Catching Crumbs from the Table (2000)

Related. Others?

Catching crumbs from the table by Ted Chiang (2000) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559422 - March 2026 (1 comment)

Catching crumbs from the table (2000) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13257199 - Dec 2016 (5 comments)

> Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry.

Whatever the non-fiction equivalent of this is, maybe that's what smart, curious humans will do in the future.

Human mathematicians will explore the findings of AI research to try to understand and explain it to other human mathematicians, in the same way biologists today try to explore and understand living organisms to explain them to other human biologists.

Timothy Gowers wrote some thoughts about how in order to do this effectively, we will need to preserve mathematical culture, which means changing some values of current academic mathematics: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/07/26/thoughts-about-the-l...

Free of charge here https://www.scribd.com/document/893921964/CHIANG-Catching-Cr...

Thanks! we'll add that to the toptext as well.