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cauchyesterday at 9:28 PM1 replyview on HN

I don't think "shared knowledge" means "shared knowledge between mathematicians and lay persons" (there is no much point in that, the same way a smartphone technician knows how a smartphone works deep down to the details but there is no big interest for society to have every lay persons being informed about it). I think it means "shared knowledge between mathematicians".

And at this level, while there are anecdotical exceptions, mathematicians have always been pretty decent (with their conferences, workshops, paper publications, international collaborations, ...).

So, it does not mean "teaching the subject", it means "creating a human network of people that share the understanding". LLM can be useful at telling a human, but you still need a human. The point of Tao is not that LLM is not good at providing explanations, it is that "providing explanations" is not the contribution to science, "the human network" is. It's like saying "LLM are great cook, they generate tons of food in space", but the point of having cooks is so that people can eat food and not die. Having LLM generating mathematical proofs is as useless as having LLM generating food that no one can access: the point was never to "generate proofs" or "generate food", the point was "creating a shared human understanding" or "eating the food so human can survive".


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tossandthrowyesterday at 9:36 PM

I don't get the argument.

I get that there is a cultural benefit to keeping it alive. Just like we ideally want the languages represented at the universities.

But keeping humans in the loop does not appear to be necessary in order to call it science, and certainly not in order to have progress or dessiminate that progress.

I don't have a problem with people doing math. As long that we don't idiomatically hold on to that way of doing things.

I do, however, find it hard to belive that individual humans will play a big role from here and forward, in any scientific desciplines.

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