I have a strong sense that almost none of the commenters and blog post authors ranting here about mathematics have any clue about mathematics or its culture. I do not recognise any of these descriptions of mathematicians at all, and can only imagine they’re based entirely on experiences of other, almost entirely unrelated, parts of academia. This is not the first time I’ve seen it online, but recent events seem to have exacerbated it.
Not sure quite what animates the absurd hatred of one of the least greedy groups of people on the planet, but it certainly isn’t experience. To anyone with any, it just looks like absurd derangement.
"People inside a moat, want to keep the moat from being breached because it fucks with their status quo."
EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. No shit, why would they want something disruptive to fuck with the way elite academia operates? And obviously I am talking about the "Master of the Universe" types atop the Ivory Tower. They have been A-OK, with privately-funded professorships, partnering with book publishers to milk students with single-access codes and never-ending "new" editions to their books, summer salary grants, partnering with all sorts of private companies as contractors, and/or milking on the tenure tit while the average adjunct lecturer at a local college/university struggles to make ends-meet and has 150 students in a lecture.
The author talks about his UC Berkeley years. That UC Berkeley that opened and operated for nearly a century as a public institution educating California's true middle class up until the 1960 Donahoe Master Plan, but slowly progressed to gate-keep "normies" out and pivoted to a model of elitism that is absolutely and catastrophically broken.
> book publishers to milk students with single-access codes and never-ending "new" editions to their books,
The best example of this is James Stewart's Calculus textbooks. It is priced so high and made him so much money that he built a $24 million "Integral House"!
PS: Just to be clear, the above has got nothing to do with mathematicians and their work. It just goes to show how bad the textbook publishing industry is in shafting students that you can make money off of them by selling centuries old well-known mathematics.
How in god's name—irrespective of how valid this is, and its very valid—is this even remotely germane to the issue of AI in mathematics? Rattling off incidents and making the case that there is discrimination and sexists in mathematics (yeah no shit), how is this related to the issue of AI that was raised in the letter? Are the complaints raised in that letter any less valid because the mathematicians who signed them make part of a community which has reproachable behaviour, both past and present? I really don't get it.
It's a clumsily made point, but I think the gist is that the letter asks AI to align to a certain ideal vision of the field of math, that the math community itself is not well aligned to. I don't think the article makes this point well, though, just by listing these incidents. Don't get me wrong - each incident is important and worthy of attention in its own right, but I find the overall argument to be pretty weak and strongly reeking of whataboutism.
In any human group there will always be issues on how we treat each other dependent on time/context/culture. But while not condoning it, this issue is orthogonal to that of misaligned AI.
The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
The above is true for "misaligned AI" in all the Sciences. It is time the Scientific Community got together and sued the hell out of the AI companies.
The letter claims that AI is destroying the mathematics community as is now. The blog asks whether the mathematics community as is now is worth saving.
I think the letter is misguided. So what if the AI labs are misaligned to math?
- But they announced a result before a paper was peer reviewed! The horror! So what? The mathematics community can read the paper once it is written up.
- But their results they publish may not care about conceptual understanding and insight! So what? If that's the mathematics community's goal, then they should sift through the lean proof and reformat the ideas to make them more insightful and develop their own conceptual understanding.
- But they aren't bothering to do literature review to tell the history about how humans contributed to the final result! So what? If it's so important to the mathematical community, they can do that themselves and throw a party every Tuesday in the honor of Luis Martínez-Zoroa and wear jeans on casual Friday in honor of Buckmaster and Alpöge - the left leg for Buckmaster and the right for Alpöge.
An AI giving a definite result of an open problem doesn't decrease the mathematical community's insight or conceptual understanding. They are still free to continue doing their work and pursuing their goals. If it's really so bad, they can just pretend they don't know NS is solved and keep spending their efforts trying to prove it never blows up (or a hand full of them can try to blow it up from scratch).
Guess what! I spend no part of my life working on unsolved math problems. I read some books for pleasure. I work in a hospitable with sick kids. I help my wife raise our kids. My goals are misaligned with the mathematics community! I've done nothing to increase conceptual understanding and insight! So what?
The relevance can be seen from the second link above (the review of the book) which highlights the essential points viz. the importance of Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation. It is short enough that you can easily go through it. Then apply it to understand why mathematicians are angry.
I don't understand why you can't just articulate the point yourself. It took me a while to guess what you were getting at. Could it be the quote:
Our egos are powerful things. They want to believe that we’re each better than we are, and we want to believe that we’ve mastered our chosen areas – that we’re the best. Whether that’s objectively verifiable or just wishful thinking isn’t the point. If we want to motivate people, we’ll give them ways to become masters or, at the very least, allow them to feel competent in what they’re doing.
