lobsters score: 1 · tags: ai, culture, math
Rather, I became a physicist to stare at large databases of histograms produced by a Lovecraftian-autocomplete of dubious correctness and say “yeah that’s probably ok I guess” to add to humanity’s knowledge frontier.
Honestly liked this post! I’ve been asking myself the titular question a lot lately.
score 1 · canonical
I raised this same point on Hacker News and was laughed at. I guess the AI boner is too big there, but I’m glad actual mathematicians agree.
They’re wasting precious scientists’ time by making them review these math papers in the hopes maybe one of these slop proofs are correct or open up an avenue for an actual proof. This is no different from the spray and pray approach AI contributors take to Open Source projects, code dumping slop on them and having the community sort through the manure.
score 1 · canonical
Man, I love me some good satire. And this is well written. Not by the likes of Terry Pratchett, but by a theoretical physicist, of all things.
Kind of makes me want to research the low-level mechanics of satire a little better. I’m curious how well, or not well, modern LLMs would be able to output useful satire. There would be a sort of meta irony in that.
On a more serious note, I’ve worked in process automation, writing software, my whole career. which only has about 10 years left. One of the questions I have asked myself increasingly, through these last 35 years, is “What is humanity going to do with itself, once we automate everything?” the last five years have definitely brought that into much sharper focus, for a much wider audience, than I used to have when I asked that question.
score 1 · canonical
I think I averaged one laugh per paragraph.
I know the focus is mostly on coders here at Lobsters, and the goal of coding is ostensibly to get something done, while the goal of science is different. I read a comment in the early days of LLMs saying something like there have always been two kinds of coders: those coding for the craft and those coding to get things done. They have unwittingly sat on the same teams for years with no way to distinguish them until LLMs came along, acting like a prism to separate them.
I haven’t been in science in a while but I suspect if coders are 80/20 split this way, then scientists are more like 99/1. It will be interesting to see what happens when they are separated.
score 1 · canonical
I will be very narrow minded, intentionally. I’ve always felt like “coding for the craft” is just an euphemism for lack of skill. The assumption that getting things done equates directly to somewhat a bit poorer quality code is wrong IMHO. People been throwing this idea around, that if you want to do it properly, it is somewhat verbose, extensive, with more abstractions and more complex ones. This isn’t true. It is had largely been used as an excuse for both buggy and incorrect code (because it’s supposedly faster to produce) and poorly and over engineered code (because it’s supposedly “carefully crafted”).
Programming, writing code, is an activity in the lines of solving an equation with pen and paper. Doing it well, means being concise and clear. Effective. Optimize the density of information for human consumption. No one would look at an overly long solution with too many extra steps and say it’s beautifully crafted.
If you were in it for the craft, why does AI bother you? What’s stopping you from continuing doing? Plenty of people enjoy woodworking with hand tools despite 99%+ of furniture being produced st factories, by machines.
Re position that you can’t be payed for it now, it’s not defendable. It boils down to essentially being non pragmatic and not only for your employer to pay for it, but also your coworkers to out up with your whims.
Of course every one enjoys having a job for which there is a high demand and having employers queueing up to raise their pay continuously. But the reason that existed was a simple matter of supply and demand. Why would you feel like that is some earned privilege?
I can’t imagine being in a position where I would have to defend my work against AI. It’s a pointless exercise and people should let go it.
Imagine in a job interview this question pops up: what do you have to offer that AI can’t do? Well… Then why haven’t the employer did it already with AI? Why are they even hiring?
I think AI is cutting through all BS and we are just realizing that a huge mass of workforce was probably mostly doing useless things.
score 1 · canonical
Re position that you can’t be payed for it now, it’s not defendable … I think AI is cutting through all BS and we are just realizing that a huge mass of workforce was probably mostly doing useless things.
So … we can’t use the argument of continual employment against LLMs, but most jobs were useless to begin with? What do you expect to happen to all the people who will be no longer employed?
score 2 · canonical
I expect people (myself included) find whatever job they can do competently for which there is demand.
IT was already largely inflated before AI. It already felt that easily most of the people in IT were unnecessary overhead. I have personally held jobs that existed due to artificial demand. Such as middle management securing jobs under their position in order to justify their own job. Or companies hiring as many people as they can in order to show growth to their investors. Or poorly engineered projects that require a small army of engineers to firefight daily problems, when the whole thing could be done orders of magnitude simpler and smaller.
This might sound a bit controversial, but it isn’t exactly unknown. Books like The Mythical Man Month or the Dilbert Principle, describe this rather accurately.
I’ve seen projects that had one design team and one development team per widget on a UI. Per widget, take a minute to fully appreciate the absurdity. At some point we need to question jobb efficiency.
I am not an AI maximalist. I use AI coding agents in a very conservative way. But the one thing that I find positive with the advent of these AI tools is that everyone is finally questioning if we really need so many people.
score 1 · canonical
Yeah the two camps that have always been there but only now are super visible is fascinating, I agree. I also agree on the 99/1 split among scientists and mathematicians (I am a mathematician by training, and lean heavily towards a lot of coding in my research job and also as a hobby).
