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The Dark Night of Mathematics

kirwinhampshire.substack.com

181–190 of 321 posts

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is stealing all the fun parts. Disagree. AI has is taking all the parts that remove the fun. Now people can truly have fun with that which they find interest in, because there's a way to avoid the parts they're not interested in engaging with, with little to no consequence.

Disagree. In many professions, people were paid to endure the boring parts to be able to finally do fun parts. See academia; a professor writes grants, attends committee meetings, teaches (sometimes undesirably) and such, to finally go do research which is fun. If the fun parts are predominantly done by AI, and are removing people from getting paid, what fills one's stomach?

Stomach-filling ability is actually tangential to whether one has to engage with the bits they don't want to engage with, since it isn't precluded by the fun parts (there are people out there who are able to fill their stomachs from only doing what they find fun). But also it turns out to be a good example of that which forces one into doing that which they don't find fun. And IMO this - pretty typical - conflation really emphasizes how much we're stuck in and need to change this system that forces so many people to do things they don't want to do so they can fill their stomachs.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#183

Grateful for this essay. Made me feel seen. Someone said: > No one is stopping you from doing what you enjoy. But that's wrong. LLMs are creating an environment in which some things are no longer enjoyable. For example there is less joy to be had in learning a programming language in 2026 than there was in 2016, because there is less utility in it now.

Interestingly, I have heard more of those who have regained their joy of programming because of LLMs.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#184
post #107

The endangered art form of human mathematics is one thing. Another thing is that there seems to be little concern for whether a theorem was created using a documented open-weights model or some unknown model in a web chat. If you want to make the case that the journey of creating the proof is part of doing mathematics, then you should also document that path and make it reproducible, as science should always be. Ther…

> I generally respect writing cringe blog posts Cringe is not an adjective.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cringe

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is stealing all the fun parts. Disagree. AI has is taking all the parts that remove the fun. Now people can truly have fun with that which they find interest in, because there's a way to avoid the parts they're not interested in engaging with, with little to no consequence.

This is a slippery slope. Having only fun things to do make them obviously boring. The human being craves contrast. That assuming what you've said is true, which is not. In a work environment, you're forced to optimize whatever that there is, regardless if it's fun or not. Moreover, there is always fun to be had even in tasks you've found boring beforehand.

> Having only fun things to do make them obviously boring.

This doesn't really pan out the way you think it does as people can always choose to do boring things if they want (if there's even any truth to your assertion). Unless your argument is something along the lines of humans need to be forced to do things they don't want so they're able to find fun in anything, which I think is pretty... wild.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#186
post #22

One way to differentiate between an art or a craft and a science is that if a genie appeared and offered to trivialize all the discovery work of your career and simply give you the answers today, and you'd say "no", you're probably not doing science.

But what if the genie instead offered (or threatened) to give _everyone_ the answers to everything you'll ever discover in your career, including your boss, your competitors, etc?

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#187
post #182

Apologies is this is a simpleton question, but how does this differ than most of the mechanical work previously done by hand, but is now automated?

> There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If they just do things for utility I struggle to see if they did it for joy in the first place. A painter still paints even if there is some perfect machine that can paint. This sounds like the same crisis many artists had when photography was invented.

Craft isn’t craft if it doesn’t produce something. So enjoying the utility of it is not a secondary aspect. That’s a key difference between craft and art.

[deleted]

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#189

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…

> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis.

Yeah as a software developer I've already been going through a version of this for the past 8 or so months.

Less acutely than the OP I suppose (the idea of killing myself certainly isn't something I've considered) and without the mystical/spiritual overtones, but I can relate to the overall feeling of loss being expressed as someone who was always deeply passionate about hand-crafted software solutions.

> 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 can't speak for the OP, but this doesn't comfort me much. A lot of my favorite parts of the work are still being stripped out, and producing more output doesn't actually benefit me in any way. As with most productivity gains since the 1970s, the value of more output is not likely to be captured by the majority of the people doing the work. If anything AI will likely vastly accelerate the productivity vs wages divide.

I accept that It Is What It Is and there's no point in trying to hold on to the past, but at the same time on an individual level something real is being stripped from us very quickly in a way that some "Live, Love, Laugh"-esque motivational appeal to perspective change won't fix.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a fair point, I did not elaborate. My comment about AI psychosis was provoked by this comment in particular: > AI isn't a tame long term transition - in scale it is bigger than any transition since the first individual cells. It's such a wild hyperbole. You are casually claiming the stochastic text generator is a greater invention than fire, combustion engine, electricity, a transistor, computers, quantum me…

The stochastic text generator perspective is ... bunk. Not saying that harshly, but it confuses the form of a problem with a form of solution. There is no inhibition of "understanding" because of a form of a problem. If solving a problem requires complex modeling/understanding, that is what happens (assuming performance is achieved). It also confuses stochastic models with the geometric transforms and topological fol…

Are you numeric?

Biological computationalism disagrees with substrate independence.

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