I never had a chance against Terence Tao. Neither did you. There are a few dozen people on the planet who had a giant advantage in math and could do things no one else could do.

It was not some great awesome fair thing that math was dominated by some outrageous outliers on the iq spectrum. It's not some great awesome fair thing now either.

▲

georgemcbay a day ago | parent [-]

> I never had a chance against Terence Tao. Neither did you.

I'm not a mathematician at all, so yeah I certainly didn't have a chance.

> It was not some great awesome fair thing that math was dominated by some outrageous outliers on the iq spectrum. It's not some great awesome fair thing now either.

I don't see these as equivalent circumstances. For most people if they get beat by someone smarter or someone stronger, it may be disappointing but they can still respect and admire that they were beat by talent/determination/etc.

Getting beat due to access to money just feels slimy, because at some level we all realize money is not distributed on a meritocratic curve at all, at least not if you are measuring values any well-adjusted person would consider positive.

▲

danielmarkbruce a day ago | parent [-]

You keep saying "meritocracy" and the like, as though it's just by nature a good thing. It is not. High IQ isn't distributed evenly or fairly or anything of that nature, and yet "meritocracy" seems fine with the idea that "some people are just smarter than others, deal with it".

Rawls had a concept of the "veil of ignorance" which is probably better for thinking about fairness rather than "meritocracy". No one should lose sleep over the fact that the tiny number of corporates with enough capital can now beat out the tiny number of 180 iqs at a task (mostly generating proofs) that is not really valuable.

▲

myaccountonhn 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> Rawls had a concept of the "veil of ignorance" which is probably better for thinking about fairness rather than "meritocracy". No one should lose sleep over the fact that the tiny number of corporates with enough capital can now beat out the tiny number of 180 iqs at a task (mostly generating proofs) that is not really valuable.

This is a weird framing. To begin with you didn't need a 180iq to work with math. What AI is doing though is making it so that an even smaller part of the population can work with intellectual, fun jobs and even more wealth gets concentrated to a small elite. That is absolutely something we should lose sleep over.

	▲	danielmarkbruce 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know if you ever spent time with some of the guys that are in the stratosphere math wise, but they are different. I'm not talking about the average math phd - I mean the guys that are really at the top of the field. And you have to be pretty strong yourself to see it... they are way out there.