If knowing the answer is not valuable then asking the question wasn’t valuable to begin with.

We should remember that math exists primarily to serve a purpose and that purpose is not being a fun puzzle hobby for a select few mathematicians.

Imagine a programmer telling their boss it’s not about working software it’s about the journey of writing the code. Good luck getting hired.

I think if pro mathematicians don’t change their tune quickly they will soon see their funding approach zero.

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Kotlopou an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I don't understand this dialogue, which seems to repeat with every result of this sort. Of course this is interesting! And of course the answer tells us something! And of course we also want to understand where it came from! None of this is in contradiction!

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CoreformGreg 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Knowing the answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem wasn’t valuable. But the pursuit of it led to many developments in other fields of mathematics that were valuable (where value is measured in terms of $).

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aleph_minus_one 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Imagine a programmer telling their boss it’s not about working software it’s about the journey of writing the code. Good luck getting hired.

Your formulation is a little bit exaggerated, but I (and many, though far from all, programmers) would agree with the following more "tame" formulation:

Getting software to solve a business problem in an elegant and maintainable way means that we got the abstractions right. Similarly, if a software can easily and elegantly be modified to cope with new business problems, it is also a strong sign that we got the abstractions right. In this sense, the business problems that the software solves are indeed just waypoints on the journey of finding the proper elegant abstractions for putting the business problems into code.

Turning these novel insights about "good" abstractions into code and programming languages enables the team to iterate faster and generate business value faster. So, appreciating that it indeed all about the journey means a commitment towards an approach to accelerate the rate with which the team can turn business insights into code and code into business value.

I know that many managers do hate such a formulation, but I stand behind it.

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unknownian an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you were a math grad student, would you rather your advisor be telling you to LLM maxx your ideas or working with you and giving you ideas on your thesis personally? I know my answer.

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brap 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

To say that we must have people that know how to X, because otherwise no one will be able to teach how to X, is kind of circular reasoning. Why is X important to begin with? What’s its inherent value to society?

	▲	unknownian 24 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I could address your situation in several ways and it would be a long discussion that a quick soundbite wouldn’t really satisfy. But at the very least, your argument is one of the arguments I would use to question the privatization of pure math by LLM companies. Pure math has little value to society so AI companies should consider not getting involved when they aren’t really making life better for anyone and are possibly harming young academics. But to give a brief answer to your question directly: In my view, and I think many if they really thought about it, the point of life is to overcome. If there is an AI that spits out the answer to questions that don’t directly impact human wellbeing instead of letting humans explore the answer at our own pace, we should question whether that AI is worth keeping around or at least relying on too much. Obviously the question is more nuanced when it comes to math, because even pure math can have applications to understanding reality and improving human wellbeing. So the question then becomes what do we do with the AI when it can both improve our wellbeing and remove meaning from our lives? Is a life without struggle worth a life without meaning? Personally I don’t think so, so I think we have to optimize all of the benefits of AI while essentially taking a harsh stance against all the harms. Currently the main harm is to education, and that’s why I think we should question and probably even disallow its use by students still working to demonstrate their skills.
	▲	rubikscube09 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		what is your "inherent value" to society?

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goatlover 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If knowing the answer is not valuable then asking the question wasn’t valuable to begin with.

Let's say it's possible to know an alien civilization exists 100 million light years away from their waste heat. But that's all we know and it's unlikely we'll ever interact with them.

Was the question of whether we're alone still "valuable"? Wouldn't a lot of philosophy and even some physics fail to meet your definition of valuable?

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QuesnayJr 16 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Knowing the answer is valuable, but it's not everything. We also want to understand why. The four-color theorem has a computer proof, so we know it's true, but we learned much less from that than we do from a human-understandable proof.

Many of the OpenAI results can be made human-understandable, so it's better than the four-color theorem example.