In which case, yes, there is a loss of that source of motivation. And that's coming for us all - or rather it's coming for some of us in most professions. Most people are perfectly average in their chosen areas and never got the satisfaction of being at the top of their profession. Yet we still go to work. I imagine it will take some getting use to for Fields Medalists, but I think the average grad student that happened to just love mathematics and never aspired to be a medalist will still like doing math. Magnus Carlsen still became the best chess player ever even though AI's have been better than humans for decades now.
Most sources of intrinsic motivation are unaffected by these developments in AI. It may be the case that extrinsic motivations may be harmed by all of this if there's less money for mathematicians in the math community. The letter lists a lot of reasons to like how the math community does math, and I don't see any real reason they can't just keep doing math that way.
Honestly, I still don't understand the point you're trying to make. Or the realization you're hoping I'll have.
This whole discussion is basically a field demanding that their field be preserved for them alone to discover. No competition allowed besides the monks of mathematics.
You can invent whatever fantasy you like. I hope more honest people will read the letter (from the fields medalists and other endorsers) and consider it on its merits.
Here's the thing. I read the letter. I'm considering it on its merits. And it has very little. They made great arguments for why it's a good thing that the mathematical community operates the way they do. They could have made a good argument for why practitioners within the mathematical community shouldn't be seduced by the power of AI and should continue to build mathematics they way they do now. Ignoring AI as a tool, but perhaps not ignoring the results coming out of it, builds understanding and skill and develops humans. I'd be all for a letter that calls on humanity to not give up their humanity to AI tools. To not become lazy and overly dependent on them.
The letter makes no arguments why AI companies proving a bunch of results quickly at all affects the ability of mathematicians to do what they want to do. It's just a giant self-congratulatory list of all the wonderful things the mathematical community does and notes that AI companies aren't doing the same thing.
It's not enough for them that they are still free to pursue all the goals they outline in that letter to their hearts content. They want to make sure everyone else doing mathematics also sets aside their own goals and pursue theirs. I distrust AI as a technology regardless of alignment. And I've learned to just not use them and focus on the things in my life that matter to me. It turns out that I'm still free to pursue the things in my life that are meaningful regardless of the existence of LLMs.
The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
It should now be clear that the AI companies behaviour i.e. backstabbing the mathematicians and stealing their life's work is the problem and not the usage of AI itself.
I also pointed you to Self-Determination Theory(SDT) to understand Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivations that drives Mathematicians (and also Scientists/Researchers/Knowledge-workers) to spend their entire lives in the pursuit of knowledge. From SDT it can be seen that the AI companies behaviour, threatens everybody's Autonomy, nullifies their Mastery/Competence and robs them of Purpose/Relatedness/Belongingness. Nobody should accept this.
A) According to the letter, mathematicians most value:
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
B) According to the letter, AI labs aren't trying to do any of these.
Conclusion) The result is that AI is not competing with them in their goals of
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
The upshot is that mathematicians still have autonomy to pursue those goals, develop mastery at achieving those goals, and remain part of a community of others pursuing them. The only mathematician who loses these sources of motivation is the one who embraces the use of AI and personally abandons those goals.
The real crisis will come if AI does try to align itself with the goals of the mathematical community and if AI turns out to be better at developing insight, training students, writing comprehensible textbooks, etc. Then the top mathematicians will truly provide little value to their community.
Shouldn't the AI companies know by now that all mathematical knowledge belongs to the mathematical community? Hopefully this letter knocks some sense into them.
Spot on. They now feel threatened that there's multiple challengers to their intellectual monopoly. This is their "whaaahhh... whaaahhhh... private company bad, now," but where OK when Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Monsanto, Open Society Foundation, Tides Foundation and many other shitty and scummy private and so-called "non-profit" entities were funding their shit. Now their entire business model is changing. Is not that it'll completely collapse, it's just changing and they are throwing a bitchy fit.
I've heard this idea before, that civilization itself is already a misaligned intelligence, and that AI will merely amplify the existing tendencies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc
This is actually pretty good! Thanks for sharing.
I have a strong sense that almost none of the commenters and blog post authors ranting here about mathematics have any clue about mathematics or its culture. I do not recognise any of these descriptions of mathematicians at all, and can only imagine they’re based entirely on experiences of other, almost entirely unrelated, parts of academia. This is not the first time I’ve seen it online, but recent events seem to have exacerbated it.
Not sure quite what animates the absurd hatred of one of the least greedy groups of people on the planet, but it certainly isn’t experience. To anyone with any, it just looks like absurd derangement.
