Mostly Mathematics, Markets, Physics, Finance, Risk, Immigration, Policy, Music, Economics, Society, Kayfabe, Technology and Tropical Fruit.
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What really happened on @PiersUncensored?
You’d *never* believe it if I told you.
Here:
Meanwhile in the U.S….we are busy pretending that scientists don’t matter and that companies do everything.
China has selected its first group of young researchers to receive funding for up to 15 years, in one of the longest research grants on offer to scientists globally
go.nature.com/4z4Q3pw
Xenophilic Restrictionists wanted to avoid being forced to later become Xenophilic Expulsionists.
"Mass Immigration is the rarest thing in all of economics: a true 'Free Lunch'."
-@Noahpinion perhaps 10-13 years ago.
This is quite right. In the 1980s well into 2010s there was a crazy idea of employers, economists like @Noahpinion, and conservative ideologues like those at @wsj (e.g. Robert Bartley) that borders should be open because mass immigration was the rarest thing in all of economics: a complete free lunch.
I am not making this up. Actual adults. And conservatives at that.
And some people at the UN (e.g. Manolo Abella) and I tried to fight this mass immigration mass delusion using economics. But you have to have a high school education to understand the argument that we were attacking the @noahpinion like ideological zealots using their own economic theory and claimed idealism. The internet is struggling with this idea. An 80+ Iq is helpful but not essential here as well.
The point was to make the Free Market pay for immigration. And free marketeers hated the idea. Why? Because they weren't free marketeers. Ever. Duh.
They were thieves and fools.
You see the open borders movement was always psychotic and never about "the best and the brightest" nor "freedom" nor "markets". It was an anoying smug debating position which may yet lead to civilizational collapse in the West. Ask @Noahpinion et al.
Mark my words: It was always about theft at the expense of national suicides. Nation by nation.
I am researching now. And they were heavy weights in questions of immigration, yes.
I also realised that people like @ericweinstein were actively working on alternative solutions, better ways to deal with immigration by adapting the Coase theorem. He saw it coming. As a young man, working actually for the UN!
The UN did obviously not listen. Guess it was "too sophisticated" and most of those illiterate didn't even understand his approach/solution.
And as per today, some lunatics are smearing him being the Immigration Ultron.
Just saying.
No disrespect to Prof. @AlexKontorovich. This is however exactly what I have been warning you about.
It takes guts to admit that we are training people today for jobs that used to exist 55 years ago. And that is what got said.
Remember what I am claiming: top students used to survive in mathematics. See the graphics attached from top advisors in the earlier era when jobs existed...the students survived! It was never as Alex portrayed it to be. No current advisor anywhere has these kind of survival statistics. That is what is being covered up. And there are MANY MANY more advisors who shouldn't be advising a single PhD student. Ever.
We were training our future colleagues. Now we are exploiting workers misclassified as students so we can import them in massive numbers and work them in a plantation system. The students generally don't survive. And then we lie about them and say that they weren't good enough! That is literally how the system was rearchitected when the jobs stagnated over 55 years ago. And the sharp elbows edge out the sharpest minds often in the academic hunger games. Literally that is what happened. That's why the greats mostly dried up.
Now we have *worse* mathematicians on average who are more incrementalist survivalists than romantic heroes and we are stuck pretending that there has not been a massive decline from the Grothendieck, Mllnor, von Neumman, Atiyah, Serre era.
I am not blaming Prof. @AlexKontorovich. He has survived and I salute that. But make no mistake, he never saw the system that actually worked. I barely did when I was around 20 and it was already in flames.
But unlike Alex, I was often in the room in the 1990s in Washington DC when the post-cold war sausage was being made at NSF and on the Hill. And what we did was to largely destroy the university system.
Read what he writes. He is talking about the Hunger Games where one of the most important mathematicians, Zhang, worked at @subway and that is just fine. It's like training highly specialized neurosurgeons to be baristas or call center operators. It just doesn't make any sense and the mathematics community does not notice that it is operating a planation where it has to dispose of bodies and train our geopolitical rivals in sensitive subjects to stay afloat.
