gyanchawdhary

very well said!

Purely because the tech he (or the companies he funds) build is otherworldly ..

I know you are a kind person irl and don’t really wish that!

Big Elon fan boy here but you are 100% right. It’s basically the “Titan” submersible in reverse.

Edit: AI :)

Im Indian and the author is a well known Indian communist, mostly known for winning the Booker prize and forever trying to export the Berkeley style socialism in India (and failed miserably)

Now to the main point, the biggest irony here is that the communist wet dream she always desired is finally being made possible thanks to SI … since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for … Next she will complain about how some ppl have more stamina and taste than others and are able to wield LLMs to build companies and win which is not fair …

Taleb does have an obnoxious amount of ego, especially in his one on one street fights on Twitter, but his writings have zero ego .. on the contrary, his books force you to take a deeper look at yourself and almost haunt you if you try to BS your way out of confronting what those ideas expose about your own thinking ..

I also read and re read the link you shared .. it’s almost baffling that he is so incredibly hesitant on not being able to clearly take a position on anything and is so painfully nuanced in his writing as if he’s almost hedging every sentence ..

PS: All my life, mathematicians were made to look and portrayed like the ultimate truth seekers (both at school, by the media, in films and in the sciences etc) and all I see is in Tao is a man trying to so badly hold on to the main character energy … perhaps demonstrating a bit of humility like Lee Sedol after loosing to the machine would be in order … in his own words, he sees himself as a fox, not a hedgehog.. guess now that he's been outfoxed .. its best not to say unhinged stuff like "there's no reason to be this fast" or that absolulty out of touch "Math 2.0" cancer slide ... what. an. absolute. tool.

a lot of mathematicians on X (which going by your tone so far im guessing you'll dismiss as an unreliable source of info) disagree with your assessment of Tao and are pointing out that ego could be the problem ... and if you think its insecurity or anxiety rather than ego driving his gaffes (i.e. a) his dumb take on the cancer thought experiment and b) telling his students "there's no reason to be this fast") then do explain why your interpretation is more plausible ...

personally i feel like you're resisting what im saying because it challenges your view of Tao and you're reluctant to reconsider it .. maybe im wrong, but dismissing what im saying as "not substantial" without actually engaging with the points doesnt exactly help your case .. it comes across more like you're determined to defend him regardless of the merits of the criticism, which is hardly logical and arguably looks like motivated reasoning ...

ps: saying AI images arent art but just "pretty pictures" is just cringey ... if it evokes emotion, provokes thought or creates an aesthetic experience, its art ... i mean im sure u have a pair of sports trainers and jackets .. that are made by a machine using synthetic fibers and not artistically hand crafted ... and ppl do view fashion as an art form ..

Neil armstrong too should have been listened to .. and just like Tao .. he was quite virtuous, and informed and pretty special .. wont you say so ? and YET he was very vocal about expressing his skepticism about spacex before congress .. thank god his views were rejected .. or we might have missed the magnificent (and now normalised) sight of rockets landing vertically and the incredible engineering behind catching that beast of rocket with chopsticks etc etc

what im suprised about though is why arnt you and others here more suspectful of Tao's skeptisim of AI .. as Wittgenstein's ruler reminds us teh very thing we use to measure something else may itself need measuring .. so why should tao's expertise be any exception?

yes

i disagree .. ur conflating Tao's kind demeanour and brilliant work with his ego and self worth .. a lot of people admired Musk before his political shitposting changed their perception of him .. a good reputation doesnt make someone immune to criticism ..

i like that term "false equivalence" .. i had to google it .. very sophesticated way of saying apples to oranges .. but i digress .. yes you are correct in pointing that out.

> As for you, what's your opinion about what he said and why do you think that?

many years ago i had watchd Nassim Talebs commencement speech at AUB .. where he described russian mathematicians after the fall of soviet union .. who earned around $200 a month .. but continued doing work appreciated by only a small number of people .. and regarded displaying awards and regofnitions as a sign of weakness or lack of confidence in their contributions .. in contrast, when Tao was asked my Lex Friedman about Gregory Parlmen rejecting the millenium prize .. he gave a dissapointing non answer .. which reveals a lot about him as an individual (not as a mathmatician) ..

his reactions to OAI papers .. both initially on social media and now in his presentation .. carry that same ego .. and its quite evident that rather than mathematics being solely about the pursuit of truth .. he does care VERY MUCH about who idnetified the truth .. and that makes him only very human .. which is waht i initally said.

>to paint Tao as an example of some sort of gatekeeping luddite who would deny the world a post-abundance future in order to maintain the prestige of his particular career path

why is it so hard to accept that a brilliant mathematician can have the same human flaws as anyone else i.e. ego, arrogance, jealousy and competitiveness?

Loved that book! Makes me wonder .. with how good AI is getting at solving novel math problems .. could you essentially bruteforce ur way towards some of RenTech’s techniques? Like .. have AI go through research papers (and related work) published by RenTech staff, figure out how their respective fields of expertise could be applied to trading, and run experiments/backtests to see what sticks? or is the hard part less the math and more the data and execution?