AI tends to take nearly finished research directions and push it to the conclusion in one step. If deployed massively, it will pluck all the low hanging fruits causing a drought of near term promising research project.…
The difference is the scale. A few incomprehensible long papers per year, sure, we will study it. A flood of AI results closing research directions left and right, that will be a problem.
On your second point: there is a more plausible explanation which David Bessis calls the "overhang". The short version is that there is a large amount of relatively low hanging fruits in mathematics, because no human…
I think both the competitiveness and and lack of problems will mean fewer people will do mathematics. I think collaboration will always be there, but the community as a whole will be smaller and weaker.
The mathematical community was very competitive in its early years, but in the last 70 to 100 years, it has been generally less competitive and very collegial. The community was in a good place, and progress has been…
It was copied from a pdf, maybe LaTeX generated. All the ligatures are wrong -- not sure where the problem lies, the pdf itself, pdf reader, or the clipboard on Linux.
Education is a complex topic. I don't claim to understand it, nor do I think we can sort this out in a hacker news thread. What I reject is the simplistic claims like "exams don't mean anything". There are certainly…
My apologies for coming off as over-enthusiastic, I am currently obsessed with this study. Here is another quote: "The negative learning effects are larger for students with higher initial achievement. The differences…
The fact that exam scores are correlated with how much you study is not the same as exams only reflect how much you study. Two students who study the same amount could have very different exam scores. The reason that…
It's not so clear that AI is an amplifier.. The paper has some fascinating analysis on this topic: "At the other end of the distribution, AI students who spend more than 65 minutes on their homework receive homework and…
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
Since Godot got mentioned, I thought this recent talk by Juan Linietsky provides a reasonable alternative to heavily restricting contribution. https://youtu.be/LDSwP37y_W4?si=fMIsdQ2yjoiGChb6
Tenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is still very important in universities. This is not generally true for non-tenured and…
I am criticizing how AI progress is reported and discussed -- given how important this development is, accurate communication is even more important for the discussion. I think you inferring my motivation for the rant…
It's really tiring that LLM fans will claim every progress as breakthrough and go into fantasy mode on what they can do afterwards. This is a really good example of how to use the current capabilities of LLM to help…
I was applying a unfair standard to them of course. Every field has a few classics that last a long time, but most old books are not read. But I think Bourbaki maybe had grand ambitions that were eventually unrealized.…
It's interesting that while Bourbaki had a large influence on modern mathematics, very few people read their books (at least among the people I know). In a sense, their project of producing a definitive exposition for a…
This is one of the things that everyone gets the reference, but it won't be good to admit it publicly. This quote is known to almost everyone born in that area, and it's the first thing that come to mind when you hear…
Xiaomi can also mean millet. I think it's a reference to this Mao quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_plus_rifles?wprov=sfla1
I use to read about the power border agents have over foreigners and was amazed at how easily they can destroy me. The only reason this hasn't happened seems to be that they're mostly decent, professional people. And…
In academic publishing, there is an implicit agreement between the authors and the journal to roughly match the importance of the paper to the prestige of the journal. Since there is no universal standard on either the…
Even if we pretend nepotism doesn't exists, academia is still not a strict meritocracy. In addition to merit, at least two factors play an important role in success, which having a good mentor helps a lot. 1) Tacit…
One of the biggest problem of maths education is that they are taught by people who dislike it. They think of maths as eating bitter medicine or training of a complex, rigid skill. The way maths is taught by them is…
I am wondering how much of the hate of LaTeX document is due to the default font. Computer Modern seems to be disliked by many users of LaTeX as well. I personally am very conflicted, as I have come to identify it as…
> That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment. Fair enough.. at least they think they can add value by improving efficiency.
AI tends to take nearly finished research directions and push it to the conclusion in one step. If deployed massively, it will pluck all the low hanging fruits causing a drought of near term promising research project.…
The difference is the scale. A few incomprehensible long papers per year, sure, we will study it. A flood of AI results closing research directions left and right, that will be a problem.
On your second point: there is a more plausible explanation which David Bessis calls the "overhang". The short version is that there is a large amount of relatively low hanging fruits in mathematics, because no human…
I think both the competitiveness and and lack of problems will mean fewer people will do mathematics. I think collaboration will always be there, but the community as a whole will be smaller and weaker.
The mathematical community was very competitive in its early years, but in the last 70 to 100 years, it has been generally less competitive and very collegial. The community was in a good place, and progress has been…
It was copied from a pdf, maybe LaTeX generated. All the ligatures are wrong -- not sure where the problem lies, the pdf itself, pdf reader, or the clipboard on Linux.
Education is a complex topic. I don't claim to understand it, nor do I think we can sort this out in a hacker news thread. What I reject is the simplistic claims like "exams don't mean anything". There are certainly…
My apologies for coming off as over-enthusiastic, I am currently obsessed with this study. Here is another quote: "The negative learning effects are larger for students with higher initial achievement. The differences…
The fact that exam scores are correlated with how much you study is not the same as exams only reflect how much you study. Two students who study the same amount could have very different exam scores. The reason that…
It's not so clear that AI is an amplifier.. The paper has some fascinating analysis on this topic: "At the other end of the distribution, AI students who spend more than 65 minutes on their homework receive homework and…
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
Since Godot got mentioned, I thought this recent talk by Juan Linietsky provides a reasonable alternative to heavily restricting contribution. https://youtu.be/LDSwP37y_W4?si=fMIsdQ2yjoiGChb6
Tenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is still very important in universities. This is not generally true for non-tenured and…
I am criticizing how AI progress is reported and discussed -- given how important this development is, accurate communication is even more important for the discussion. I think you inferring my motivation for the rant…
It's really tiring that LLM fans will claim every progress as breakthrough and go into fantasy mode on what they can do afterwards. This is a really good example of how to use the current capabilities of LLM to help…
I was applying a unfair standard to them of course. Every field has a few classics that last a long time, but most old books are not read. But I think Bourbaki maybe had grand ambitions that were eventually unrealized.…
It's interesting that while Bourbaki had a large influence on modern mathematics, very few people read their books (at least among the people I know). In a sense, their project of producing a definitive exposition for a…
This is one of the things that everyone gets the reference, but it won't be good to admit it publicly. This quote is known to almost everyone born in that area, and it's the first thing that come to mind when you hear…
Xiaomi can also mean millet. I think it's a reference to this Mao quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_plus_rifles?wprov=sfla1
I use to read about the power border agents have over foreigners and was amazed at how easily they can destroy me. The only reason this hasn't happened seems to be that they're mostly decent, professional people. And…
In academic publishing, there is an implicit agreement between the authors and the journal to roughly match the importance of the paper to the prestige of the journal. Since there is no universal standard on either the…
Even if we pretend nepotism doesn't exists, academia is still not a strict meritocracy. In addition to merit, at least two factors play an important role in success, which having a good mentor helps a lot. 1) Tacit…
One of the biggest problem of maths education is that they are taught by people who dislike it. They think of maths as eating bitter medicine or training of a complex, rigid skill. The way maths is taught by them is…
I am wondering how much of the hate of LaTeX document is due to the default font. Computer Modern seems to be disliked by many users of LaTeX as well. I personally am very conflicted, as I have come to identify it as…
> That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment. Fair enough.. at least they think they can add value by improving efficiency.