…

Why is there a cultural benefit to keeping it alive, or to having universities? It seems like education is toil that could be automated for those that don't have fun with it.

Humans soon won't need it.

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