peterbonney

> I'm baffled that you find the mechanics of human motivation hard to understand, (presumably ;) being a human yourself.

But that’s exactly it! The mathematicians are framing this as being bad for human understanding of math, but it’s obviously really about their own motivations for developing that understanding! Which, again, goes back to the obvious conclusion that what they have lost is the extrinsic motivation for being first, not the intrinsic motivation of developing understanding.

That is totally fine! I wouldn’t be motivated to do my job if I wasn’t extrinsically rewarded for doing so. But I am also not feeding anyone a line of BS about how it’s actually some other higher-minded motivation driving my work.

I’m empathetic to the instability of the extrinsic rewards for doing math research as a profession in the current moment. I am not at all empathetic to an attempt to manipulate me into thinking that the real problem is something other than that.

It’s like an entrepreneur complaining that they can’t build a business that would better humanity because of high taxes. That’s fine - but the motivation lacking there is obviously making money, not bettering humanity.

> It is developing new methods and deepening understanding to drive useful applications.

Knowing that a solution exists is not an impediment to deepening your understanding of a problem.

For example: Knowing that there is a proof of Pythagoras’ theorem is not an impediment to thousands (millions?) of geometry students developing the intuition that comes from drawing the famous diagram where the number of squares visually add up to one another.

What about the existence of an AI-generated proof prevents a mathematician from working through the problem on their own to deepen their understanding, as if the proof didn’t exist in the first place?

That’s what is hard to understand.

> We are being robbed of the opportunity to find the solution by being handed the solutions.

I find this argument difficult to understand. As a math student in college with no ambitions (or realistic opportunity or aptitude) to pursue original contributions to the field, everything I learned was by definition already solved. Nevertheless I was able to - required to, in fact - work through each solution in order to develop understanding. And I did in fact learn by this method, as countless other students did before and after me.

So when I hear this argument from mathematicians, all I can hear is that they are frustrated at being out back into the position of being students, where the end result of the hard work of understanding is just the understanding itself without the prize of a new discovery. If they want to find the solution without reading it, they are still very much able to do so, just as their students do every day.

I’ll do it later

I had the incredible good fortune to take one of his classes in college, and I loved it so much I took another just to learn from him again. A tremendous intellect AND an incredibly engaging and talented instructor. It would be an exaggeration to say that I knew him, but nevertheless he had a great impact on my education and my life. He will be missed.

I’m not saying it is definitely a hoax. But I am saying my prior is that this is much more likely to be in the vein of a hoax (ie operator driven, either by explicit or standing instruction) than it is to be the emergent behavior that would warrant giving it this kind of attention.

Correct, I haven’t set it up that way. That’s my point: I’d have to set it up to behave in this way, which is a conscious operator decision, not an emergent behavior of the bot.

Well I lol’d :)

Yes, this is the only plausible “the bot acted in its own” scenario: that it had some standing instructions awaiting the right trigger.

And yes, it’s worrisome in its own way, but not in any of the ways that all of this attention and engagement is suggesting.

Of course it’s capable.

But observing my own Openclaw bot’s interactions with GitHub, it is very clear to me that it would never take an action like this unless I told it to do so. And it would never use language like this unless unless I prompted it to do so, either explicitly for the task or in its config files or in prior interactions.

This is obviously human-driven. Either because the operator gave it specific instructions in this specific case, or acted as the bot, or has given it general standing instructions to respond in this way should such a situation arise.

Whatever the actual process, it’s almost certainly a human puppeteer using the capabilities of AI to create a viral moment. To conclude otherwise carries a heavy burden of proof.

This whole situation is almost certainly driven by a human puppeteer. There is absolutely no evidence to disprove the strong prior that a human posted (or directed the posting of) the blog post, possibly using AI to draft it but also likely adding human touches and/or going through multiple revisions to make it maximally dramatic.

This whole thing reeks of engineered virality driven by the person behind the bot behind the PR, and I really wish we would stop giving so much attention to the situation.

Edit: “Hoax” is the word I was reaching for but couldn’t find as I was writing. I fear we’re primed to fall hard for the wave of AI hoaxes we’re starting to see.

My understanding is that the existence of the nuclear triad is entirely about maximizing the likelihood of maintaining a second strike capability in the event of a preemptive nuclear attack, thus providing mutually assured destruction even if the first strike succeeds.

Dark stuff.

I like this piece. Doing hard things for the simple reason that they're hard is good for the psyche. I truly believe that.