Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, what do you think about the book Four Futures?
I have not read it but I can't imagine a book written before the current explosion of AI can be accurate. What do you think of it?
[deleted]
No country for mediocre mathematicians
101–110 of 159 posts
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. That's really mean thing to say
It's actually a really dumb thing to say and OP's response is the best one because it's a microcosm about how the world works. For every Terence Tao there's probably 20 more people cranking out high-quality work that's just a little less inspired. Their work is valuable and important, and asking that question is devaluing the entire endeavor of human knowledge. It's essentially positing that nobody else can contribut…
Exactly. It's like saying "why would you bother driving your Honda Accord over there, when I could drive my Corvette there in half the time?"
It still gets this person to somewhere they weren't.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#103I'd think AI can help him even out the score a little, or a lot.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything A similar question is now being asked: what is the point of doing research, etc. if something like AI can figure out everything? The question betrays the parochial way in which many people think about knowledge. For them, knowledge is merely an instrument or an effect. It does not occur to them that knowing is a valua…
Yes, I think we will continue to have hobbyist learners as we advance AI, but it's going to be a niche, and not a commercially viable one.
Do you think commercial viability will continue to be viable?
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#105Funded positions are much less than PhD number. However, people can fund themselves with a job. In a country, if it's easy to to get a part-time job with enough payment, mathematicians can continue work.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#106This is the best thing I've read in years.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agency.
Humans don't seem to need a markdown to decide what to do next.
Without agency, it's all tools. I guess that's why a 'tool' is sometimes used derogatorily.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
mathematicians or physicists fall into this category of knowing a lot about many thing . Sabine videos for example . she knows everything it seems
> mathematicians or physicists fall into this category of knowing a lot about many thing . Sabine videos for example . she knows everything it seems Sabine Hossenfelder, for obvious reasons, knows quite a bit about physics, though on some physics topics she has opinions that are outside the mainstream. For other areas, I am rather certain that she has a talent to learn about them up to some shallow level quite fast,…
It turned out she had more talent for being a science influencer than a scientist.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#109As an ex-academic (not mathematician), this really resonates. Every generation of researchers has to outperform the researcher generation before them - there are fully tenured profs out there who, with their track record, wouldn't get a postdoc nowadays. It's just a ratchet where every generation has to be more outstanding than the previous one, so yeah, you suddenly need 'triple the conferences'. Eventually that ratcheting reflects on your self-worth and you start calling yourself mediocre, even though you vastly outperform the previous generation. It's an extremely unfair game designed by careless people.
Throw AI into the mix and your self-worth crashes. Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous, and I sit here and wonder what's the point.
Re: No country for mediocre mathematicians
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the credit of the original commenter, that is why they said "give it one or two years". _Right now_ we need the experts to formalize/check. They're saying they think LLMs will reach a point in the near future where that won't be necessary.
All we need experts for right now is verifying the formalization of the statement of the problem is correct. The proof itself, that formalization is checked automatically.
So there is no getting around the fact that someone has to verify something. my point still stands.