Every theorem is already in the mind of God. No theorem prover has discovered it anymore than an astronomer discovers a star. We simply have better access to God's thoughts now. It makes us realize we are human and not divine.
What a complete nonsense. Math is no more 'the mind of god' than polio is. If anything math is a triumph of mind over religion because it gave us the tools to power a vast chunk of the scientific revolution. Without that we'd be cowering in the dark and hoping that the sun would rise tomorrow.
I guess according to his logic they would be tools for interacting with an automation. Like the button on a car wash kiosk. You could just as well holler and the man turns it on.
Are you saying a sandwich ordering service is a tool? Just because something has been turned into a service doesn’t mean it’s a tool, because otherwise literally any physically achievable action could be turned into a tool by making a service around it, thus completely diluting the definition of “tool” to “literally any physically achievable action”. That’s not a particularly useful definition.
The funny thing about people comparing mathematical research in the days of LLMs to playing chess in the days of Stockfish is that it identifies the competitive nature, and hence status seeking attitude, of the mathematical research community. Chess is, of course, a competitive game with a winner and a loser. You "win" mathematical research by solving a longstanding unsolved problem.
There is this idea of advancing human knowledge and adding to the record of what people know in mathematical research that breaks the analogy down, somewhat. But most people aren't Perelman. They would happily take the million dollar prize. And it is out of the question to do anything other than put your name on the published paper.
That is what I am gathering, too. I've been watching this from the sidelines, really confused by all the people moaning endlessly about how this revolution is somehow damaging to the community of mathematicians, which makes no sense to me no matter how many times I read their arguments.
But realizing that the primary driver was never actually proving the conjectures, nor understanding the proofs, sheds light into the issue. Many are not satisfied with the prospect of curating and preserving an ever growing collection of discoveries; what they wanted is being the discoverers themselves.
Which to me is mind boggling, because that is not what they have been saying aloud all along. Maybe it's my autism speaking, but I really thought they cared about the resulting knowledge rather than being recognized by their peers. How naïve of me to think that they were above that.
Meanwhile, people who simply enjoy having a tool that facilitates solving problems, because having a solution is their true goal rather than an excuse to obtain recognition or validation, are excited to use this new wonder.
Please don't pretend that you've somehow been deceived. Hasn't everyone heard quips like "theoretical physics is like sex: it has some useful results, but that's not why we do it"? How hard is it to understand that doing something is what gives pleasure, rather than the outcome?
Having AI tools does not remove the ability to do anything, other than being the first. I genuinely don't get that viewpoint, it is alien to me. It is equivalent to saying that the existence of bicycles removes the pleasure of running.
How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.
A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...
A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.
He was a professor so I think he started long before a NGS kit was even a thing. Also, the rumor seems to have been that he kept some personal items in the same fridge as samples and that there was cross-contamination or a mixup. All very much hearsay though.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
Current thought in the academy is that the flea-rat vector wasn't the dominant vector for the medieval plague "Black Death" mortality event, but human-flea-human. See also 2018 PNAS paper Katharine Dean, Nils Stenseth, Boris Schmid at Oslo. Basically, Northern Eurasian people were really gross, Mongols even moreso, and that provided the vector for a dominant human-flea-human spread. The rat vector, we're missing evidence that should be there: mass rat mortality; fast & huge mortality in areas with few rats; clustering followed human networks, not rodent networks. Also the kind of flea. Check the refs for more details.
The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.
There is an interesting (and frankly terrifying) book called biohazard by the former head of the soviet covert bioweapons program during the cold war and it seemed it was not that uncommon to have random screw ups at even high level labs resulting in the deaths of sometimes a lot of unfortunate people. Of course there was also a culture of cover up and not admitting mistakes as well for all sorts of reasons including the fact that they aren't supposed to be working on bioweapons in the first place as well as the usual punishments for screwing something up.
Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...
I did well in school and the praise I received for excelling in my math degree did shape my life and impact my motivations. I do like praise.
But outside of social reasons, it's understanding I crave. Thoroughly understanding a topic is awesome. I remember the feeling of acing my qualifier exam in grad school.
Those LLMs change nothing fundamentally about this motivation and need and capability. I can't type a prompt, hazily skim the wall of text, and come to comprehensive understanding. I still have to work.
What I like about LLMs is that they can increase my understanding by helping me learn more efficiently. What I don't like is the temptation to turn off my brain.
This week I helped a colleague with a bug. He used an LLM to sort it out before telling me about it.
I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out.
AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.
Exactly. I feel that agentic programming is largely turning what would have in the past been actual understanding into some kind of fluffy superficial pseudo "understanding" that's only barely good enough when assisted by AI.
how did his AI solve the bug? I've had cc recognize a bug was in an outdated lib and then update it to resolve the issue. Granted it made that determination by finding the source code to the lib, identifying the bug, and then verifying it was fixed by looking at the source of the updated lib.
AI providers are in fact incentivized to have you not think about the task. I’ve found that they automatically do more for you, and frankly, a lot of the time I don’t want it to do more for me. Ask me a question rather than burning a bunch of tokens to answer something I already know of the top of my head.
The agents also overload you with walls of text, always including lots of less relevant information. It's like they want you to give up and let them drive.
Well yeah it conditions you to turn towards it anytime you hit a roadblock.
It is in a precarious state right now where it is too good not to leverage but will bite you if you get sloppy.
I still write things by hand sometimes because it is fun, but it does make you feel stupid when you spend 2 hours fixing something a 2 min prompt could have fixed.
I suppose if the number of nameable things is countable (because humans can only enumerate, and it is humans who name), then it trivially follows that some real numbers are unnameable. Which proves the existence of such entities.
The argument is something like the set of possible thoughts about physical objects is larger than the physical objects themselves. It feels similar in flavor to the idea of unameable objects.
There's something special about a name. The name of the God of the Bible is special. Christians are to call upon _the name_ of the Lord. We pray, hallowed by _thy name_. It is somehow denotes the summary essence of the thing being named, even if it doesn't give specific details of its characteristics.
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