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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
You used "happened" yourself in your post, when you said "get them to concede ... the October 7th attacks happened". This is because this turn of phrase is natural in English, and you are trying to make a lot of tea from very little leaf there. I have no problem with the wording "Hamas performed, fully agentically, the Oct 7th attacks", nor would I take any issue with the converse "the levelling of Gaza happened"! Not every random stylistic choice has to be a dog whistle for whatever proves your grand theory.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
And yet you still refuse to assign any moral responsibility for the escalation in hostilities to Hamas.
Can you show me where you think I said they have no moral responsibility? Of course they do; both parties do in an escalation spiral. I just think the Israelis have more, while it seems to me that you, in your attempts to frame the story as a simple "the Palestinians started it", think they have none.
I do think that, in a very basic sense, the Israelis do have more agency, because to begin with, unlike the Palestinians they have a very plausible option to simply abandon their project of conquest and gtfo. If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.
"in a day"
I dispute that how many days the killing was spread out over is particularly relevant.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
"Low-level" is relative. Yes, Oct 7th was an escalation. So was the Israeli response! Israel kills n people in 2023, then Hamas kills about 1.2k, then Israel kills 71k. It doesn't look like n is much smaller than 1200/(71/1.2)! Conveniently place your arbitrary cutoff between "high-level" and "low-level" somewhere else, and you can say there was a low-level conflict prior to Oct 27th followed by a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities. (Certainly Hamas reduced no Israeli cities to rubble.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
A lot of things happened in 2023 before Oct 7th, too. Look in particular at entries such as June 19th and 21st. Of course no single one of those events will have been "the reason"; and to begin with, mirroring your (1) and (2), from the beginning of its existence, the stated goal of Israel was to create a Jewish state in that territory, which implies expelling the Palestinians or at least codifying their status as second-class citizens in their own home, and Israel acted aggressively towards them immediately following its founding (and, in fact, its predecessor organisations did so before the founding). (3) seems completely irrelevant, since the Egyptians presumably did not do any of those things. I think "Israel's stated purpose entails expelling the Palestinians"+"Israel takes actions that have the shape of expelling the Palestinians" is a pretty compelling and plausible motivation for Oct 7th.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate.
Please show me where I said any such thing.
To define the "most recent conflict" as starting on Oct 7th, you either have to assert that there was no conflict before that date, or you can set the beginning of the "most recent conflict" at any point at all for your argumentative convenience. If it's the latter, then, well, I'll say that in the most recent conflict (the one that started on Oct 27th 2023 or so), Israel struck first. That part is not open for debate, etc.
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.
More options
Context Copy link