Applied Mathematician, Veteran, Nevadan — Probably watching Star Trek. (he/him/his)
Las Vegas, NV
Joined April 2010
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I’ve begun calling people that enthusiastically use AI in tacky ways (or are otherwise off-putting zealots) “Twomblies”
I encourage you to do the same.
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
The future is so bleak oh my god
Microsoft has filed a patent for an AI system that could rewrite what people say during livestreams in real time. It could change words depending on who's watching, taking into account their age, location, and language.
The idea is to clean up broadcasts by removing filler words, censoring swearing, or even replacing certain words.
The AI could also adjust the speaker's lip movements so viewers wouldn't notice anything had been changed.
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
The “we let Israelis sexually assault kids and go back to Israel instead of facing trial” caucus has spoken I guess
Vote Aaron ford
Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson broke party lines to endorse Gov. Joe Lombardo’s re-election campaign because of his relationship with Lombardo and his gripes with Attorney General Aaron Ford, he told the Review-Journal.
FULL STORY: lvrj.com/post/3907347
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
If you think this is about “hurt feelings” sry you’re a child. Stevens has been making veiled threats (of, at minimum, un-endorsing) for weeks unless El Sayed denounced ALL his meaningful criticisms of israel. He refused. At some point AIPAC had to follow through on these threats
NEW
The New York Times, which spoke to Haley Stevens, basically reports that this was all about hurt feelings.
So many people today made this all about Stevens putting country over party.
“On Sunday morning, Ms. Stevens woke up angry about being told not to come to church. She called Mr. Rogers and asked if they could attend church together, a gesture he immediately embraced, she later explained. She told none of her friends and allies in Democratic politics about her plans.”
Full Story: nyti.ms/47UNnid
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
No disrespect to Prof. @AlexKontorovich. This is however exactly what I have been warning you about.
It takes guts to admit that we are training people today for jobs that used to exist 55 years ago. And that is what got said.
Remember what I am claiming: top students used to survive in mathematics. See the graphics attached from top advisors in the earlier era when jobs existed...the students survived! It was never as Alex portrayed it to be. No current advisor anywhere has these kind of survival statistics. That is what is being covered up. And there are MANY MANY more advisors who shouldn't be advising a single PhD student. Ever.
We were training our future colleagues. Now we are exploiting workers misclassified as students so we can import them in massive numbers and work them in a plantation system. The students generally don't survive. And then we lie about them and say that they weren't good enough! That is literally how the system was rearchitected when the jobs stagnated over 55 years ago. And the sharp elbows edge out the sharpest minds often in the academic hunger games. Literally that is what happened. That's why the greats mostly dried up.
Now we have *worse* mathematicians on average who are more incrementalist survivalists than romantic heroes and we are stuck pretending that there has not been a massive decline from the Grothendieck, Mllnor, von Neumman, Atiyah, Serre era.
I am not blaming Prof. @AlexKontorovich. He has survived and I salute that. But make no mistake, he never saw the system that actually worked. I barely did when I was around 20 and it was already in flames.
But unlike Alex, I was often in the room in the 1990s in Washington DC when the post-cold war sausage was being made at NSF and on the Hill. And what we did was to largely destroy the university system.
Read what he writes. He is talking about the Hunger Games where one of the most important mathematicians, Zhang, worked at @subway and that is just fine. It's like training highly specialized neurosurgeons to be baristas or call center operators. It just doesn't make any sense and the mathematics community does not notice that it is operating a planation where it has to dispose of bodies and train our geopolitical rivals in sensitive subjects to stay afloat.
I am sorry. But we went mad under Reagan and then insane under Clinton. This actually makes no sense now and made no sense then when I tried to stop it.
It's a suicidal plantation economics operation that makes us weak and our geopolitical rivals strong. Full Stop. That's all there is to it.
