Comment by getnormality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by getnormality | Hacker News Reader

From one of the answers:

> mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification.

Yes! And this applies to all human culture, not just math. Everything people have figured out needs to be in living form to carried on. The more people the better. If math, or any product of human skill, is only recorded in papers or videos, that isn't the same as having millions of people understanding it in their own ways.

Modern culture often emphasizes innovation and fails to value mere maintenance, tradition, and upkeep. This can lead to people like the OP feeling that they have nothing to contribute, when actually, just learning math, being able to do it, being able to help others learn it - all of these are contributions.

We are all needed to keep civilization afloat, in ways we cannot anticipate. We all need to pursue some kind of excellence just to keep human culture alive.

This is why I think Brady Haran is one of the coolest living mathematicians. Numberphile is educating a new generation of young mathematicians for anyone with access to youtube. Accessible math communication is so important. So many cool things are buried in textbooks and papers the average person would never read.

Numberphile doesn't do any education. That's like saying the Discovery Channel is educating a new generation of zoologists.

I simply don't care to gatekeep what counts as education. It has taught me things from videos I can still recall a decade later and pushed me to explore different areas of math I wouldn't have done otherwise.

It's education for whoever finds it educational

If topics are presented engagingly these efforts will no doubt inspire the next generation.

Young people are curious, sometimes all they need is a spark and to be introduced to a new topic in an engaging way. These forms of content deliver that spark.

I believe that I have learned cumulatively double in the past 10 years from YouTube compared to what I learned in 6 years of middle and high school. And I don’t spend 8 hours per day on YouTube.

Plumbing, react, combinatorics, real analysis, python, c++, cad, micro and macro economics, reinforcement learning, to name just a few of the things I learned through YouTube.

We don’t give enough credit to what we take for granted today.

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea" -- Saint-Exupery

This is exactly what Numberphile does. Those who are hooked will find the resources on their own. They need a reason to look for them and Numberphile gives them one.

I agree with that, but inspiration is not education. If you watch everything Numberphile has produced, you'll come out of that with no new skills and trivial new knowledge.

Pedantically speaking you may be correct about Numberphile, but many times Numberphile provided the exposure and critical nudge to follow up on a piqued curiosity. That did end up imparting new skill.

However I will push back on the claim that inspiration is not education. It may not be sufficient on its own when resources are not readily available. But now that they are it's the inspiration and persistence that are the missing magic sauces.

> From one of the answers [...]

Thank you for highlighting that answer. It is one of my favourite pieces of writing about the culture of mathematics. I just want to add that that particular answer is now affectionately known as Thurston's Paean.

In theory, sure. In practice, our society is a) not set up to value things which don’t have an immediate financial ROI, b) is valuing them less as time progresses, not more, and c) is experiencing some very serious transitions that may destroy the financial viability of devoting a lot of your time and energy to some very important things.

Living culture is a concept that I think is quite unintuitive to modern minds. Examples of it are all around us... but it's usually blatantly missing from our "big picture" thinking.

For example. Take a modern country with a modern economy. Flatten it. Destroy all the factories. Bankrupt all the companies. You can get back to a fully modern economy again quite quickly. WWII demonstrates it.

Taking an unindustrialized country through the development process... that's very tricky. It can't really be rushed.

For a long time, economic development was seen as mostly capital and technology. You need time to develop all the capital needed. Roads, factories, etc. But... development efforts underperformed. Then the idea of "human capital" got popular as a way of explaining the deficit. Education, mostly. Development efforts still underperformed.

I think the "living community" thing is the answer to this. It' ecology. You can't make a rainforest by just dumping all the necessary organisms into the right climate. It's the endlessly complicated relationships between all those organisms that make the rainforest.

This is one of the things that worries me about the pace of modern change. When writing and literacy resurged in classical antiquity... we totally lost all the ways of (for example) doing scholarship orally. Socrates (through Plato) wrote about some of the downsides to this.

...and we did completely lose oral scholarship. We have no idea how to do it. Once the living culture died... it stayed dead. All the knowledge contained within it went away.

> I think the "living community" thing is the answer to this. It' ecology.

I agree. A body of knowledge, mathematical knowledge being one of them, is a give-and-take between its producers and consumers; a market for ideas. It grows in that ecology of people with its pathfinders, specialists, generalists, historians, educators, etc. Committing to a body of knowledge is becoming part of its living culture.

Where I disagree: I believe some of the loss is inevitable. Keeping in mind the example of a body of knowledge above, as the scale of what's accumulated until now grows, the role each of us play in the sustenance of its culture shrink. This is a direct consequence of the modern developmental process (ie division of labour to the point where it feels like we are all modular parts of a much larger whole).

I can't say whether its better to focus on recovering what's lost, or, trust the process, as it were.

But were trapped in only keeping alive that has a reward signal which is can it help pay rent, pay for food, get love, etc

Theres a limited amount of time, space and energy so what's the ideal mechanism to say what to pay attention to or not

> Everything people have figured out needs to be in living form to carried on.

It would appear that LLMs are invalidating this claim. Things can live in synthetic form and carry on just fine. Instead of cultivating a population of learned minds we are just feeding a few dozen egregores of models and training corpuses.

All LLMs do is launder other people's IP. So I don't think you invalidated any other claim.

They are not invalidating this claim, and cannot, unless we'd actually try it out for a few generations. Which we shouldn't and won't.

LLMs are quite good at simulating life and living intelligence (in the short term), but they aren't any of that. That's why we call it artificial intelligence. It's true that we can't put our finger on what exactly the difference is, but it's not like reality has ever felt encumbered by our limited understanding.

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