Comment by bjt
7 hours ago
The more pertinent question is not the binary "should we fund mathematicians or not?" It's "how many?" The money you dole out to them needs to come from someone else.
Easy yes: Let's impose a tax on everyone to support at least one mathematician.
Easy no: Let's impose a tax on everyone to support one billion mathematicians.
Where are you going to draw that line? How are you going to convince a majority of voters that you're drawing it at the right place?
Do we support people who are intentionally not using GPS and are still using paper maps? Or even the people who do it without any maps, just from their memory?
Do we support people who aren't using vaccines and are intentionally infecting themselves directly (measles parties)?
Do we support people who are intentionally using axe instead of chainsaw? Police officers and stormtroopers who are intentionally using knife instead of a gun?
With civilization and technology we do loose some mental capabilities - like say the part of the brain Amazonian people use for extremely skillful face recognition we do use for reading/writing while loosing that face recognition skill level that those people in the jungle have. So goes the medieval way of doing mathematics (it is a pity though - I liked it and hoped that mathematics will fall among the last, yet it happened to be among the firsts)
Weird questions.
> Do we support people who are intentionally not using GPS and are still using paper maps? Or even the people who do it without any maps, just from their memory?
Yes. We do - it's a sport from way back and ongoing - a good many people want to retain non GPS navigational skills.
> Do we support people who are intentionally using axe instead of chainsaw? Police officers and stormtroopers who are intentionally using knife instead of a gun?
Yes. We do. Proficiency in multiple weapons and non weapon combat is a basic part of service training. Axes and wedges still have their place in tree felling.
You are making your argument on the basis that LLMs and future AI system will be just as good or better as current mathematicians at all the relevant processes involved in academic math and mathematics in general. I'd like to see an experiment where an AI system was trained as a 1870s mathematician and see if it can come up with set theory, if that is not possible, then current AI systems are not fit to replace mathematicians.
>where an AI system was trained as a 1870s mathematician and see if it can come up with set theory
a car or a future starship wouldn't climb a tree better than ancient human.
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If GPS required you to pay hundreds of dollars per month to criminal companies, most people would still be using paper maps.
Assuming paper maps were the only alternative - absolutely yes. I probably would, and least on a pro rata basis for bigger weekend trips in unfamiliar areas.
That exactly illustrates the way of technology - the first commercial GPS receivers cost $3000, and of course people used the paper maps back then, yet technology prices have always been going down (temporary RAM crunches notwithstanding :)
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