> We might say that generating ideas is the real intellectual work of mathematics.
The article talks about how many new ideas are relatively worthless and the real goal is to find the "concepts that 'carve nature at its joints.'" I think this is the crux of the whole thing and I haven't seen a satisfying discussion of it anywhere.
I mean, FLT is mentioned. Is that an accessible proof to humans? Is it full of these high value, refined concepts or is it more like a bunch of little hacks that at least dozens if not hundreds of people randomly stumbled upon, in an all out attempt to solve one of the most famous math problems?
I'm not totally convinced what value math concepts have beyond "you can use them to solve even more math problems." I really want to believe there is. But if not, it's just a pure benefit to have faster ways to solve them, no?
There are definitely some results which have this "a bunch of little hacks" quality you're describing, and while opinions differ I share your intuition that there's something a little disappointing about solving a big problem that way.
But I think FLT is about as far as one can get from that situation! Wiles's work was the culmination of centuries of theory-building work, and the concepts that were developed over that time are far more important than FLT; the thing Wiles actually proved (a special case of something called the "Modularity Theorem", the full version of which was proved a bit later) is itself much more valuable to human understanding of mathematics than FLT. It's certainly very cool that it can be used to answer such a simple question that was open for so long, and it makes for a great headline, but I think if you asked number theorists working in the area they would almost all tell you that they're much more grateful for the theory that came out of this quest than for the mere fact that the quest was completed.
Agreed! There has not been enough appreciation for re-organization efforts of the dependency-tree of knowledge. Now that expansion of the frontier has been somewhat trivialized, it should be an indication that our priorities have not been entirely wise.
The value of these math concepts is in their explanatory power. We want to understand! Insofar as we want to maximize the diffusion of powerful thought-tools, ironing out the wrinkles at the frontier is needed to be able to fold everything up neatly. The benefit we should seek is wide diffusion of powerful theories, and the folding and the neatness has been long undervalued.
Apocalyptic predictions normally get everyone into gear to prevent the threat. Not a great argument for "let's see what happens if we just sit around this time"
The mental model here is that AI is a powerful tool whose main purpose is to outcompete others, increase power or provide a defense. This is not the right model!
The biggest risk is not that someone discovered a big new weapon, which by the way
> No one person, or one company, knows the answer and history is no guide
are you kidding me? It's a problem as old as time.
This is not nuclear power though. The bigger problem is a scenario where AI increasingly acts like bacteria, doing things autonomously, things no one really understands, things we think are confusing and weird. And then just by chance, some bacteria end up in some human lung cells and they turn out to be an excellent place to grow and multiply. Why is this worse? Because weird shit does not seem threatening, and it almost always isn't, so nobody tries to stop it.
Also, the argument in the article seems to be "obviously AI development is not a particularly urgent global threat," and therefore these downsides (risk of collusion, misuse of state power, etc) are the most critical factors? I guess, uh, yeah, if there's no benefit to taking these actions we shouldn't take them.
Thing is though, I think that the argument of "we don't understand how it works or what it does" doesn't hold up - everything an LLM does is observable. And if it's scary, we turn it off. If it starts to act like a bacterium / virus (e.g. it becomes self-replicating), we've dealt with that kind of software before.
But more importantly, we need to keep the organizations building and running these things accountable. If a company like Anthropic or OpenAI builds software that "escapes containment", they should be held accountable for cybercrime, just like people who write viruses (there's probably a few that did that on here, and of those a percentage that got in trouble with the law over it).
Mark my words, the organizations that develop AIs will keep using phrases like "we don't know what it's doing" or "it's too dangerous" to try and avoid responsibility and accountability for their software. Just like Google did, hiding behind "the algorithm" for lawsuits about preferring their own services over that of the competition.
Completely agree. It's a choice not to observe and understand what's going on, at least a very risky one if not actively evil.
There's a tradeoff though... isn't it already super hard to understand what they're doing with these math proofs for example? Clearly there's a tradeoff between deeply understanding the behavior vs. quickly solving the concrete problem, hence the big controversy in math now. From one perspective, letting stuff run ~autonomously in a mad dash to solve your problem is a really bad idea, threatens to destroy the whole field etc. From another perspective, solving lots of problems fast is extremely enticing and worth some risks.
Update for one other thought:
> And if it's scary, we turn it off.
Agreed, that's why I think the bad scenarios are some form of "it does some weird stuff ostensibly while helping us solve some problem" followed by "oops, we miscalculated that threat level."
The neural net engineering challenge was so awesome, I got really into it, spent way too much time and then was shocked when I actually managed to solve it. Since then I've gotten interested in... hardware. God help me
In Lathe of Heaven by Le Guin, the main character George is famously frustrating because he doesn't do much. Bad things happen to him and he basically just lets them. He thinks his psychiatrist is totally evil yet keeps going back. He has a pitiful lack of control over his life. He doesn't seem to want control, which is the worst part. He isn't super happy, and you could take that as the main point, but I don't.
even George, perhaps the most boring and least reactive person you've ever read about or met, would just laugh at the goal of being "entirely unfazed by everything happening around you." Even he falls in love, experiences great joy and brutal heartbreak, finds his own small ways of making an impact, makes peace with difficult things. For a character who supposedly does nothing important, he does a hell of a lot.
i am not sure why people are interpreting so extremely.
the gist of the post is "do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to." and "the goal is to just do your own thing.".
it is not "never let anything affect you ever, then die".
