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- Hacker News
- I'd like for HN to start tagging posts that are not written by terry tao, but are guest posts, like this one. Considering HN internally already uses AI tools to scan through and read the content to determine if it is AI-generated, I assume this is doable.by FLeXMurphy
- We need to pivot math towards intuition and accessibility.
Math has built a gated, inaccessible institution which - by design or not - served as a moat.
I believe math has little to do with mathematical notation - intuition is much more important. One can have intuition but not be able to “read math” - much as many musicians don’t “read music”.
Reading math however does not guarantee ideas or intuition. And those are what math needs.
by strideashort - People keep talking about this like there's a finite amount of math to be done, and then the party's over. But that's never how math has worked, is it? Every problem you solve, ten new ones open up. Like a fractal, the more you zoom in, the more detail emerges. No matter how much better AI is at solving problems, it's not going to generate the "final, complete compendium of mathematics" that that seems to hover over this post.
Math is meaningful because ... some people like to do it. The same as any other human pursuit. It doesn't need a reason beyond that. And AI won't change that. There will continue to be things to explore, things to find out, things that are maybe just at the edge of AI's reach and needs a human to decide whether it's worth continuing to explore or not. (Remember, AI isn't free).
So, IDK, I think for people who enjoy exploring math, there will always be interesting areas to explore. AI just gives us a better flashlight.
BTW I do agree that there's going to be an incident soon, whether intentional, accidental, or paperclip-factory, that leads governments around the world to shut all this down for some time, perhaps even shutting off access to GPUs entirely. It seems unavoidable. But that's just a temporary respite and skirts the core philosophical premise of the post.
by daxfohl - A village builds a clock tower so everyone can glance up at it and know what time it is. The tower helps as people meet more easily, work schedules align, and meals are shared. Over time, fewer people watch the sun and the clock becomes authoritative. When it stops working, nobody knows what time it is. Discord ensues and arguments follow as meetings are missed and people wait impatiently for repairs. An older woman in the village kept baking at dawn and never stopped watching the sun. She never relied on the clock. Villagers gathers at her door and call her wise, for her practice ends up inadvertently helping to re-calibrate the clock once it is repaired. She replies that she is not wise or special and was just going about her usual baking routine.by retrocog
- > A host of reasoned declarations and open letters to protect/guide the math research community have been released over the past few months, spiking in intensity after OpenAI announced their solution to the Millennium Prize variant of Navier-Stokes. They quickly gained widespread support among mathematicians. The Leiden Declaration already has 4,000+ signatories, Math and AI has 7,000+, and even the open letter opposing the Caltech Mathathon has 2,000+.
> Among non-mathematicians, the public response was more sympathetic than not, but I observed a vocal minority (particularly from the technology and economics communities) with reasoned objections, generally saying that the mathematicians should adapt and cede control in the new AI world.
Interesting how Software Engineers, instead, seem to have given up early without any declarations or open letters.
by lnrd - Everyone involved in AI should have read The Library of Babel [1].
It's about many things, but perhaps the most relevant idea here is that no information matters without understanding. We could generate all possible knowledge, but unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it, it doesn't count. The cure for mortality could be written on the moon, but if no one reads it, it hasn't really been discovered.
[1] https://maskofreason.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...
by Planktonne - > We (humans) should help humanity flourish. I understand that not everyone agrees. I have been called a “speciesist” for being “too human-centric”.
this is insane. the "speciesist" people aside (the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now, which is completely mad), i have the opposite problem: the _axiom_ seems to be: we should help ME flourish. "Me" as in people who are raking in trillions for their own very special selves right now, at the cost of everyone else's future, while none of them can be trusted to hold my cell phone for a second.
> if an industry commits to the axiom of helping humanity flourish
where does he see such industries, outside of maybe nonprofits?
by twelve40 - I consider myself an applied mathematician though technically I’m an economist (macro models, mostly) and operations researcher and differential game theorist (odd combination, but whatever). For context I’m 45 and I’ve spent most of my working life in corporate life.
I’ve always been at a disadvantage academically because I’m rather clumsy with my manipulations, derivations, and I’m a disaster at mental arithmetic. I’m also dyslexic. But starting in the late 1990s when I was in High School I started to become fluent with CAS (Computer Algebra Systems): first Derive, then the Symbolics capabilities of Mathlab, and ultimately Mathematica.
The whole transition is turning out quite well for me: I’m now able to delegate exploring my intuitions to increasingly powerful tools, I no longer have to haul the pyramid blocks up the ramp myself but I can drop them in by helicopter (as if were) and what I bring to the party is intuition and understanding.
I view it a bit like astronomy: in ancient times, before telescopes, keen eyesight was a prerequisite to be an astronomer. Later, after telescopes, anybody with eyesight had enormously enhanced capabilities of observation, and now, with radioastronomy and other forms of remote sensing (neutrino observatories, gravitational interferometers) the whole field has opened up to people who by virtue of being blind would’ve literally been excluded only a few decades ago.
Go forth and multiply: everybody can become a mathematician now. There’s an infinite number of potential universes out there with an infinite number of facts to prove and disprove. And while we’re at it: there’s so much more to mathematics than conjectures, proofs and counterexamples. Solve, model, approximate, fiddle around: as long as you’re not doing trite numerics on arbitrary systems of equations you’ve cooked up for your own amusement you’re good in my books.
Enjoy the tools. Keep your wits about you. Work through the steps that are presented to you. Build your intuition. HAVE FUN.
by qubex