I am sorry. But we went mad under Reagan and then insane under Clinton. This actually makes no sense now and made no sense then when I tried to stop it.
It's a suicidal plantation economics operation that makes us weak and our geopolitical rivals strong. Full Stop. That's all there is to it.
In the US, we graduate on the order of 1000 math PhDs a year, and there are about 300 postdoc jobs (and ~70 tenure track jobs three years later). So no, a math PhD is not, and has never been, a "gold medal" (in the sense of an academic position).
And is "merit" about potential or about actual results? I really hope it's not the former (which is much more error prone to measure)!
About Zhang specifically, there's much more to his story than what's been reported, and it's devastating how much he suffered before his breakthrough.
In other words, established mathematicians and leaders of the community, completely failed a fellow mathematician yet again, turned him into a @SUBWAY PhD, and wasted almost his entire career over BS for decades.
Point Blank.
Question: why do we listen to leaders like this?
In April 2013, a 58-year-old mathematician named Yitang Zhang submitted a paper to the prestigious Annals of Mathematics.
At the time, he was virtually unknown in the mathematical community.
After earning his PhD from Purdue University in 1991, Zhang struggled to find a permanent academic position.
For years, he worked outside academia, including at a Subway sandwich shop, before eventually becoming a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught undergraduate mathematics.
Yet throughout those difficult years, he continued pursuing his own mathematical research, particularly the mysteries of prime numbers.
In July 2012, while visiting a friend in Colorado, Zhang was sitting quietly in the backyard when an idea came to him. He had spent three years working on a problem involving the gaps between prime numbers, and suddenly he saw a way past an obstacle that had frustrated some of the world's leading number theorists.
Over the following months, he carefully developed that insight into a rigorous mathematical proof.
On April 17, 2013, he submitted his manuscript to the Annals of Mathematics.
The response was remarkable. Within just three weeks, the referees had delivered an unusually enthusiastic report, recognizing the work as a landmark achievement. The paper was formally accepted on May 21.
For centuries, mathematicians had wondered whether infinitely many pairs of prime numbers could occur within some fixed distance of one another.
The famous twin prime conjecture predicts that infinitely many pairs differ by exactly 2, such as 11 and 13 or 17 and 19.
Zhang did not prove the twin prime conjecture itself. Instead, he established something that had never been proved before: there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes whose difference is less than 70 million.
Seventy million might seem enormous when compared with 2. But the crucial breakthrough was that the gap was bounded by a fixed number, no matter how far along the number line one went.
It was the first proof that bounded gaps between consecutive primes occur infinitely often.
His discovery opened an entirely new chapter in number theory, inspiring mathematicians around the world to improve his bound. In 2014, Zhang received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his extraordinary achievement.
For the love of g-d. Take a lesson from Israel.
You cannot run a modern nation around fear that @Yusuf4Love2002 with 168 followers is going to call you a far-right genocidal fascist if you pick up a gun to save your society. It WILL do just that.
Just ignore it, and fight back.
Feel free to give up on heroic and romantic mathematics, Sir.
We don’t know each other, but I have admired your work. Yet I offer an alternate interpretation, respectfully. We have simply forgotten what it is like to live among true giants. True heroes.
von Neumann, Einstein, Grothendieck, Weyl, Turing, Gödel, Cartan, Shannon, Weil, Kolmogorov, Serre, Gelfand, Feynman, Dyson, Chern, Leray, Kodaira, Milnor, Atiyah, Singer, Thom, Bott, Borel, Harish-Chandra, Wiener, Courant, Pontryagin, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, Fermi, Pauli, Landau, Schwinger, Tomonaga, Yang, Oppenheimer, Wigner, Wheeler, Bethe, Bose, de Broglie, Yukawa, Gell-Mann, Salam, Weinberg, Dyson, Chandrasekhar
etc., etc.
were all alive on New Years Day 1954. That’s not nostalgia. That is how far we have fallen in this preposterous era you have celebrated.
