So overhyped. Yet they have no power but some prestige among nerds. The reason why it is bad is that the money/status is very limited relative to the amount of smart people. I would rather praise developments in quantitative sciences.

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orochimaaru 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not true. Novel mathematical methods precede their application by at least a decade and widespread use by about a century.

Calculus was invented in 1670, it was about 1680-1700 till it started actually being used in astronomy. The uptake was probably faster because at that time a lot of mathematicians were Astronomers as well.

There is a lot of mathematics created but we don’t yet know how to use it. My hope is that AI can bridge the search gap to accelerate this.

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leonvoss an hour ago | parent [-]

Quantitative scientists are also mathematicians. I'm not attacking mathematics, just probably-useless subfields. Is there any good quantitative evidence that actually estimates what percent of math work today will be useful? Because to me it seems like <1% and I feel like we could easily make that number a lot higher. Particularly I want to see massive improvements in quantitative social science; physics already gets a lot of attention so it wouldn't be able to see as much improvement to getting more resources but it could probably still get more.

	▲	orochimaaru 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think in social sciences it maybe more of an inability/reluctance of the domain group to use the mathematics as opposed to the mathematics being absent. Take category theory for example. The initial mathematics appeared in 1942. The application to social sciences started in about 1970 and I’m not sure of the level of uptake at the current time but a quick AI search says applications have accelerated in the past decade (needs verification).
	▲	yorwba 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What open problems in quantitative social science do you have in mind where better math could achieve massive improvements? I'd expect the bottleneck to be data availability nearly always.