canjobear

What in his speech would not apply to language models?

As grim as it gets, with rare glimpses of light.

> Professor McGaugh has commented many times on the sociology of science and how the dominant paradigm tends to be hostile or indifferent to alternate views

This should also set off crank alarms.

What makes you think the government can’t compel you to provide a password?

Because there is a proof! If you are interested in the conjecture, then you would be interested in the proof. If you are not interested in the proof, then you weren't really interested in the conjecture. You were interested in the good style of articles about the conjecture, or the friends you made along the way, etc.

It is of course possible that either (1) the statement of the theorem in Lean is busted or (2) there is a bug in Lean. But both of these seem to me to be lower probability than that the proof is correct. It's not just an e-mail from a crackpot. For someone who is actually interested in the problem, the probability that the proof is correct is high enough to warrant effort to understand it, or at least to learn enough Lean to check the theorem statement.

This is the key bit.

> But, back to the Partition Principle. I took a brief look at the preprint released by OpenAI (not at the Lean code, since I know very little of the actual usage of Lean, and that code was enormous). It sucked. It is unclear, muddled, and has a strange structure.

Incredible lack of curiosity. The Lean artifact shows that there is a proof. Maybe the natural language writeup sucks (maybe it doesn't even correspond to the Lean proof!) but the proof is there and if he were really interested in the problem he would try to understand it. Rather, his revealed preference is that what he's really interested in is good style in academic papers.

Just ignore the emails. Academics are already very good at that.

In practice this already happens, unfortunately.

> Nor have they flailed wildly at LLMs as if complaining enough about it will make them go away.

If you look at the comments on the blog post, you'll find plenty of this.

> such a random corpus

I see what you did there

What was his reputation before OpenAI?