If you have to listen to such an elevator pitch, you're not the target audience. This is bleeding-edge math/CS research. Talking about a "product" just shows that you have a fundamental misconception regarding what this is all about.
You can also describe say, the Frankfurt school of critical theory or every other programming language.
A product is an act of production here, as in some kind of process. Even things like classes of clouds and rocks can be described in that framework
I don't expect Lean to be an exception
Also to respond to the idea that I'm fundamentally unworthy of an explanation: I'm also not the target audience for the LHC or James Webb but effort has been made to describe it. They don't demand advanced physics degrees to unveil its purpose like they're some kind of secret society.
> I'm also not the target audience for the LHC or James Webb but effort has been made to describe it.
And there is an effort to describe Lean on their webpage. But I would be curious to know if you would be able to recall the "elevator pitch" you heard for the LHC that doesn't grossly gloss over any kind of relevant actual information. "Customers were dissatisfied because previous colliders were too small, so we made a bigger one. This allows us to hurl particles very fast at each other." Huzzah, you've just been elevator pitched. Do you actually know anything significant about the LHC after that pitch? I sincerely doubt it.
You're also glossing over the fact that the LHC was started in 1998. The James Webb telescope has been in the works since the 90's. Meanwhile, Lean started as a research project in 2013, and Lean 4 is only 1.5 years old. Being angry that scientists have been developing the fundamentals before engaging in outreach is misguided at best.
The LHC example is so simple ChatGPT did it in a single go. Again, this is generative AI
"For particle physics researchers seeking to unravel the cosmos, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offers an unparalleled solution. Unlike conventional particle accelerators, the LHC achieves extraordinary collision energies, enabling experiments that mirror the early universe's conditions. This distinctive feature has led to groundbreaking discoveries, notably the Higgs boson. In contrast to other accelerators, the LHC's unmatched power and global scientific network establish it as the premier choice for unlocking the universe's deepest secrets, setting it apart in its capacity to explore uncharted frontiers in particle physics."
In fact, I asked it to do it for Lean and it could do it just fine.
In contrast, the main lean website starts like this:
The Lean (jargon) is a (jargon) developed principally by Leonardo de Moura.
There's this bizarre fetishism for making things inaccessible and then personally belittling and insulting people when they state the obvious.
The other inexplicable behavior is the tendency to give "answers" by pointing to giant manuals that don't answer the question.
This is endemic to ML. Someone asks what say "Vit-L" versus "Vit-H" means and the answer is usually a link to some ~40 page peer reviewed LaTeX that mentions the acronyms but doesn't define it either.
The strategy is to do anything but be transparent and direct.
That's a buzzword soup with barely any actual substance. You're illustrating what I meant. It's also full of jargon (particle accelerators, collision energies, Higgs boson...)
> This is endemic to ML.
Lean and ML are completely unrelated topics.
This is so bad that different fields within the discipline can't even understand each other and they wear that as a badge of honor as if being opaque, uninformative, and misleading people is a natural law they're obligated to follow.
It's a truly bizarre social game. A cycle of gaslighting and abuse as an institution.
I don't know who goes this deep in to these threads so this is mostly for myself.
My primary critique is from a lifelong love of mathematics. I actually hold a few fancy degrees in the subject.
I cannot stand however, power structures for the sake of power structures. The primary reason I left academia and broke away from the field is my, well, disgust really, with how, I believe willfully obtuse things are.
It's not so much how things are stated although there's problems there, it's the relationship dynamics, interactions, and style of expressions.
Before the rise of the term science, math was called a "natural philosophy" and I really have felt that the mathematics community, at least on the west coast, which is what I've experienced, has an accentuated form of the most off-putting characteristics of philosophy including a steadfast refusal and denial to acknowledge it.
I really think it makes what I consider a beautiful field of study to be hostile, insular and needlessly esoteric.
I still care a lot about it and I want it to be healthier and more open.
Lean started as a small research project hidden away within Microsoft Research, and mathematicians learned about it and have built a community by word of mouth. There is no accountability needed at all for the project, and there's no need to advertise it -- that's not to say that there hasn't been any effort put into advertising it to mathematicians. I just advertised the system myself an hour ago during a talk that explained Lean and Mathlib to a group of mathematicians, computer scientists, and linguists.