fasterik

Both Bernhard and Ligotti seem to have been heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, the granddaddy of pessimism.

I wonder if it's an age/brain development thing. I also had crazy math and programming dreams in my early 20s. I don't get those any more, though I still spend a lot of waking time (possibly more now than back then) obsessing over math and programming problems.

Bernhard is fantastic. Woodcutters might be a gentler introduction to his style. It's shorter, funnier, and less oppressive than Correction, which is his magnum opus. Apparently he was at least somewhat as unhinged in real life as in his writing. He was notorious for insulting the Austrian intelligentsia and either refusing literary awards or showing up at the ceremony just to rant and insult the audience, which he wrote about in a memoir titled My Prizes. He was a big influence on W.G. Sebald, another great German language writer (my personal favorite) who makes an appearance in McCarthy's library.

I would call it art, not junk food.

What about working on things for the intrinsic value of learning, challenging oneself, creating something useful or beautiful, or the satisfaction of a job well done? Sure, social status is one motivator among many, but I find this genre of evolutionary psychology extremely reductive and empirically dubious.

Another thought: maybe society as you describe it isn't all that different today than at many other points in history. It's called the human condition.

"Guilty until proven innocent" is an authoritarian, quasi-Stalinist view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with seeking profit, and most people who do so are completely within ethical bounds. For the ones who do unethical things, we have laws and courts to decide that and to punish them appropriately.

There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.

If we've learned anything from modern physics, it's that our regular intuitions are often wrong. The framework makes perfect sense mathematically, and it makes the right predictions experimentally. It's still controversial how exactly the framework relates to reality, which is where you get into interpretations of quantum mechanics.

So many entry-level explanations of quantum mechanics start with classical physics, waves, particles, the double-slit experiment, etc. and then jump straight to infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. In my opinion, there's way too much conceptual baggage that comes with these concepts [0].

As a non-physicist, QM only clicked for me when I learned the linear algebra of one- and two-qubit systems and observables on those systems [1]. The math is accessible at a pre-calculus level, and the most "counter-intuitive" aspects of QM (interference, the uncertainty principle, entanglement) make perfect sense in this framework. I think it's the best starting point for understanding what QM really says.

[0] That's not to say they aren't important historically or for a complete understanding of QM. I'm talking about conceptual understanding for someone, especially an amateur, encountering QM for the first time.

[1] Chapter 2 of Nielsen and Chuang is what did it for me. It's heavygoing if you've never seen linear algebra before, but I don't know of a clearer explanation of the postulates of quantum mechanics.

On the one hand yes, Perelman was known within his subfield. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that if some random person had published the same papers, they would have gone unnoticed, since as far as I understand it these were important results that would have been worth evaluating based on the titles and the abstracts.

Volume isn't really a problem going forward, at least in mathematics, since every proof can be accompanied by a Lean verification. Whether other disciplines can implement automated verification or quality assessment will depend on the details of the field.

Reputation is already a lot more about networking than a specific publishing system. Researchers get recognized by producing quality work and telling people about it in person and on the internet. Reputation spreads by word of mouth. I don't see that changing much in an open publishing world.

I agree, the people who care will still push themselves to learn. There's a concern about education for the ones who don't care, but that's a separate issue and was present long before AI came along.

You're thinking in terms of the traditional peer review model. I'm imagining a more organic process where papers are scrutinized to the extent that they're considered important or promising. For example, how Grigori Perelman's papers on arXiv about the Poincaré conjecture were reviewed by peers. There's no assignment of individual reviewers in this model, it's a natural byproduct of researchers discussing and collaborating in public.