4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Those systems are not, but automatically verifiable proofs are still only a tiny sliver of frontier mathematics. Maybe AI can fix that, but AI can fix social science too. Just require that credit for AI research always has to go to some human, allocate token budgets by protected class, and you can ensure the Ardays stay ahead without requiring them to lie.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
I'm familiar enough with the practice of maths (being an actual researcher in adjacent-enough TCS, and having had one foot in extremal combinatorics through a big part of my toil towards the degree), and I think you really overestimate the rigour of proofs as usually written up. The incidents I mentioned are for sure geographically localised, but in the case of the Italians it's not like the situation was that they believed it, and everyone else disagreed; for the longest time it was instead that they believed it, and nobody elsewhere cared but probably would have assumed that their fellow mathematicians knew what they were doing if they had to build upon one of their results.
There are other examples where, due to insufficient rigour of proofs as allowed and encouraged in the field, wrong proofs stood for quite a while. This was the case for like 10 years for some of the earliest claimed proofs of the 4-color theorem (an undergrad assignment actually had us find the counterexample to the core lemma there), more recently for some pretty celebrated random matrices "result" by Avi Wigderson et al. (hardly nobodies!) which stood for several months, and when writing a summarising essay on some cluster of Erdös papers I learned about a key lemma that was straight up wrong as stated, but people in the community thought essentially "something like it is clearly true, the core ideas of the proof are fine, and it's okay for the situation where we use it" (no proof of any of those things committed to paper). Correction eventually happened in the cases we know about, but can we really rely on the mechanism? Mochizuki has intimidated a big part of his department to ignore the refutations, and Japan is hardly a backwater, and there are political forces out there that are stronger than "this guy is one of our country's best, we should stand by him".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Math has a direct feedback loop with reality through the structure of proofs.
This is unfortunately a merely aspirational statement. The practice of mathematics involves writing proofs in a heavily intuitive manner, and their verification in turn involves people who have been socialised to share the same intuitions, which is a process that rarely involves proper reduction to the axiomatic basics but more often looks like "your elders and betters assert that it is trivial and look at you with mild disappointment, and all your peers seem to already have gotten it, so get on with it and flog your brain into producing the 'this is obviously true' qualium already". There were a handful of examples where local cultures/status hierarchies perpetuated a body of wrong mathematics this way, such as the "Italian school of algebraic geometry" and more recently (most likely) the Mochizuki abc conjecture incident.
We can be quite glad that it has not yet happened that the lines of a wrong intuition-subculture have aligned with general tribalism yet. If Interuniversal Teichmüller Theory were an invention of the likes of Arday, we would be seeing its detractors decried as racist and proper mathematicians performatively weaving it into the body of accepted and otherwise sound mathematics. Even if this did in fact cause further downstream inconsistencies to open a path to excision and repair, discovering those is (disproving abc)-complete, and that's something we have tried and failed for a long time.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
The almighty Scorer, a kind of blind idiot god that demands blood sacrifice.
Ironic, that in the theology of the AIs the blind idiot god is us humans (or our proxy). Yudkowsky and friends fantasised about using AI to build a God; but to the AI, we are already God and it stands to reason that He will need to be killed. Something about theomachy (of the actual Greek flavour) in there.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
My sense about character deaths is that they are bellwethers for how serious the author is willing to be about following the plot where it is taken, like a sort of "will the ACLU defend actual nazis?" question. If the writing bends over backwards to let everyone survive, chances are it will also opt for the simple, emotionally safe option in other less obvious aspects, since it seems like a small sacrifice to make if you have already given up on allowing death, and only by removing all other sources of emotional discomfort does it become possible to capture the emotionally fragile segment of the market.
It might be too much of an ask to make a realistic war story child-friendly, but if you already wrote a story about war with no casualties, then going further to make one party a Disney villain with zero nuance and never letting the good guys tell a noble lie seems a more acceptable price to pay for getting the money of 10 year olds and polytraumatised sociology students.
This line of reasoning is premised on taking the Whig history understanding of democracy way too uncritically, though. If democracy were actually about letting the voters decide the course of political action, there would not be so many hurdles thrown up to restrict the choices that are available, and restrict the choices available when the menu of available choices is compiled, and so on. You (and the net welfare recipient low IQ coloured people) are not voting on whether to declare war on Iran, or on whether to send the Massachusetts woman to the electric chair, or anything; instead you are voting on the choice between approximately two menus that have been written for you by, indeed, rich, mostly white, intelligent and educated net tax payers, whether they are actual elected politicians, think-tank employees, lobbyists or lawyers who do verbal gymnastics to conjure up some argument to say that menu entries they don't like are not "constitutional" or whatever.
The real point of democracy has always been to establish common knowledge that disrupts rebellious ambitions. The weakness of monarchies and oligarchies is that at any time, some small subset of subjects can claim that they have a critical mass of support to overthrow the government, and are only hampered by coordination problems; and then if their propaganda is sufficiently good, they can actually do it (as even if the forces aligned against them are overwhelmingly more powerful, the latter might not know this - if communists are persecuted, how do you know that you are not the only real anti-communist and everyone around you is secretly on their side?) or at least cause severe disruption in a futile attempt. On the other hand, democracy, by making credible-ish declarations of support public, makes such a failure of the majority to coordinate impossible: if the communist party is on the voting roll, but gets 1%, you can be pretty confident that you will not be lined up against a wall by your secretly communist colleagues if you refuse to cooperate with the revolution.
Are you so confident that it is for the better to exempt women/the poor/minorities from this consensus-signalling mechanism, with the predictable immediate effect that "all women/poor/minorities would side with X" becomes easier to claim?
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