You are quite right.
All threads on this topic (i.e. Mathematicians and AI) are overrun by bots/shills/vested interests/etc. astroturfing for the companies.
It is just Propaganda and attempting to manipulate Public Opinion.
"People inside a moat, want to keep the moat from being breached because it fucks with their status quo."
EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. No shit, why would they want something disruptive to fuck with the way elite academia operates? And obviously I am talking about the "Master of the Universe" types atop the Ivory Tower. They have been A-OK, with privately-funded professorships, partnering with book publishers to milk students with single-access codes and never-ending "new" editions to their books, summer salary grants, partnering with all sorts of private companies as contractors, and/or milking on the tenure tit while the average adjunct lecturer at a local college/university struggles to make ends-meet and has 150 students in a lecture.
The author talks about his UC Berkeley years. That UC Berkeley that opened and operated for nearly a century as a public institution educating California's true middle class up until the 1960 Donahoe Master Plan, but slowly progressed to gate-keep "normies" out and pivoted to a model of elitism that is absolutely and catastrophically broken.
Fuck off.
Fat cat math professors have had it too good for too long. Leave some crumbs for the AI company CEOs!
> book publishers to milk students with single-access codes and never-ending "new" editions to their books,
The best example of this is James Stewart's Calculus textbooks. It is priced so high and made him so much money that he built a $24 million "Integral House"!
Where the money from your Stewart calculus book goes - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2011/04/18/where-the-money-fro...
The House That Calculus Built - https://www.fastcompany.com/3052267/the-house-that-calculus-...
PS: Just to be clear, the above has got nothing to do with mathematicians and their work. It just goes to show how bad the textbook publishing industry is in shafting students that you can make money off of them by selling centuries old well-known mathematics.
How dare the billionaire math professors profit off theorem proving!
The poor altruistic AI companies like OpenAI will unleash math understanding and theorems for free for humanity!
How in god's name—irrespective of how valid this is, and its very valid—is this even remotely germane to the issue of AI in mathematics? Rattling off incidents and making the case that there is discrimination and sexists in mathematics (yeah no shit), how is this related to the issue of AI that was raised in the letter? Are the complaints raised in that letter any less valid because the mathematicians who signed them make part of a community which has reproachable behaviour, both past and present? I really don't get it.
Why does it have to be about that? The author says they agree with the letter in the first paragraph.
It's a clumsily made point, but I think the gist is that the letter asks AI to align to a certain ideal vision of the field of math, that the math community itself is not well aligned to. I don't think the article makes this point well, though, just by listing these incidents. Don't get me wrong - each incident is important and worthy of attention in its own right, but I find the overall argument to be pretty weak and strongly reeking of whataboutism.
You are right.
This just reads like a rancorous rant.
In any human group there will always be issues on how we treat each other dependent on time/context/culture. But while not condoning it, this issue is orthogonal to that of misaligned AI.
The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
The above is true for "misaligned AI" in all the Sciences. It is time the Scientific Community got together and sued the hell out of the AI companies.
The letter claims that AI is destroying the mathematics community as is now. The blog asks whether the mathematics community as is now is worth saving.
I think the letter is misguided. So what if the AI labs are misaligned to math?
- But they announced a result before a paper was peer reviewed! The horror! So what? The mathematics community can read the paper once it is written up.
- But their results they publish may not care about conceptual understanding and insight! So what? If that's the mathematics community's goal, then they should sift through the lean proof and reformat the ideas to make them more insightful and develop their own conceptual understanding.
- But they aren't bothering to do literature review to tell the history about how humans contributed to the final result! So what? If it's so important to the mathematical community, they can do that themselves and throw a party every Tuesday in the honor of Luis Martínez-Zoroa and wear jeans on casual Friday in honor of Buckmaster and Alpöge - the left leg for Buckmaster and the right for Alpöge.
An AI giving a definite result of an open problem doesn't decrease the mathematical community's insight or conceptual understanding. They are still free to continue doing their work and pursuing their goals. If it's really so bad, they can just pretend they don't know NS is solved and keep spending their efforts trying to prove it never blows up (or a hand full of them can try to blow it up from scratch).
Guess what! I spend no part of my life working on unsolved math problems. I read some books for pleasure. I work in a hospitable with sick kids. I help my wife raise our kids. My goals are misaligned with the mathematics community! I've done nothing to increase conceptual understanding and insight! So what?
You might want to read up on "Self-Determination Theory" on how Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivations works in Humans - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory
For a nice introduction, see Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49679494
I might want to. Would you explain its relevance here and make a pitch for me doing so.
