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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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I'm skeptical of math as a field and how Tao practices it. I think there's a chance he's an invention of his parents and academia and so secret shilling for OpenAI is right in his lane as far as attention seeking behavior goes. Take this with a grain of salt though, I don't want to slander him. He's certainly intelligent but yet none of his ideas have led to anything tangible and the praise heaped on hims just feels like it could be better allocated to practical problem solving, so it makes me a little suspicious that there's a confidence trick going on under the surface. Also, if there's anything to this, he wouldn't be the first, Von Neumann was suspicious too, for example his uncle mysteriously attributed to him physically impossible abilities that have been later debunked. Again, not saying these men aren't smart, I think they are extremely intelligent and what they do is difficult, but that labels like genius are political in nature and that these men and their entourages seem to do everything in their power to claim that label, behind just focusing on the best contributions to math and science they can make. To the extent that I think their contributions to humanity suffer as they chase fads and prove abstractions instead of undergoing less prestigious work to make material progress.

I'm skeptical of math as a field and how Tao practices it.

This is an important concern.

Tao has almost certainly been offered dump trucks full of cash to join quant funds. Perhaps if he made global derivatives arbitrage a few points more efficient he could save every American's retirement fund a few hundred bucks a year. Would that be a better contribution to humanity than whatever he's doing now?

Good point, and grim. But he was also offered those dump trucks by OpenAI, and he took it. But he's not contributing to AI research, just branding. I don't blame him, AI research sucks. There's no theory to it, it's just try random things. Same with quant research.

There is tangible real world improvements that Tao's work has led to, like MRI scanners is brought up constantly as one of the most prominent and direct examples. It's true that pure math doesn't have many easy and obvious results like that, but that's true of a lot of science. Tons of important inventions are based off things that no one was expecting like microwave ovens (just a guy discovering candy melted in his pocket while working on radar equipment) or penicillin (accidently contaminated a petri dish while studying bacteria).

For every compound found in a gila monster that cures obesity, there's hundreds (thousands? Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands?) of other compounds that aren't found to do anything usable (at least not that we currently know of) but to find the former we have to go digging through the latter. We can make some educated guesses, but we don't know ahead of time too well what will be useful and what won't be. After all, that's why we do the work and the research, to find out.

ChatGPT indicates that maybe 10% of the improvement to MRIs from 2000 to 2020 was due to pure math, and Tao was maybe 10% of that. So that's 1%. But it says most of the improvement came from applied engineering using math as a tool.

After all, that's why we do the work and the research, to find out.

But pure math gets way too much status compared to how likely it is to find something useful/interesting. Most of it is pretty obviously a waste of time. Quantitative science such as physics is a much more efficient way to search useful state space with math IMHO.

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