This author has a natural talent for writing. That was interesting throughout.
No country for mediocre mathematicians
81–90 of 159 posts
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding. ⸻ 1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rat…
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"
How many CERNs are there? Enough to build careers on?
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"
[flagged]
[deleted]
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#84Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that. About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that…
Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding. ⸻ 1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rat…
As someone who's also thinking about their child's future, I've come to the conclusion that building their capacity for precise language by expanding their vocabulary and grammar in an array of domains and subdomains is the best way forward. Not only will they have a more detailed understanding of what's out there, but using specialized, narrow terminology with AI provides vastly better solutions than general prompt language.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"
[flagged]
Did you read what he posted, or do you place widgets on a webpage
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"
How many CERNs are there? Enough to build careers on?
No, what do you think about the book Four Futures?
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is there’s something more to that? Yes: this is about building the quotient field (field of fractions) [1] for some integral domain, or more generally, building the localization ([2], [3]) of a commutative ring with respect to some given set that is closed under multiplication (the special case of the quotient field for a ring R is obtained when one chooses R\{0} as such a set). -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/in…
It's mighty pretentious to say that one needs all that theory to simply answer the question lol. For many questions, only the most rudimentary theory is plenty to get an answer, that is exactly the same answer as a more elaborate theory would yield.
If you just want to do some stupid computations: sure.
But this is not what mathematics is centrally about. The central point is the kind of thinking about the respective topics (and understanding it) which these more abstract definitions encode.
Understanding the topic just enough to do some elementary computations does not give you the kind of thinking that is often near a transcendental experience.
Just to give one example: the reason why the localization of a commutative ring (a generalization of the field of fractions) is introduced is that many properties of ring hold if and only if they hold for all of its local rings; see for example [1]. This means to understand some property of a commutative ring R, we "just" have to understand its (simpler) local rings.
This is an example why one wants to study such ideas; on the other hand, I can imagine sooo many more exciting things to do with my life than dividing numbers by each others to form fractions. :-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Localization_(com...
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im going with this... scifi stuff still requires engineers. Its laughable and insulting to think these billionaire owners are going to make robots and llm loops to get real shit done https://rcsnyder.github.io/open-frontier-curriculum/ Ya "claude can you build me the next cern Thanks"
[flagged]
Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin.
AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified.
Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin. AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified. Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.
Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues.
Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes!
What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a professional mathematician, if you’re not advancing your subfield of research consistently you are mediocre.
If you say so. Saying most tenured faculty at research 1 institutions are mediocre seems to be stretching the definition, though.
Who’s saying that?