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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21709 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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I do wonder how the reaction will be when, almost inevitably, some PhD student or postdoc gets scooped on a problem they had gone all in on and commits suicide. It's not like OpenAI seems to be following the standard process of extending feelers through the field to get in touch with any existing noosphere-homesteaders before solving these.

People still play chess even though computers have long been better at it than use humans.

I'm in programming, one of the fields that has already been most affected by AI. I can also report that I'm having some of the most fun and being more productive than I've ever been. My key has been to just embrace AI hard and use it as a tool the best that I can.

You also see the culture war starting up in that space. There are several Linux distros that have people pledge that they haven't used AI in the process of doing their contributions. My prediction is either: a) people are just lying about not using AI or b) they'll just lose and people who are using AI will simply outperform them in the marketplace of ideas.

So math people simply need to get on board. The train is leaving no matter their opinion of it.

The difference is that people largely only ever played chess for the love of the game. There are nontrivial numbers of people who do programming for the love of the game; in my experience, though, there are very few mathematicians who derive sufficient meaning from the "game"/process alone, and those who are are unlikely to find themselves in such high echelons of academia, instead gradually filtering out into other fields where you can continue pursuing it as a game (ex.: Martin Gardner, Greg Egan...).

I'm certainly in the "love of the game" category of programmer. I honestly think that you have as many in math. And unlike computers, few people ever went into math to get rich -- so my internal estimate is even higher for the math side.

Side-topic: I think the programmers who are in it for just money are the ones that are going to get selected out. I've been at this for a long enough that when I started a programmer was a good white-collar job, but not one to get you rich. My experience, and frustration, with how the field has changed over the decades is that the quality of people has become absolutely dreadful outside of a few highly selective places. And even places like Amazon (where I spent some time) are compromised.

I get joy from many things. From tweaking things big and small. I don't think I ever really got joy from the act of writing code. It was always a means to an end. And the end doesn't have to be strictly useful. Something I've been kicking around for the past 35 years (also: crap... I'm feeling old) is an implementation of the Game of Life from John Conway who would fit in with your list perfectly. I came up with what I still think is the fastest way to play it with "normal" code in the general case. Using Claude I was able to get this implemented with a front-end that I can interact with. I get joy from the algorithm. Joy from thinking of low-level optimizations. Joy from learning more about the innards of how the processor I'm on handles cache lines.

I don't get joy from setting up a build system. No joy from setting up a front-end that runs on my Mac. Very little joy from tweaking an unrolled inner loop. Less joy from setting up unit tests.

Having AI lets me get to that joy. And it makes me incredibly happy. And it lets me paper over the parts I consider ditch digging.

My gut says that the folks in math want the same thing. Come up with an idea, and have something else handle the proof. There's joy in simply making something better or pushing the frontier a bit more.

And with AI, you can make bigger leaps. Ask bigger questions. Get more joy from discovery.

In case you're interested: https://github.com/gburgyan/vlife and a technical paper in docs that's more presentable.

There are absolutely people in math for other reasons than money, but among the countless mathematicians I've known very few have been motivated by anything that did not factor through being the first to prove/discover/define something that others care about.

That's the thing exactly. If, through using AI tools, you can be the first to prove something, isn't that a good thing? Only through discovery can we reach higher to ask bigger question. It took a lot of work as a civilization to get to the point where we had the language to construct things like the Navier–Stokes equation in the first place; they don't just get written down in a vacuum.

So we've gotten to a step change in the system. The real challenge will be to be the first the ask the question in the first place. Even if that is automated away, you're still left with the pure joy of learning and discovery which is rewarding unto itself.

I can also report that I'm having some of the most fun and being more productive than I've ever been.

Same here.

Culture war would happen. The two main sides would be 1) "This is terrible. We should control AI and put my preferred political ideology in charge of society, even the parts of my ideology that have nothing to do with AI." and 2) "But you didn't care when the coal miners were committing suicide. We should put my preferred political ideology in charge of society, even the parts of my ideology that have nothing to do with job loss."

I think we’ll invent a new entertainment form of ‘challenge math’ or something where the idea is you try to figure out a proof you haven’t been exposed to competitively even if AI has the answer, and it’ll be like a game. Either way, I really don’t think this is reason to end it.

OTOH, when manuscript traditions and horses went obsolete, we didn't make this stuff major competitions. Calligraphy is now an art form that most people never encounter and horses are a luxury despite the government giving them away for free.

Horse breeding was and is controlled by humans. The dial was simply turned down as demand fell over 50+ years between around 1900 and 1950. Working horse lifespans are maybe 20 years. The human equivalent would, at worst, be something like a one child policy for successive generations and/or cratering birthrates which we already have.

despite the government giving them away for free.

Trump's trying to swing midterms with the "free pony" program again?

No, there’s been a free pony program for a while. The bureau of land management has free ponies if you want one.

You have to go find it yourself for that one though, don't you? Kind of like how there are 'free fish' in Central Park?

(ED: or ducks even)

No, they will literally ship you a free pony that they rounded up in the desert. It causes a public outcry among the sorts of people who keep track of government programs to cry about when they euthanize them or sell them to quebecois butchers.

Huh -- I had heard of permits or whatnot but thought you had to go get the horse yourself -- surely shipping is not included!?

What a country!

(that said I've heard that such horses are pretty impractical to train most of the time, so yeah people are probably eating them or something...)

Plenty of horse-involving sports still

We still use calligraphic scripts ornamentally, right? On books and signage and such.

Though I’m more exposed to East Asia where there is probably more of a calligraphy scene and more calligraphic script (even if printed) as decoration or for style.

There’s cursive script(not the same thing) used ornamentally very heavily, but most people in the west never run into calligraphy. Ever. You can hire an artist to do calligraphy for you if you’d like, but it’s quite rare.

I suppose my background is colouring this, then, especially since I dabble in calligraphy.

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