alt Hacker News>OpenAI drops some hundreds of "solutions", incomprehensibly written "solutions", and we are all expected to jump on them and what? Appreciate their contributions? Why?
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>So, no, I will not be sending Sam Altman a bottle of whisky anytime soon, nor I am planning on spending my time reading through that paper and trying to make sense of it.
Think about a hypothetical circumstance where we get radio communication with some aliens on another planet. They send over tons of math to help us advance our tech, we know the math they're sending us is correct, but their explanations are really hard to work through because they aren't humans and the math is so different from anything we've done. Should we whine about the results they sent to us and refuse to engage with it?
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Love your metaphor here. I guess there will always be people who try to keep going and follow their current projects and say that only human math is real math and we should only use alien technology for proofreading mails and such but not their highly established and esteemed professions. Or just keep your hubris low, update your priors, work towards progress.
In this hypothetical case funding agencies would probably happily pay for “alien maths translation grants” and you could write papers about advances in that field and get jobs etc. So arguably for better or worse it would create a specialised academic cottage industry that somehow interfaces with the rest of maths.
> to help us advance our tech
The major discussion is about whether this will in fact advance our tech.
In the Three Body Problem, the alien race shows us “miracles” in an attempt to discourage us from the pursuit of science. Consider that possibility.