Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. The spooks are well underway.)
I’m not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof that’s barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?
personally I feel like all this shit is a continuation/outgrowth from the crypto "whitepaper" phenomenon: ~zero substantive engagement with the actual discipline in question, and "work product" (quotes intentional) equal to some claims with a "proof" thrown out as its defense
(it also continues to be part of a cultural and knowledge DDoS, which others have written better on)
Like, in other words, I don’t think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!
If it's actually exploiting a bug in a formal system, no. If it's a natural-language (unformalized) document which no one can understand, no. On the other hand a formal proof not using bugs which can't be understood, is still considered a proof, though its value is lower than an understandable proof (because as you said in another comment, the real value is in understanding rather than theorems). The prototypical example before LLMs was the proof of the four-color theorem which relied on computer-checked casework.
I suppose what it comes down to is, if OpenAI couldn’t be bothered to try and elucidate their results, or even try to separate nonsensical exploits from genuine proofs, I don’t understand why mathematicians shouldn’t treat all of it as worthless instead of doing unpaid PR work for them.
I think the problem, from a layman's perspective, is that it wasn't until the mathematicians started digging through it that it became apparent how bad the situation was. My only frame of reference for whether the proofs are nonsense or not is you kind folks bitching about it, and OpenAI was happy to do the marketing part with or without anyone signing on.
I mean, I don't know, my confusion comes from also seeing a lot of mathematicians react as if mathematics are over and that it sucks that the future is all about checking AI proofs. And I suppose it's unpleasant when a sort of maybe authoritative entity comes out of nowhere and tells you the answer to your favourite problem is 42 and doesn't elaborate. But I feel like I might be missing something as to why this is a big deal. (Apart from OpenAI's shitty conduct, I mean.)
This was exactly the point - flood the zone with shit to show how “smart” the stuff underlying your IP is