turzmo

Paraphrasing Hardy, 'exposition is for second-rate minds'.

I don't believe this myself. But I do believe that if you've formed your very ideas about what is good and desirable on the basis of a culture that has held certain values dear for hundreds of years, and have fought against every doubt and difficulty in life for decades to mold yourself into that image, that it does not 'suck' that you are unable to adapt to a new reality overnight.

Very few people that would love to be craftsmen would love to be factory foremen. It is far too insensitive to the human experience to expect people to just deal.

If the end result of this is that within a few years, AI "does" all of the mathematics that humans do, and that there is nobody around that understands any of it, what was the point?

Due diligence — pretty standard acronym in this community.

I assume that will be a feature available for the higher tier subscriptions...

“Any future plateaus in capability are planned, for your safety”

Sure, why not, it’s just not selling the idea that money buys happiness…

Personal training services? Workout gear? Not sure you should have lead with that, these are expensive things with minimal impact.

I don't know, self-reported happiness seems like an awfully unreliable metric. For one, I've noticed that projecting unhappiness is much more of a faux pas in rich circles. On its own this could account for much of this relationship.

That may be, but my point stands. It is neither learning to absorb difficult material nor efficient.

I don't think so. There are many objections to methods of making learning "easier" and the invalidity of one does not imply the invalidity of all of them.

We've also seen the effects of LLMs on learning, at least when used instinctively by students. An entire generation of students seems to have atrophied their critical thinking skills this way. Talk to 21-year-olds today and you'll see what I mean.

Baby Rudin is a special textbook: it comes from a time when mathematics textbooks were not at all judged by their pedagogical value, but instead by their aesthetic appeal to mathematicians (a la Bourbaki).

If you actually want to learn analysis, there are a nearly infinite number of friendlier resources (e.g., Understanding Analysis by Abbott).

Learning to unpack difficult text on one’s own is a valuable skill. Research papers often require a similar amount of suffering, and at the frontier of knowledge, despite all the advances we’ve seen, LLMs seem to have absolutely no understanding or intuition. They are much better at things that have been expounded at length by humans before.

I would argue that if you’re going to use an LLM to make Rudin easier to understand, you are not learning how to absorb difficult material, nor are you learning analysis efficiently.

There are two number "1" pigs, and two of them have malformed tails. Sloppy even for slop!

Doctors simply don’t treat things well that are not classified as a particular disease. If you want to get stronger or more fit, you may well be better off asking your local bro than your PCP.

Sleep is sadly in the same category. If you don’t have sleep apnea, and you want to get treated for sleep, you will be offered any number of pharmaceuticals, all of which are terrible. Better advice comes from other people dealing with sleep issues in this case.

Same here. Only thing that’s ever worked.

I’ve had a similar experience in physics. Excellent domain knowledge and semantic search, but the intellectual sparkle and reasoning just isn’t there and it still often throws out a lot of wrong ideas. It is very useful for coding.

But there is a discrepancy between (the implication behind) these reports and how I subjectively feel talking to LLMs. Granted, I don’t have access to whatever cutting edge model is out there for as many credits, but I also don’t feel like I’m talking to an IMO silver medallist.

Both impressive and terrifying. But as always, the methodology is buried: how many open problems were tried until they found a success?

If they tried this on 1000 problems and this is the one that succeeded, it still means that there are 999 open problems that an LLM cannot one-shot. It seems likely that this would remain the situation until the next model.

If this is the first one they tried, maybe we’re totally hosed.

The conclusions are so different in these cases that it is impossible to know what to think. Though it is reasonable, I think, to assume that a company is willing to push the maximally misleading narrative —- especially a company known for questionable ethical direction at the top, and one that is still circling an IPO, and one that is in the tech industry, where conjuring an illusion of growth and progress is sufficient for success.

I don’t think that’s always true. Backlash is a real thing. It doesn’t always work, but it doesn’t cost much and it’s a lot better than blindly accepting the situation.

I never understood this perspective. Just because a person's behavior is market-rational, it does not mean they can't be criticized for externalities.

That is, in fact, an important thing to do. It turns those externalities into public perception, which turns into market forces that adjust the behavior, if you want to think purely in market terms.

The analogy with Budweiser is not a good one. This would be the CEO of Budweiser actively pushing more drinking while the nation's drinking was increasing. And yes, people would be right, and effective, to oppose this (see Oxycontin).

(2023)

> The valuation is the potential based on what SpaceX could do as the 1st mover in space tech.

It is not.

Would either of you have a recommendation on where to start learning about either?

The author seems too humble to put a giant Patreon link in a popup (it's at the very bottom), but in case anyone wants to know how to support: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski/membership?vanity=ciech...

Clippy would have been perfect for the role!

I don't think Erdos problems are useless myself, I put "useless" in quotes to emphasize that they are the sort of research that doesn't have an immediate application, and so their automated resolution should be weighed against the sociological cost.

As opposed to, say, drug discovery.

Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public.

Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question.

The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questions on the wrong end of the spectrum: Erdos problems are exactly the sort of "useless" questions that people might answer purely for the love of the game. The sort of questions that a young person might cut their teeth on and gain confidence.

Solving questions like these automatically, I think, is not good for the long-term health of research. At least for the foreseeable future you still would like people to become interested and develop skills in these fields. These developments, and especially how they are presented, directly discourage that.

Thanks for elaborating. Can you say more about mysticism?

I’ve heard this said, but why?

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Not OP, but it has to be a walk with no headphones for me. As I walk, thoughts seem to bubble up from my subconscious and present themselves for consideration. This doesn’t happen as often if I’m listening to music.

Won’t be canned for going with the herd. I think it’s that simple, even if the herd is running off a cliff.