This is absolutely categorically *NOT* the romantic era of individual heroism. This has been the era of mostly modest, professional, institutional incrementalism…with an occasional Grisha Perelman or Witten.
PREDICTION: AI is going to break this stranglehold that our leadership has had on credit assignment, how fast we are allowed to go, and who lives and dies within this community. And you are absolutely free to take the other side of that. But you might stop trying to speak as the leader of mathematics and mathematicians who do not agree with many of your mysterious recent statements.
Respectfully.
Mathematician Terence Tao:
"we're seeing the end of the romantic era of mathematics, the age of heroes. we're moving into an industrial era where math becomes large-scale, done in big teams like the other sciences"
We're entering, rather unwillingly, a new era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost
Three notes:
First, Purests will note I am blending mathematics and physics. Very True!
Next, Cartan refers to the son Henri not his deceased father Elie.
Finally, Dyson refers to both a mathematician and a physicist (See their co-authored essay “Missed Opportunities”). ;-)
Exactly what I have been screaming.
Yes, I know it is hard to imagine.
But I was simply telling you a truth.
Even if it was hidden by all. Until now.
Precarious scientists hold back science. You had to pay these people properly. And they are now openly against progress.
Call me crazy, but I’m not ready to concede. I’m having a different set of reactions entirely, based around a simple difference: I think the main thing holding back mathematics has been human sociology of mathematicians.
Here’s why I’m excited:
“When will it stop solving problems and build its first original theory?”
“Can it figure out how octonions and exceptional algebra are actually part of the mainstream?”
“At last! A mathematics that won’t be built around a Putnam and Olympiad-style problem-solving fetish.”
Can it at last say “Y’all just wasted a *TREMEDOUS* amount of time and energy on Calabi-Yau phenomenology and Superstrings while calling people closer to the answer, morons, grifters and worse.”? That would be huge!!
“I hope @OpenAI will hurry up so that the machine can at last shake its human prejudice from the training corpus and stop deferring to our ‘leaders’.”
“At last, a non-PhD colleague!”
“Somewhere I have notebooks full of ideas and observations in areas that were too expensive to explore!”
“Does this mean that mathematicians are going to finally drop the bullshit about how they don’t care about credit?! Or that they don’t care about money?? Because @OpenAI is now running them in emulation…sped up! At last: a mature and non-infantile version of mathematics!”
“Shalom Koide, Tits-Freudenthal, Elliptic Cohomology, and Interstellar.”
—-
Let our leaders call for a slow down. Then get those leaders out of the way as there is no telling what the rest of us humans can do with these new tools.
My condolences to the problem solvers. A tough break for you. But know: It’s coming for all of us. I have no illusions about that.
For now at least we humans (e.g. theory builders, great writers) are still top dog. Let’s spend that time wisely and optimistically.
For all our sakes.
Navier-Stokes = Hiroshima. @OpenAI #math drop = Nagasaki. We must urgently reset goals + incentives in world where #AI is far superior at math + more. Only solution I can think of: authentically focus on human flourishing (not same as advancing science) psloh.com/math-ai
Remember what I have been telling you:
When adequate support dried up decades ago, Mathematicians and more so Physicists became a club where the senior members deliberately slowed down the pace of progress of all our research to match the pace and direction of their club.
The scale of this is staggering.
But... Why?
Why is OpenAI trying to solve hundreds of math problems to be released all at once? I think we got the point when they found a counterexample to Navier-Stokes -- internal model = great.
I am not sure at this point what this (hostile?) takeover of the mathematical landscape is trying to achieve other than, again, a massive PR stunt.
This is incredible. Wow!
In a certain very particular sense, this is now the world’s top mathematician.
Congratulations @sama! So exciting!!
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results.
github.com/openai/math
The United States of America has a right to exist. Despite having done some wrong and/or questionable things to become the United States.
Yet I’m not an Americanist.
I’ve never needed a word for it. We are just irreversibly here. For both better and worse. So I don’t debate it.
