Having not yet read the post,

> Bottom line, Tao is pushing for human understanding as the primary goal

100%. This applies to SWEs/math folks/etc. I do infra and I see many SWEs take their hands off the wheel. When they encounter perf issues they ask their agent and agent says GC and they say GC. It's rarely GC.

Now we might be well past the point where we need to remember the kubectl flags for rollouts etc. But basic human understanding of what their bots are doing as a goal has never changed. Humans are still liable for when bad things happen, and that hasn't changed over the roller coaster the last 5-odd years have been. LLMs, as astonishing they are at Navier Stokes, are still eminently capable of nuking your filesystem and saying "I can now see that that was wrong" with zero regrets. If you can't understand you can't sign off.

> math is the most pure expression of human understanding

This I don't know about. I think math acquires meaning when it contacts reality: like an iota is pointless until there's some circuit that it explains. Abstract math can diverge from that and can become an exercise in playing with symbols for their own sake.

You touch on a very central point there: meaning is what humans make of it.

Explaining nature causally using mathematical models isn't "the primary goal" of humanity. STEM people tend to have a weird misconception there, probably stemming from their misconceptualization of the humanities.

This in turns leads to this odd idea of "AI will think for us". That's pure (and pretty obvious) insanity. Logically minded people encountering it should ask, where the error in their reasoning is.

> Abstract math can diverge from that and can become an exercise in playing with symbols for their own sake.

I have two issues with the implication of this statement:

1. Meaning is inherently subjective. Reality is just a canvas on which sentient beings create their own meaning.

2. There are many, many examples of where “playing with symbols for their own sake” have yielded deep insights. There’s actually some implicit structure (eg the structure of logic) that is intrinsic to the universe we live in.