https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...
Math fosters critical thinking, and we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades. I don't think we can afford to sink even deeper...
I kinda agree, but I also kinda disagree.
My question would be if "math" is the right tool for that. It can achieve that as a side-effect, but how we express it and talk about it is full of legacy cruft, cargo-culting and general bullshit that makes it not exactly snap into place for all kinds of brain wirings.
Math I believe is not an end in itself. Maybe with that perspective, solutions that satisfy our needs there can be found
In contrast since then we've had almost not noteable physicists or Computer Scientists that I'm aware, we've got a couple, Hawking and Knuth. But apart from that I don't know if there is a single scientist I could point out today that has revolutionized our understanding or even done any real breakthrough work in the field of Physics since Einsteins era.
But my reply was I guess implicitly assuming the post I was replying to was talking about the median level of critical thinking. Your reply is talking about the peaks of creative accomplishment which is not what I was addressing.
You also seem to be restricting yourself to pop science knowledge of who’s made breakthroughs. That’s because our collective understanding of physics has become much more detailed, to the point where it starts to lose the ability to be meaningfully comprehensible to the average layperson.
Consider AdS/CFT, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence
There’ve been many major developments just in that area since the early 1970s, to through the late 90s all the way to 2019 (the island formula), with many major contributors like Bekenstein, ‘t Hooft, Susskind, Maldacena, and many less well-known names.
If you resurrected some of the scientists you mentioned, they’d have a lot of work to do to catch up, and making field-changing major breakthroughs would be just as difficult for them as for anyone else alive today.
Something similar is true in CS. There’s been plenty of progress in all fields of CS, but similar to the situation with physics, its nature is not as simple as what the founders of the field were dealing with, so there’s less awareness of it outside the field. Just to pick one small example, Conor McBride’s insight that the derivative of a regular type is the type of its one-hole context ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358663 ) is beautiful and kind of amazing, but not a result that you’re going to hear much about outside of PhD programs and the like. CS is chock-full of such work. The entire field of programming language theory has come a long, long way since Turing and Von Neumann’s time, to pick a broader example.
Compared to when?
This is true and nobody complains that GCC or LLVM is making programmers dumber. They are code-generation tools from higher-level source code. Much like LLMs are code-generation tools for higher-level language/prompting.
Online discourse though is collapsing under dumb AI talking points.
Now, they all did have gems of interaction that would could find by sifting thru the dumb stuff, but I find that property of discourse to be pretty steady. I've even found some interesting comments on YouTube videos and newpaper websites.
This is more like paying someone else to read your math homework, generate answers, and maybe even submit them on your behalf. If that had been the (average) student experience, math skills really would have collapsed.
Assuming we can re-establish the will for democracy and taking care of the whole group.
In other words, a positive outcome with thing X is possible but there are also big behavioral and cybernetic pitfalls, ones which are suspiciously persistent.
Ah, yes, a very BOFH approach [0] to workplace quandaries.
> I mean I use coffee quite a lot
Perhaps, but I don't think either of us would agree with the claim: "The way we integrated caffeine for productivity offers a useful and practical model for integrating meth for productivity."
There's an extremely detectable difference in the feedback loops that form between the tool and the people using it. There's something which remains unsolved ~90 years on. If we assume for the sake of argument that coffee is "good" and "productive", then that leads us to the question:
Are these LLM systems going to be more like coffee, or more like meth?
People can no longer drive a stick-shift car, whereas it used to be that a valet would always be able to drive one to park it.
However, I can use mathematica to demonstrate the criteria for various forms topological stability of solutions to many types of differential equations. I'd rather live now.
My most-common frustration with it is when products I want to compare don't have the same quantity-denominator. (Either a different unit, or sometimes a different dimension like weight versus volume.)
https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...
Seems like critical reading skills have already collapsed.
With a calculator you still need to understand the fundamentals of mathematics. You also need to understand how to operate a calculator and know its functions.
Even when removing numbers and manual calculation, being a function or formula oriented mathematician still requires you to know the theory and functionality.
With an LLM, you don't even need to know anything other than asking the robot to perform. You don't understand the output, nor can an unskilled person explain it.
what point is there to be a human calculator if nobody rewards you for it?
and I'm not talking about wealthy Bay Area tech workers doing it so that they can write their substack blogs but rather the average person
If we're going to be the last generation that understands code at this level, we need leave it in a much better state before we die.
"Oh, that old simple device didn't displace anything, so this one which is now quickly taking over every job will be just like that simple one". So I guess people today know how to sew and knit and bake bread?
"Oh, humans were always needed, so it'll be the same this time." Is that true of horses and oxen after cars and tractors were invented?
Also, yes I am dependent on a calculator.