In the US, we graduate on the order of 1000 math PhDs a year, and there are about 300 postdoc jobs (and ~70 tenure track jobs three years later). So no, a math PhD is not, and has never been, a "gold medal" (in the sense of an academic position).
And is "merit" about potential or about actual results? I really hope it's not the former (which is much more error prone to measure)!
About Zhang specifically, there's much more to his story than what's been reported, and it's devastating how much he suffered before his breakthrough.
It was only a “meritocracy” after Zhang proved the bounded gaps- all while he was barely getting by as an adjunct. The man had to literally prove the biggest result of the decade before anyone would give him the time of day.
Was he not good enough before? Seems like he was.
This is the exact opposite interpretation of what actually happened. The case of Yitang Zhang perfectly illustrates how mathematics culture, at its best, is a pure meritocracy. Regardless of how “unknown” you may be, write a paper that proves a longstanding problem and we will read it, and if it’s right, then you will be instantly recognized as a hero by the community.
This part of mathematics may now be gone forever (due to AI), and this is very sad; this is one aspect of what so many of us are mourning, even as we look with awe at all the amazing discoveries we’ve already been gifted and many more sure to come.
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Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
Terance Tao: Imagine prescribing a drug no one understood.
Medical community:
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
I disagree with Terence Tao's view of mathematics, which he articulated in a talk yesterday at Caltech (see slide below).
Applied math problems are not disjoint from pure math problems. This is not a minor matter.
So no, this is not a "more accurate model". It's embarrassing.
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
Update:
Hundreds of papers published (the package) ✅
The author list is "the consortium" ✅
Raw data not released ✅
Within days errors found in multiple publications ✅
One person claims credit for all the work of the consortium and compares himself to Newton ✅
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
uhh, let me be clear: better things aren't possible
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
I forbid my children to be smart. That is a 20th century mindset, Luddite behavior.
If any good came of this, I think it’s been my ability to mute / block a mess of clout-chasing accounts riding the hype wave.
In a not-too-distant second, It was cool learning that Tristan Buckmaster is a classy dude.
In yet another sign of AI’s surging dominance over human minds, OpenAI recently claimed to solve one of math’s biggest questions: the Navier-Stokes problem. But now three mathematicians have showed OpenAI’s work dodges the question rather than solving it.
spklr.io/6011ETxdU
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This is spot on- and (cynically) why I think we should reframe the “prize” / “path” for ourselves. Find a different- perhaps more satisfying golden fruits (in keeping with the metaphor).
Protein folding, predictive evolutionary genomics, or multi-scale closure models- all huge.
Here's my best attempt at explaining what I think this open letter is really about. It's not just the math elites protecting their status.
Imagine a tribe of monkeys who can see a dense grove of fruit trees at the center of the jungle. They all want to go there, but the jungle is dense and dangerous and there's no path.
They offer a prize to any brave monkey explorer who can retrieve a particular kind of golden fruit that only grows at the absolute center of the grove.
Officially, the goal is to get the fruit. But that's not really what the tribe cares about.
What they actually want is for someone to discover a path through the grove. Once a path exists, everyone can follow it and share in the prized fruits.
One day a strange bird appears. It flies directly over the trees and easily picks up the golden fruit, dropping it neatly at the monkeys' feet.
By the rules of the prize, the bird has done what was asked of it. But the monkeys are dissatisfied. The task required no bravery from the bird, and more importantly, there's still no path to the grove.
I think this captures some of the discomfort mathematicians have with AI.
A correct proof is nominally the prize, but much of the value lies in the path to the proof: the concepts, techniques, and understanding that the proof creates.
Human solvers create these naturally so there was no need to make them part of the prize.
AI solvers don't. Even worse, they destroy the value of the prize which demotivates the human solvers and leaves the field impoverished.
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Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
I'll bet there are other mathematicians scooped by OAI in the past few months that are going to be looking back very closely at what they did or didn't put into codex
Every Day I’m Galerkin retweeted
created theranos as a trauma response
