971–980 of 1001 posts
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That's only one of mathematics' many purposes.
Exactly! What got me interested in memes as a kid is precisely the fact that mathematics is true in a way that is wholy independent of our understanding of it.
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>> Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that th…
Who is "we" ? Because if you dont need to employ a human, then who needs your services? If nobody needs anybody, what are we? (Edit: assuming you are human)
There are too many uncertainties around who will be in control and with what kinds of aims.
It would end in some kind of prison or zoo.
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> Those who think it's me or the machine will fail. > Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed. This is only true up until a point. If I treat a mid-sized model (say, Qwen3.8 Flash Next) like a pair programmer, then yes, it accelerates my work. But I can already see the next stage with Fable: If I give it a couple of paragraphs of spec and $50, then I can just leave…
> But I don't expect AI to accelerate humans or improve our productivity for long. I can already see the first signs of a future where the AI doesn't need us for anything at all. The real question is, why is this a bad thing? Every task that is automated is a task that humans no longer have to do. It doesn't mean that humans still can't do it for reasons other than "because it needs to be done". And if the answer is…
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They want the AI labs to stop solving "important" math problems so that humans can do it, on the theory that when AI solves "important" math problems, it robs humans of the opportunity to gain new insights into those problems. Total horse shit, but that's the essence of it.
The issue is that now that Navier-Stokes is "solved", the amount of resources put into researching it will be reduced, meaning that the insights and knowledge that would have come out of even failed attempts will never be. An "unsolved problem" as a beacon to strive towards, gaining understanding along the way . With the beacon dead, noone will strive.
I've been disappointed by this community before but this is the first place that there is such unanimous rejection of the very ideals the uses here will claim to represent. The reaction is just... small, tiny, petty.
As a software engineer, 6 months ago. I was better than AI in essentially every way except raw typing speed. Now AI has surpassed me in fine-grained problem-solving ability. It can write more reliable code than I can, faster than I can, provided it is given the right guidance. But one thing that I'm still much better at is identifying technical opportunities and choosing the right tradeoffs. My feeling is that fronti…
This mirrors my understanding when I use Claude code for mathematics. I can have deep discussions with it and it can solve my hairy problems. But whenever we go off the beaten track into design new mathematics, it struggles to make conceptual leaps and find the right definitions. Once I give it my ideas, it is back to its super-human pace and top notch intelligence. This situation suits me fine, since I am anyways mo…
The people who prided themselves on raw puzzle-solving ability got hit hard. Those who are idea-driven and architecture-oriented feel like they got handed a superpower.
It's quite a big shock at the industry level because the entire software engineering job interview process at essentially all large companies was heavily biased towards well-defined, raw problem-solving under time constraints which is precisely the skill which AI has replaced.
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different fields have different communication cultures, that’s not inherently bad. sacrificing inward focus is expensive from the pov of the insider; i see your points but not everything can be written for a general/wide audience. after all, the audience of the author are the specialists, since only specialists spent the effort to be able to engage with the work in depth. perhaps we disagree that mathematics is not a…
> what the work was meant to achieve in the first place is what the work was achieving in the first place. it was developing mathematics. Meant by who? Were the people footing the bill aware of this? People can like and do a lot of things. When money enters the picture it gets more complicated because usually the people who pay do that because they derive some gains from it. Historically scientists and mathematicians…
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> what the work was meant to achieve in the first place is what the work was achieving in the first place. it was developing mathematics. Meant by who? Were the people footing the bill aware of this? People can like and do a lot of things. When money enters the picture it gets more complicated because usually the people who pay do that because they derive some gains from it. Historically scientists and mathematicians…
mathematicians are primarily paid for teaching, and that's their primary function from the pov of the general society. i don't think anybody is debating that part of their profession? i read somewhere that the annual nsf grant budget for mathematics is 57 million, in total. even if it was just spiritual elegance, that's a reasonable number no?
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mathematicians are primarily paid for teaching, and that's their primary function from the pov of the general society. i don't think anybody is debating that part of their profession? i read somewhere that the annual nsf grant budget for mathematics is 57 million, in total. even if it was just spiritual elegance, that's a reasonable number no?
Yes, that amount seems fine if true. They may be seen as teachers by the outside world yet they hire and promote and award internally based on research. Status and prestige is rarely allocated based on teaching. This is already a discrepancy. And note that the post doesn't much talk about teaching courses, but mentorship of grad student researchers who already work at their labs.
As a consumer of mathematics, I want to attack the author’s idea of “what that work was meant to achieve in the first place”. I do a lot of programming that uses mathematics. I designed the error recovery file format “par2”. I worked as a quantitative trader. What do I want from math? To be able to search math results, understand them, and apply them. But academic mathematicians are so inwardly focused - as these aut…
One key idea to understand about human behavior is that people are focused on their status among their peers and their next level superiors with power to lift their status. You are not among either, so you don't matter to them. This is nothing special about mathematicians, though, people work the same way everywhere, in every field, community etc.
I got an economics degree and found that the City of Austin to pay off its $3 billion dollar pension debt … and encountered the same problem you mentioned, again. Except this time my plan is to run for City Council and be their next-level superior.