TripolitianFish

I have a hard time pinning down when we stopped handing out actual sentencing for stuff like this. Nixon walked after Watergate, but at least the fall guys get hit with (some) time. Reagan walked after Iran-Contra (grand treason by the way), but his fall guys also walked. Even moving away from unitary executive talking points, like you said nothing really happened to the 07-09 gang, midlevel analysts got pinched for manipulating LIBOR, I'm trying to think about the last time there was proper consequences, IIRC most of the big wigs at Enron pled guilty, and it turned the big five into the big four. Maybe SBF? Even then, that was one guy catching several dozen people's utter carelessness and EA fueled mania.

I really would love to figure out when we phase shifted into this mode, maybe it was always like this, I'm frankly too young to have anything else to compare to.

The sort of mathematics that has been published recently is very particular. Which isn't really downplaying it but it is to say that there's a pretty massive gap between mathematics and semiconductors or wetlab work. I don't want to say anything totally deflationary like "AI will never effect research in biology" or something like that, but I think the contribution of AI in those kind of fields will be much more modest.

Oh chill the fuck out.

Yeah man market forces man, don’t worry about it man the market fixed it, nah man massive federal subsidies didn’t do anything man don’t worry about it. The inflation reduction act? Never heard of it!

I also would not be so confident about it never happening again, handling the summer well does not indicate necessarily that the winter will go smoothly, they’re different loads.

Sure, 1. Yes, a lot of effort is put into problem curation. Some parts of math are very problem list oriented while others are more program oriented. The work put into formulating the “correct” or “meaningful” (both of these adjectives should be taken in context) questions is not “somehow worthless” now, but the problems themselves now can/will no longer serve the same purpose they did. A significant part of their purpose was to organize the fields. If a solved problem could still provide a reference point for a field to organize around is a question I don’t really have the answer to.

2. Yes, math is bigger than the solved problems, of course. There is a plausibly infinite number of problems and theorems to work on. That being said, the ability to ask new questions which are of some “mathematical use” requires skills built from working on and solving prior problems. It might have happened to you in college at an advanced class where the professor would turn to the class and ask if there were any question, but everyone is so past their depth that despite being confused, no questions are asked. I’m not saying math is coming to an end but rather that one part of it, the question asking part, has become harder while the question answering part has become much easier.

The above depends on some understanding of what makes something useful in mathematics, which is not something I trust myself to relay the nuances of. Anyways, I hope I elucidated my opinions workably enough.

You can accept is and reject ought.

Jesus Christ you suck.

It’s always frustrating to listen to people on HN and X, the everything app, talk about this with that characteristic smugness. “It’s totally understandable that they feel this way” “oh people still play chess!” As if what mathematicians are upset at “losing” an arbitrary strategy game. It’s a very childish way to interact with it but you can’t expect much I guess.

I like this website though because it collects a lot of the important frustrations from the mathematical community, these open problems were curated in order to organize a field around, most to all of them only have/had value in so far as they promoted study of the subject. The claim that AI proofs will open new frontiers for mathematics research could probably be true but misses the point that the manner OpenAI has gone about their “contribution” does more to cauterize the field than promote anything productive. OpenAI is functionally reducing the communities ability to ask real questions. Math is ultimately a very different field from the rest of the natural sciences, and I suspect a lot of the more simple discussion on this subject misses the objections because of those differences. All this to say, I don’t know that OpenAI is doing these haphazard releases cynically, with the assurance that all that matters is the headline, but it really does feel that way right now.

What are you on about. The papers are held to scrutiny, this is how it works. If you put something out there, you should have done the due diligence of checking it (which is how these errors were found, with their own weaker model!). Being a smug prick about checking results that were announced as progress is less than worthless.

He’s not strawmanning you as much as taking OAI at their word. Plausibly the majority of the work was done with a fractional amount of human oversight, and maybe he’s sort of operating on the assumption they’re running “every” open problem continuously, which is pretty sensible. If you’re a mathematician working on an open problem which other people know about (how much of actual mathematics work is this kind of workflow varies from field to field) you can be pretty certain that an AI lab is prompting at it.

What are you even saying. Mathematics largely happens “commit by commit” as insufferable as that is a way of saying it, via conferences and meetings and prepublications. You’re attributing some bizarre to morality how mathematicians operate. You’re just upset people aren’t playing at your playground enough to your liking.

Also “real mathematicians” aren’t the people who “math belongs to”, you’re a mathematician if you do math, that’s it.

I don’t think you hate to be snide even a little bit, if I’m honest. The difference being that the entirety of mathematics research has never pulled in the CapEx that anthropic or OAI is. Mathematicians in academia are mostly paid to teach, mind you.

I’m personally pretty excited by the results coming from these labs, but trying to dismiss the capital allocation objection with “but what about” is really silly.

Not to mention the money grifters (à la manosphere freaks) rake in, or the regular reports of people using LLMs as therapists and friends.

Not sure what the point of closing your eyes and plugging your years is

You certainly could argue that! As you could argue any number of contrived political inferences which are more fun to think about than be of any real use.

I’d love to live in the USA you’re talking about friend.

This is just oriental despotism paranoia, whatever cutsie repetition slogan you come up with is not a serious argument.