Comment by rfgplk
5 hours ago
> Almost all people who are qualified to analyze the results are paid researchers.
This _might_ have been true somewhat in the past (although it wasn't), but it's completely false today. Anyone with access to a sufficiently advanced model has the capabilities of analyzing these papers/proofs. It's no different than reading a codebase you might not be fully familiar with, and checking it for correctness (give an engineering analogy).
This hardcore gatekeeping of math (and by extension STEM) fields MUST stop.
I mean, I have a decent math background, but I would struggle greatly to attempt to even tell you what most (or any) of the conjectures in e.g. number theory are about at even the highest level. I can't imagine a layman would have any hope.
Like I was reading some about adele rings last night, which is already going to be quite a concept for a layman to be able to even slightly describe. Then you can layer on that apparently they're locally compact, so we can talk about harmonic analysis on the additive group. Like, come on now, 99.99% of people have no hope of ever following along, and this is stuff from 75 years ago.
> Anyone with access to a sufficiently advanced model has the capabilities of analyzing these papers/proofs.
But they don’t. What they have is the ability to ask something else to do the analysis. It’s an important distinction. If the asker has the skills to evaluate the results, that’s one thing, but too many don’t and act as if whatever they got is unambiguous truth.
> This hardcore gatekeeping of math (and by extension STEM) fields MUST stop.
What must stop is the overuse of the word “gatekeeping”. Anyone is free to study these fields and work on problems. What people rightfully object to is uninformed research flooding everything with hard to verify junk.
The discourse around "gatekeeping" is so poisonous. I think a lot of non-mathematicians are looking at this situation as if this was a guild of medical doctors or some other profession with a regulatory monopoly trying to "gatekeep" access to math from a new upstart in order to preserve their own pricing power. That's not how the math community works, it welcomes all and there is no barrier to contribution.
Mathematicians do have some vested interest in keeping the profession from collapsing into an intellectual oligopoly, where one or two commercial players with early access to their own internal models continuously scoops everyone else and pollutes the field with externalities, and the profession itself collapses, only leaving AIs and hobbyists able to stand. At that point it'll be the AI firms who become rent-seekers. That's not really "gatekeeping" in any conventional sense of the term, it's protecting a healthy economy of ideas and the long-term development of mathematics.
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