Comment by boron1006
10 hours ago
To be honest I didn’t get that much outrage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662116
It seems like a lot of the issue here is that these problems aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they lead down interesting roads. It defeats the purpose if you solve them without getting any real understanding.
It’s akin to saying you’ve solved “pancake flipping” problems with a waffle maker, or “travelling salesman” problems with a zoom meeting.
Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems and arriving at their own solutions so they can continue having whatever insights along the way.
Well, one thing is stopping them. There will be no more adoration for their genius.
If you truly do it for understanding and not the attention, carry on. AI should change nothing about your motivations.
> Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems
My understanding is they are? And literally everything in this world is based around incentives. If you say “well you can continue to work on understanding, but your kids are going to starve” that’s not nothing.
It boggles my mind. Why cure cancer? The cancer researchers will be out of a job and their kids are going to starve!
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A lot of this would be public funding. If AI is reducing the need for mathematicians in an area it makes sense to fund it less and fund something else that isn't solved.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why most are missing the point. Many people, including you, deeply believe that most mathematicians are chasing adoration of their genius, otherwise why would anyone care about such abstract work?
People like Grigori Perelman would baffle you, a mathematician who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, refused the monetary prize, field medal and continues to live a life of total recluse.
For most mathematicians their primary drive is chasing the unknown, not for anyone’s adoration, but to pursue their desire to see what lies in the beyond.
Going to the gym and using a forklift
This is a good metaphor for treating the means as an end, thanks. And I agree with your parent comment that that is largely the misalignment that Terence is pointing out.
There is an implicit agreement that mathematics is funded, for the most part by the public, as a way to advance the state of knowledge and propagate (even if very indirectly) what has learned for the public good.
It was never about helping individual mathematicians demonstrate that they are individually good at math. It happened to work out that way, but it wasn't the goal.
Agree, my comment is rather about the fact that most work you do in school and (lower) university is not itself of interest, rather the purpose is to work out your brain. The more of your exercise you leave to the forklift, the steeper the cliff will be when you find a weight that doesn’t fit on forks. (That is, unless/until machines get good enough to completely replace people, at which point we have another few problems on hand, such as day-to-day purpose and justification of existence)
I've been wondering if mathematics is going to go the way of particle physics in that it will start to take a lot of money to make advancements.