> the gist of the post is "do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to." and "the goal is to just do your own thing.".
So basically, a main character life, the life of a player. A player can even choose not to play the game, and it isn't their whole world.
The reason this post is incendiary is due to their overwrought metaphor which ultimately works quite poorly, if at all.
while it's not how i would have written it, i am struggling to understand many of the interpretations being posted in the comments. it's like people skipped over all the lines that say (or imply) "just do your own thing", and got immediately hung up by the use of "npc".
I'm just trying to explain why people are posting what they are posting. E.g. "likely from a stress tolerance so shallow and under-developed that the slightest inconvenience or expectation feels like a crisis" stems partly from the immature writing style.
But given that you are posting passive-aggressive "okay?"s to my explanation while purporting that you don't understand the comments while alluding to the notion that you do understand exactly why...makes me think you are just a troll, or worse.
not trolling, just found it to be an odd thing to add on. none of the other comments that i read at the time of my comment, except yours, brought up the age of the author.
i typically try to avoid using age as an insult. i find it rude. you don't, apparently.
(out of curiosity, what is the "worse" thing you think i am?)
I mean, the example they give is pickpocketing the blacksmith and the blacksmith just doesn’t care. So, never let anything affect you is kind of exactly what the author is proposing.
They try to reign it back in at the end with “goal is to do your own thing” but the examples given, and really NPCs in general, are the antithesis to that.
Ironically, the NPCs are designed to do exactly what they are supposed to with no free will at all. I have programmed you to do this, and thus you shall.
It's clearly more complex than the story these authors are telling, in particular the highest income consumers get the worst returns on their interchange payments. So stores and services catering to wealthy consumers are actually subsidizing an opportunity for savvy customers, many of whom are not wealthy
One note on patio11’s opinion on this is that he really overweights the ongoing work and innovation required for electronic payment processing. It WAS a great novelty and deserves to have made a lot of money for 30 years. But the reason they make so much money today is monopolistic low behaviors to lock in their advantages. It’s not a free marlet because of deals over time, some of the most famous of which are their prohibition on charging different rates for cards or even disclosing the rates on cards.
I think the most simple piece of legislation to solve a lot of problems is to allow merchants to pass along the interchange rate to their customers. If they could do this legally and operationally, this would solve most issues here. If a credit card wants to be expensive, fine the consumer should pay for it. Because of contractual and operational limitations, credit card companies have gotten themselves into the current arms race.
If stripe implemented this, it would make me appreciate them as a force for good instead of being a part of the problem.
>in particular the highest income consumers get the worst returns on their interchange payments
That's not what the article says:
>High-income consumers with high FICO scores benefit the most from reward credit cards compared to mid- and low-income consumers with high FICO scores. At the lower end of the FICO distribution, however, this pattern is reversed. On average, net rewards are far more negative for high-income consumers with low FICO scores than for middle- and low-income consumers with low FICO scores.
>Or, to put that another way: if there is redistribution happening, it necessarily includes redistribution from unsophisticated high income customers to sophisticated low income customers.
While it's true that wealth customers with low FICO scores are getting hosed, it's not clear whether that is enough to cancel out the effect that richer people (presumably) have higher FICO scores on average
To be clear though, the higher FICO scores get hosed the most, see the graph earlier on. Your quotes are conditional on FICO so they don't take that into account.
The only way I can put these things together is that at the high FICO end, both wealthier and poorer consumers get hosed a lot but wealthier consumers not quite as much. On the other hand, lower FICO band doesn't get as bad of a deal overall but it is worse for wealther people (plausibly because they have high interchange fees and don't use their rewards).
It's complicated, but... this is not a wealth transfer right? It is a transfer mostly just from consumers to credit card companies that provide them a service.
>To be clear though, the higher FICO scores get hosed the most, see the graph earlier on. Your quotes are conditional on FICO so they don't take that into account.
Are you talking about "Consumption by income decile" graph? That doesn't show them being hosed, unless you think everyone should pay a flat rate to access the credit card system.
I'm talking about "Interchange income - rewards expenses," where the difference is 6x higher at the highest FICO scores. And of course interchange income is not the same as cost to the cardholder but they are linked
> Over the last generation, we have solved tons of well-defined problems. We eradicated smallpox and polio. We landed on the moon. We built better cars, refrigerators, and televisions. We even got ~15 IQ points smarter! And how did our incredible success make us feel?
One big outcome of this is being alive more, that doesn't really make you any happier. Also consider stuff like a growing global economy that helps with things like, well, not starting as many global-scale wars that decimate whole cities.
I also think there is a word for someone who is good at poorly defined problems. "Artist." If you define that very broadly and maybe throw in some religious type roles, community leaders, etc in there too, you have a whole group of people who are dedicating their whole life to this problem. But these are super ancient professions and it's not really surprising that we haven't got amazingly better at them recently. I mean, art from centuries ago is still incredible!
Agreed, I loved my biology courses and lab work and had always had a similar sense of wonder about it all. It's interesting, I'm not sure that came from any teacher in particular and I bet there are plenty of people who just never feel it no matter how you teach the subject. That said, those are beautiful illustrations referenced in the article and they have a ton of teaching value, and I think a lot of core concepts that went over my head would have been way more accessible using tools like that.
When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.
In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?
Agree! imo this is the guiding principle that makes great tutorials great.
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