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Comment by lutze

13 years ago

No one is saying that.

Levers. No one said the pulley (or CAD) rendered the architect defunct, and no one is saying computers should do the same for mathematicians. We're just trying to understand this resistance to using tools to help do heavy lifting, the “human-centric bigotry” as the article puts it. Reading some of the responses here, it's probably being overstated, but even so.

And ignore you and go play somewhere else? A good number of the most influential computer scientists have actually been psychologists, not mathematicians, so the older brother needs to get the fuck over himself if that's his attitude!

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lutze

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fusiongyro  13 years ago

The problem is that these tools don't help much. In other fields, people clamor for software because software can excel at things humans are bad at: repetitive tasks, rote calculations, lots of arithmetic. The hard part of the proof is coming up with it, not checking it. And coming up with the proof requires deep insights, which means a library of proofs isn't as useful as a library of code where you can use the code without having to understand it. What we have so far is pretty good at checking proofs but very bad at coming up with them. So what you're actually engaging in here is "machine-centric bigotry"--the idea that the machine is intrinsically better at all problem solving than man, despite evidence to the contrary.

I'd like to hear who you consider influential computer scientists coming from psychology. The ones I hold dear are mostly settlers from math.

If the younger brother were as wise as he thinks he is, he wouldn't need to get so worked up as to substitute profanity for an articulate argument.