> we urgently need to come up with good ways of explaining the value of having a large pool of human mathematical experts, even if it is no longer part of their role to find new proofs of theorems.
This is the main issue, and while I fully agree with that value sentiment, the Fields medallists’ letter failed to provide convincing arguments for why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding things, and how competition for postdoc and tenure positions would work under these circumstances.
This is meant to be a funny, stylized comment. If you can't bother to read to the end, just ask a chatbot to explain it to you.
Most people do not use any math after school in their lives. All of their real problems are political. Kids spend significant time in school being told that math teaches them "problem solving" and then leave school and discover, since math solves no political problems, math doesn't solve problems at all. In other places around the world, where by many measures people are much more numerate than Americans, people are actually poorer and live under more authoritarian governments. In industry, math has been reduced to a shibboleth for a neurodivergent lack of ethics, which is why mathematics PhDs go into banking, and never politics - and we imagine politicians and lawyers to lack ethics, which is pure projection, nearly all of our best presidents and congressmen were lawyers. Even the academic environment that supports mathematicians and the STEM community generally - all of that concentrated neurodivergence and lack of people skills has led to less political power, which means less funding and less new students, which has been much more threatening to mathematics than automated proofs.
I love math, but my honest POV is, the value of theoretical math cannot get much lower. The crisis is insurmountable. The community made its deal with the devil (Jim Simons) long ago, it thought it was a STEM discipline like bio and it's really a philanthropic humanities discipline like opera. Math is having its opera moment. Someone would have to step up as the rich person who saves math, and unfortunately, all the best candidates are right now destroying it with chatbots.
What's interesting to me is that this can be completely true (I believe it is), but why can seemingly nobody see the value and prioritize saving it. Opera is beautiful, it's one of the many things that make life worth living.
More efficiently allocating capital ought to be just a way to generate more resources for producing opera. And yet...
layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
This is the main issue, and while I fully agree with that value sentiment, the Fields medallists’ letter failed to provide convincing arguments for why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding things, and how competition for postdoc and tenure positions would work under these circumstances.
doctorpangloss · · focus · HN ↗
Most people do not use any math after school in their lives. All of their real problems are political. Kids spend significant time in school being told that math teaches them "problem solving" and then leave school and discover, since math solves no political problems, math doesn't solve problems at all. In other places around the world, where by many measures people are much more numerate than Americans, people are actually poorer and live under more authoritarian governments. In industry, math has been reduced to a shibboleth for a neurodivergent lack of ethics, which is why mathematics PhDs go into banking, and never politics - and we imagine politicians and lawyers to lack ethics, which is pure projection, nearly all of our best presidents and congressmen were lawyers. Even the academic environment that supports mathematicians and the STEM community generally - all of that concentrated neurodivergence and lack of people skills has led to less political power, which means less funding and less new students, which has been much more threatening to mathematics than automated proofs.
I love math, but my honest POV is, the value of theoretical math cannot get much lower. The crisis is insurmountable. The community made its deal with the devil (Jim Simons) long ago, it thought it was a STEM discipline like bio and it's really a philanthropic humanities discipline like opera. Math is having its opera moment. Someone would have to step up as the rich person who saves math, and unfortunately, all the best candidates are right now destroying it with chatbots.
mlsu · · focus · HN ↗
What's interesting to me is that this can be completely true (I believe it is), but why can seemingly nobody see the value and prioritize saving it. Opera is beautiful, it's one of the many things that make life worth living.
More efficiently allocating capital ought to be just a way to generate more resources for producing opera. And yet...