The relevance can be seen from the second link above (the review of the book) which highlights the essential points viz. the importance of Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation. It is short enough that you can easily go through it. Then apply it to understand why mathematicians are angry.
I don't understand why you can't just articulate the point yourself. It took me a while to guess what you were getting at. Could it be the quote:
Our egos are powerful things. They want to believe that we’re each better than we are, and we want to believe that we’ve mastered our chosen areas – that we’re the best. Whether that’s objectively verifiable or just wishful thinking isn’t the point. If we want to motivate people, we’ll give them ways to become masters or, at the very least, allow them to feel competent in what they’re doing.
In which case, yes, there is a loss of that source of motivation. And that's coming for us all - or rather it's coming for some of us in most professions. Most people are perfectly average in their chosen areas and never got the satisfaction of being at the top of their profession. Yet we still go to work. I imagine it will take some getting use to for Fields Medalists, but I think the average grad student that happened to just love mathematics and never aspired to be a medalist will still like doing math. Magnus Carlsen still became the best chess player ever even though AI's have been better than humans for decades now.
Most sources of intrinsic motivation are unaffected by these developments in AI. It may be the case that extrinsic motivations may be harmed by all of this if there's less money for mathematicians in the math community. The letter lists a lot of reasons to like how the math community does math, and I don't see any real reason they can't just keep doing math that way.
Honestly, I still don't understand the point you're trying to make. Or the realization you're hoping I'll have.
This whole discussion is basically a field demanding that their field be preserved for them alone to discover. No competition allowed besides the monks of mathematics.
You can invent whatever fantasy you like. I hope more honest people will read the letter (from the fields medalists and other endorsers) and consider it on its merits.
Here's the thing. I read the letter. I'm considering it on its merits. And it has very little. They made great arguments for why it's a good thing that the mathematical community operates the way they do. They could have made a good argument for why practitioners within the mathematical community shouldn't be seduced by the power of AI and should continue to build mathematics they way they do now. Ignoring AI as a tool, but perhaps not ignoring the results coming out of it, builds understanding and skill and develops humans. I'd be all for a letter that calls on humanity to not give up their humanity to AI tools. To not become lazy and overly dependent on them.
The letter makes no arguments why AI companies proving a bunch of results quickly at all affects the ability of mathematicians to do what they want to do. It's just a giant self-congratulatory list of all the wonderful things the mathematical community does and notes that AI companies aren't doing the same thing.
It's not enough for them that they are still free to pursue all the goals they outline in that letter to their hearts content. They want to make sure everyone else doing mathematics also sets aside their own goals and pursue theirs. I distrust AI as a technology regardless of alignment. And I've learned to just not use them and focus on the things in my life that matter to me. It turns out that I'm still free to pursue the things in my life that are meaningful regardless of the existence of LLMs.
Your comment is both clueless and disingenuous.
As i have mentioned in my other comments here;
The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
It should now be clear that the AI companies behaviour i.e. backstabbing the mathematicians and stealing their life's work is the problem and not the usage of AI itself.
I also pointed you to Self-Determination Theory(SDT) to understand Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivations that drives Mathematicians (and also Scientists/Researchers/Knowledge-workers) to spend their entire lives in the pursuit of knowledge. From SDT it can be seen that the AI companies behaviour, threatens everybody's Autonomy, nullifies their Mastery/Competence and robs them of Purpose/Relatedness/Belongingness. Nobody should accept this.
That far from charitable. My arguement is:
A) According to the letter, mathematicians most value:
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
B) According to the letter, AI labs aren't trying to do any of these.
Conclusion) The result is that AI is not competing with them in their goals of
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
The upshot is that mathematicians still have autonomy to pursue those goals, develop mastery at achieving those goals, and remain part of a community of others pursuing them. The only mathematician who loses these sources of motivation is the one who embraces the use of AI and personally abandons those goals.
The real crisis will come if AI does try to align itself with the goals of the mathematical community and if AI turns out to be better at developing insight, training students, writing comprehensible textbooks, etc. Then the top mathematicians will truly provide little value to their community.
Shouldn't the AI companies know by now that all mathematical knowledge belongs to the mathematical community? Hopefully this letter knocks some sense into them.
Spot on. They now feel threatened that there's multiple challengers to their intellectual monopoly. This is their "whaaahhh... whaaahhhh... private company bad, now," but where OK when Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Monsanto, Open Society Foundation, Tides Foundation and many other shitty and scummy private and so-called "non-profit" entities were funding their shit. Now their entire business model is changing. Is not that it'll completely collapse, it's just changing and they are throwing a bitchy fit.
No.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49679494