I think there's another interesting story here about how this was apparently moderately flagged and triggered the flame-war detector which kept the story off the front page of HN 2 days ago[0]. I think people are having a hard time processing this information rationally(?)

What can we do to make conversations around these incredibly exciting and important topics more constructive? HN is where I expect to read expert comments on these topics, has this style of conversation moved elsewhere?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157930#49132926

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tomhow 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The main issue was that it was submitted late Friday night SF time, meaning it was overnight or Saturday everywhere in the world when the post had its chance on the front page. The flagging was minimal relative to the vote count and had no effect, and the flamewar detector would have been turned off sooner if moderators saw it sooner (it wasn't really a flamewar, just a lot of comments). It still spent 10 hours on the front page.

None of this is anything out of the ordinary; this kind of thing has always happened. The only real story here is that moderators sleep sometimes.

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reducesuffering 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> HN is where I expect to read expert comments on these topics, has this style of conversation moved elsewhere?

For people who have been paying attention to accurate predictions leading to our present state of the world, HN has collectively been reactionary, incorrectly dismissive, and incredibly behind the curve. In public, people are better informed on LessWrong and AI Twitter circles. That's where frontier researchers are. Barely here

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jrflo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that HN is particularly negative towards AI because the vast majority of users here will have their prestigious CS careers disrupted by AI advances. So, there's an inherent negative bias towards this news.

I for one am really fascinated by AI's advances in science and math and would like to talk about it somewhere without the constant flamewars...

	▲	sothatsit 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Extreme claims on posts like these also, rightfully, trigger people’s skepticism. I don’t think it’s wrong to question claims that math is dead as a field. But then it leads people to miss the overall trendline. People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps leading to crazier and crazier results. The much more interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be, and what won’t. Writing has been much more stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there as well. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we get much better at manipulation? And then there’s questions like, even if AI can answer increasingly complicated math questions, will we still need mathematicians to translate results to the real world, verify them, or decide where to push the frontier?