Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
new Scott Aaronson blog post just dropped it’s mostly him freaking out about those solved Erdos problems and AI mathematicians replacing human mathematicians, with a little bit of AI short storywriting and the Pope’s encyclical sprinkled in
Sadly, Erdős never invented a problem based on counting the r's in strawberry.
Man, I jumped a few logical thoughts and now I'm thinking of all the fun we could have with various agglutinative languages that can invent words on the fly. How many 'E's are in 'Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung', Claude?
Look, I admire professional math researchers as much as the next guy, but they're literally balancing on top of the economic pyramid of needs. This is a profession that cannot exist outside a culture with a surplus that can afford higher education, because there's no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.
So GenAI can solve Erdos problems. Can it unplug a drain or repave a road? Fuck no. Can it handle refuse for a city? Also fuck no.
Maybe professional math researchers will go the way of professional typesetters. I think humanity will retain its relevance.
His drama knob is always set to 11.
See also the previous article and how he talks about the "[fucking] NYT." Or better, dont look at that article.
Not a pro mathematician so apologies if Im hanging my butt out here, but I'm not convinced these solutions (or something analogous) aren't in the training data. Wouldn't be the first time. Several seem like the kind of thing you might figure out for a lemma on the way to something else unless you'd previously examined tHe ErDoS PrObLeMs.
Note: there are over 1200 problems that could be arguably labeled "Erdos Problems." It appears that a chatbot enjoyer vibecoded a website in 2024 and was somehow declared the chief keeper of the things. The site can be found here: https://www.erdosproblems.com/faq
isn’t that the old “basic science is boring and unsexy” issue though? There are economic incentives, but not in a short term-big-bux sort of way, so capitalism can’t be trusted with it.
To conjure up a recent example, something like “The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials”, published back in 1997, probably had limited commercial value at the time, but 20 years later completely sunk a promising post-quantum cryptography algorithm (“An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH”) which might have had some non-trivial commercial implications if SIKE had got through the key exchange algorithm competition.
Anyway, the Erdős problems are good candidates for llm work because they have been specified in a careful and formal way, which requires a reasonably competent mathematician to do. That then opens up mathematics to the same deskilling problem that other sectors afflicted with llms have, and because capitalism is shortsighted and stupid we don’t know what the future economic impact of that will be, right?
I think the challenge is that the value of results of any kind of basic research are so wildly variable that normal rational economic thinking stops working. In Nassim Taleb terms you're actively seeking black swans in a world where everyone knows all swans are white. Sometimes you venture into the depths of the rainforest and come back with a revolutionary new medicine, but most of the time you're gonna have a few cool pictures of new bugs or something - not without value in the real sense, but hard to capitalize and transform into profit. Even if you end up discovering/creating an entirely new framework for understanding life itself that revolutionizes everything from agriculture to medicine to politics in the following century, that doesn't necessarily work in the specific context of economic rationality - who remembers the name of the guy(s?) who funded the Beagle? And sometimes, as you referenced, the cool bug picture doesn't have an obvious or immediate return but ends up being the important piece of data in a different context decades down the line.
This is a field of human endeavor where the economic best-case scenario is probably Bell Labs. And despite having an absurd number of patents and prizes they still couldn't survive within being largely a vanity project for the original Telco monopoly. The ludicrous returns that came from repeatedly revolutionizing electronics and computing couldnt justify their position on a quarterly balance sheet.
The Beagle voyage was a Royal Navy project, and it had a defined purpose: charting. Having a young naturalist onboard was rational because what if you found the next tea plant?
The captain of the ship remained an implacable opponent to Darwin's later theories.
I believe Bell labs was mostly a fig leaf for covering up Bell's legal monopoly (i.e. look, we're doing some good stuff with all the money you're legally obliged to pay us)
there is a degree of risk that is acceptable for business. 90% drug trials fail; if you are inventor, you make a startup, package your pre-trial drugs and associated IP there, then pitch it up and cash out. vcs have money for clinical trials. sometimes you have phase 1 results that you got on your own too. the further it goes in trials the more it is worth; result is the biggest gacha in the town
yeah I was aware of the value of pure math (specifically the discrete stuff for crypto) when I wrote it
my point is the Scott-A is massively overvaluing the societal worth of pure mathematicians. Assuming (I know, big ask) that AI can succesfully automate that field, humanity is not worse off with regards to outcomes. Humanity remains relevant.
It's a weird moving of goalposts, not often commented upon, that GenAI is succesful mostly in replacing (in the Ersatz sense) stuff that's not really foundational to human society. We don't have robot cars, nor are we actually close to getting them, which would actually transform society in a massive way. Instead we have robot copywriters and bespoke porn creators.
but for people like Scott-A, whose entire selfworth is being "smarter" than anyone else (not withstanding that he would be eaten alive in the post-apocalypse), being replaced by a robot is not just about losing your livelyhood but your self-worth as a human as well
Its the “expert in one field = expert in all fields” stuff that I hate. There’s still plenty of jobs and areas of expertise that require humans: medicine, psychology/therapy (AI has arguably made the need for human therapists way more important), physical labour like construction work, linguistics etc. Hell human authors are definitely keeping their jobs since so many people hate slop
The part about the AI generated story about ancient Israelis tugging at his heartstrings made me dig up the post where he proudly proclaims himself a zionist and creates an insane trolley problem: https://awful.systems/post/5437903
Seems like run-of-the-mill yada-yada boosterism for the most part.
Points for managing to write an entire blog post without lamenting how the persecution of nerds is a historical level atrocity, much unlike the ongoing state-sponsored genocide by Israel which is very fine and very justifiable, I guess.