Thread

1. encyclopediai · 1789809474 · focus · HN ↗

   The last days we are served these high goals about understanding, "digestion" and so on.

   But if you look at the practice of present mathematics, in the last 20 years it is all about publishing solutions to problems.

   There are famous problems to be solved, there is a hierachy of conjectures to be solved. A quick search here on HN gives pearls like "Theory building papers are dime a dozen and don't get published in high tier journals unless they solve a problem".

   And all of a sudden it turns out that problem solving can be automatized.

   So then what will problem solvers do? Well, from now on they will "digest" problems solved by AI.

   In a way or another they will find a way to stay on top.

   That's the goal, at least, but mathematics as a living practice does not have much to do with these games of power.

   1. dudeinjapan · 1789810590 · focus · HN ↗

      The issue here is not AI--it's academic papermill culture and paywalled journals.

      AI gives us greater freedom to "stop and smell the roses", explore hidden structures, etc in mathematics. It is a dream come true for curious minds.

      1. encyclopediai · 1789811891 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes. AI is a useful tool and we are going to adapt and use it.

         The phd student will be forced to publish 10 breaktrough articles, the university department which does not offer "free" access to AI (for its members) will see the its ratings going down, when compared with the other universities.

         It will be "use AI or perish" for academic management so on the side of academic management the ones with vision will thrive and the ones without will perish.

         But what about the publishers? In the last decades the academic research was made into a feeder for publishers. The main goal of a researcher is to write articles, which are later sold back to other researchers.

         This economic system is under big stres now, because for a while at least the academic management and publishers will have contradictory goals.

         And that is why this scare which is induced by those who profit the most from the present system.

         1. bonoboTP · 1789830406 · focus · HN ↗

            Academia can work fine with open access conferences and Arxiv preprint as machine learning and computer vision and other computer science fields show.

            1. dudeinjapan · 1789889009 · focus · HN ↗

               Arxiv is a good blueprint for what we should build on. Terry Tao gave a recent talk about how "canonicalization" is the key bottleneck. The limitation of Arxiv is that is non-canonical, non-peer reviewed. However, there is no reason that journals should have a monopoly on peer review (it should be noted that peer reviewers aren't even directly compensated for it, granted it is supposedly "priced in" to academic salaries.)

               1. bonoboTP · 1789895613 · focus · HN ↗

                  Yes. See ICLR for example, which is a peer-reviewed conference, on the OpenReview platform, with no publisher involved, the papers are just hosted on the OpenReview website. It's a similar situation with ICML. NeurIPS also doesn't involve any traditional publisher. Because why would they? There is an online platform to do the reviews, discussions, uploading the camera-ready etc. There is no real role for IEEE or ACM or Elsevier or Springer in this any more. Machine learning as a field has shown that it's perfectly doable, over many years now.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.