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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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I'd argue math matters -- there's a reason that people like me who need to use our knuckles for times tables still sometimes know Dijkstra -- but that's probably not going to help math PhDs choosing between a barrel of bourbon or a different type.

In the short term, this might boost math as a job, since now there's literally hundreds of lifetimes of proofs needing deep examination and translation being dumped on a weekday night... but even in the best-case, that's not what people signed up for. And worst case, the machines might be better at it than the humans, and if they aren't yet, they probably will be soon.

In theory, math PhDs are well-educated extremely smart people who should adapt best and most easily to a career change, but again, now what people signed up for, the PhD isn't cheap, and a career change to a different field that might just become the next benchmark isn't encouraging. Worst-case, this seems up there with 'moving to a new culture' or mega-dosing on THC that pegs the schizophrenia risk.

Notably, ML related results are nearly entirely absent from this batch of proofs; maybe a half dozen touch on it, distantly.

Yeah, and both anti-distillation and anti-LLM-training-assistance techniques are already known and disclosed. And given the 3SUM problem, if I'm understanding it correctly, I would be very surprised if there's zero here.

Related really fun thought: previous LLMs have been very prone to 'leaking' out to the public net as they do more advanced work or get stuck on genuinely impossible problems. Here, either OAI has really stepped up their sandboxing game, the leaked outcomes have become internalized universally without public fanfare, my search-fu has been flopping... or a lot of this stuff doesn't count as 'advanced work' or 'sticking'.

Also in my experience with Math PHDs a lot of them aren't really wired for the general workforce even if they've got unbelievable processing power. My high school ex's dad is a top tier Astrophysicist and has won a major prize for Astronomy but I wouldn't really trust him to do any job that requires particular lateral thinking and he's relatively sociable and flexible by the standards of his field. There is a certain filtering, especially these days, where only the most stubborn and pure-mathy are the ones who decide to pursue Academia (especially if they don't have good diversity points) in the first place and the ones with more lateral abilities drop off the curve when they realize how insanely difficult a slog it is to get consistent paychecks in Pure Math.

the ones with more lateral abilities drop off the curve when they realize how insanely difficult a slog it is to get consistent paychecks in Pure Math.

Even in applied math there's the same effect. The people with the most focused talent and interest stay in academia, in a tournament where only a fraction of entrants can win tenure. (How many grad students does the average tenured professor advise through a PhD? In a field that isn't expanding like mad, the reciprocal of that is roughly your odds of getting tenure.) Everybody else goes into industry or other research labs, trading respect for some combination of extra salary and lower stress.

ex's dad is a top tier Astrophysicist and has won a major prize for Astrology

This seems entirely possible (Isaac Newton was certainly very much into alchemy, for example), but it seems more likely you meant astronomy.

And Brian Josephson took up research into psychic phenomena after he won the Nobel for his work on superconductivity. The PR required careful management when he was the only living Nobel laureate in the Cavendish.

I feel like people being shocked that the sort of person with the single-minded drive, curiosity and intellectual firepower to get a Nobel ends up wandering into other esoteric stuff after their big win. Especially when the big win means they've got tenure and budget to just do whatever they feel like exploring

Always forget which is which, oops. Fixed.

I always assumed pure math was extremely easy to get academia jobs. Even in engineering or b-school math profs tended to be foreign born with awful English schools that resulted in making any college level math class a teach yourself affair.

Being that math departments seemed stuffed with foreigners who can’t speak English I assumed that there were zero domestic demand to be math professors.

Never actually tried myself but I've got a few white male friends with Maths PHDs who've said vast majority of job openings are looking for people with more diversity points (and foreign born counts towards that) and the compensation is low enough it only really suits visa-desperates or ultra autists.

The USA's Largest Employer of Mathematicians is not really academic, and almost certainly doesn't hire foreign nationals. I genuinely have no clue what their demographics look like, though.

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