But I don’t see the coder split as 80/20 (craft/goal) – more like 10/90, and as someone in the former camp it kinda terrifies me.
score 1 · canonical
Mathematicians have always benefited from their ivory towers (pure realm of abstraction) but I’m not seeing the same degree of opposition from the squishy sciences.
The messy python/R glue nonsense my biologist friends asked me to review has gotten significantly better since LLMs arrived. General software practices as well.
Trained in math as well; former colleagues and especially the new generation seem distressed. I actually personally think we finally have the impetus for mechanical translation/verification which will usher a new golden age in mathematics, but the growing pains in training and hiring will be real.
Office hours are packed with undergraduates who struggle to see the point of understanding proofs when a model can translate it to Lean in check it in 30 seconds. We’re going to have to move up the “why are we learning to multiply if calculators can do it” to higher levels, which I think will overall be good. Undergraduate and early research has always been reprove, convince yourself or work on trivial lemmas/bounds.
score 1 · canonical
The messy python/R glue nonsense my biologist friends asked me to review has gotten significantly better since LLMs arrived.
But the LLMs aren’t dong the biology for them, producing barely comprehensible yes/no proofs that do not lead to building of new theories.
score 1 · canonical
I’m unsure on this binary, as I feel that doing it “for the craft” is a bit infantilising. It’s not wrong, it’s just people can and do believe that “for the craft” is also the best way to get things done when you draw back your view to more global concerns and longer timeframes. You likely also amend “get things done” to “get good things done”, which carries a lot of the weight.
Nonetheless, if this binary were to hold, I have discovered that I am the former, crafty person, when I always conceptualized myself as the latter, getting stuff done person. All my working techniques for getting-stuff-done have now been redefined as love-of-craft techniques, and are now more easily dismissed, despite as far as I can tell, continuing to work. I don’t know how to feel about this.
score 1 · canonical
Would you agree on the “binary” classification in the context of a day job/necessity vs. hobbyist/leisure activity? Or, under external pressure vs. no pressure as the distinction, essentially?
score 1 · canonical
That’s not been my experience up until now, I have always managed to align my professional and personal selves rather well, with the acknowledgement that the values I bring to an organization have a significant, but not perfect, overlap with demonstrable corporate success. I could back this up with some small amount of data (a good example is the DORA metrics as they relate to software delivery and company performance, before they themselves started to focus AI and stop performing as rigorous science, in my view.) This was the compromise, or deal, I made with society.
Now, this is much less easy, so perhaps I simply never experienced the same sort of external pressure that others felt. This is sad, because under this sort of external pressure, where even your opinions on the micro-tasks of your profession are under scrutiny, I don’t see much point in hiring experts … you’re not allowing them to be effective experts in their fields. Maybe this is the majority of experience and I have just been privileged up until now.
score 1 · canonical
“Getting things done”, when contrasted with “love of the craft”, is actually more like “means to an end”, and as is standard with consumerism it turns out a lot of people aren’t bothered what the means actually are, or their wider effects, nearly as much as just having the thing in the end.
It’s definitely more of a spectrum; in between “just for the love of the craft” and “I don’t care just get me the thing” is a whole lot of “the end result is just another part of the process, and the process is what we need to do to feel fulfilled and satisfy our sense of purpose.”
score 2 · canonical
A fun reference for this thread might be Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Programmers and mathematicians are facing this now, but scribes faced this with the printing press, weavers with the mechanical loom, portrait painters with photography.
The dichotomy of end product vs process is bizarre. Sometimes, the end product is the process. You find the conclusion of this with performance art, but see glimpses of it with “hand-crafted” goods, or photoshoots on film. Sure, you could mechanize the production, or you could shoot digital and just slap a filter on it, but that’s not what art/craft is about.
score 1 · canonical
Thing is, computer users have mechanisation already. We clearly just don’t know how to use it effectively yet. (The dismal efficiency:inefficacy ratio of the latest thing is further evidence.) Imagine yourself with the same amount of hindsight on now as we have on the printing press or loom, and tell me with a straight face the notable part is LLMs and not simply computers themselves. Buck Rogers’ history books will say, “In the early 2020s, the sixth or so attempt at AI served as a stark reminder to software practitioners just how immature their field really was”, and the next sentence will be about something else. Our pioneers are still alive is how new software development is compared to any other human endeavour. This isn’t the biggest upset so far or yet by a mile.
The dichotomy of end product vs process is bizarre. Sometimes, the end product is the process.
Indeed. I’ll go so far as to say the end product and the process are inextricably linked. It matters how a thing came into being. By-products don’t just vanish when you’re not looking at them. Which is why (tangent ahead!) the “means to an end” or equivalently “why can’t we just talk about the fun toy and not its effects on the world” view is so… childish to me - fully-fledged people have a responsibility to evaluate their actions in the context of their consequences. Just going, “yada yada externalities, can we gush about how convenient this is?” is some Farquaad “some of you are going to die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.
score 2 · canonical