Per the dictionary, perhaps. But when people use it online they rarely mean it as a neutral statement about someone’s level of wealth. It’s typically meant to imply unfairness or that the wealth was obtained through unearned advantage.
You mean 1.075M? The house was the bulk of it. But that’s the point. A private individual will use his economic power on vanity spending and it won’t materialize into anything efficient or useful.
You seem to be suggesting that there's a problem with private individuals spending their money as they see fit because that leads to what you see as wasteful vanity projects. So I'm asking how you think the world should change to compel these individuals to spend on things you believe are more efficient and less wasteful? I would point out that spending $1.075M on food for starving people probably scores more utilitarianism points than an internet cafe though in your zero sum world.
When I say that people (or as you refer to them „private individuals”) using their economic means (and therefore resources and time of others that they hire) on misguided projects is a negative phenomenon, that’s a whole complete statement.
I don’t need to design any world changes to go with that. So your line of inquiry makes it seem like you’re fighting some phantoms or replicating debate strategies that you’ve observed. That’s unnecessary. The statement still holds up.
The only objection you can make is the silly one: actually it’s not up to me to decide what’s misguided, it’s up to those people who have the means. Or you can say doing useless crap is actually good which is not even a valid objection in my book.
I noticed you edited your original post to point out these “silly” objections. The point of saying “private individuals” is that they have the right to determine for themselves what is a good use of their money and your opinion about whether it’s wasteful is irrelevant. I was assuming you had some ideas about how to reduce the waste but apparently not, you just wanted to tell everyone about your personal preferences for how other people spend their money.
Maybe they should be shamed for vanity projects and not admired?
Maybe admitting that the phenomenon exists is the first step before any ideas can even be discussed? Clearly it’s extremely difficult for people to recognize.
> Note that this proof while impressive does not add any value to mathematics as a human pursuit.
I don't see how this can be stated with such certainty. We don't yet know what the implications of large scale autoformalization and proof verification will be on the human pursuit of mathematics. I'm open to the idea that it might be a benefit to the human pursuit once the human pursuit adapts.
> one might naively expect that the natural question to ask with regards to a given problem X in a field is "What is the answer to X?". But in many cases the more valuable question is "What can be learned from studying X?"
And later
> But the currently fashionable practice of pointing a powerful AI tool at the task of answering a problem X, unguided by any human expert in the field X resides in, has created an unprecedented divergence between the production of answers, and the production of insight, to the point where the two questions have become _negatively correlated_:
That seems narrow minded. Theres both "learnings directly related to the thing studied" and "learnings downstream from the thing studied". If you imagine mathematics being a huge sudoku puzzle of unknowns you are trying to fill in, each previously empty square you are able to fill in (or gain a smaller bound on) has implications in all sorts of other areas.
It's important to remember that most mathematics is not science - large parts of it are mostly esthetic pursuits that bring joy to certain mathematicians, and sometimes happen to have unexpected benefits to science or engineering (like how number theory suddenly became important to cryptography in the 20th century).
Fermat's last theorem is a great example - it is in itself a completely irrelevant observation, not used (so far) in any larger theory. It was only pursued because (a) Fermat casually claimed to have easily proved it (almost certainly being mistaken about it), and (b) it sparked the curiosity of mathematicians because it looks so simple but turned out to be so hard.
So what does humanity gain by knowing that the theorem holds? Basically nothing. What does humanity gain from the process of proving it? As far as it is known for now, basically nothing (though it is somewhat likely that the complex theories created to prove it will find other applications). However, those that have worked on it, and the guy who did prove it, gained a huge amount of personal insight into mathematics, and surely grew as mathematicians, and will hopefully use those skills in working on other problems that may prove more directly useful. Plus, they had a great time doing it.
What this means is that, if the proof had been discovered entirely by AI, basically nothing would have been gained. LLMs don't learn by doing, so no personal experience growth would have come from this; and as I mentioned, both the result and the proof are, so far, quite irrelevant even for mathematics more broadly. So it would have been actively detrimental, or at best neutral, compared to letting human mathematicians work on this problem, in a way that is never the case in science or engineering, where any bit of knowledge is in itself useful to at least some extent.
Interesting that Fable produced the Venus elevation map by training a neural net to generate it. I wonder what the prompting looked like to make that happen, I.e. was this a spontaneous discovery or the result of a specific request.
I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of developers the author describes. I use AI daily for limited code writing and lots of debugging. I agree with the author that things go off the rails when you stop truly reviewing its output and just click accept to get the thrill of productivity. I don’t think using AI for debugging means you have to do that though, it’s still a choice. As an AI-human team I have had the experience many times now of debugging an issue in a complex system that I simply don’t think I could have done alone or in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t think this is a reflection of my low abilities - it’s because the AI brings to the table skills that I’ll never have like reading through and correlating huge amounts of logs across many runs of the same system on different compute nodes in a cluster. Once it finds a needle in the haystack I can still take the time to understand and reason about what it found though.
I cannot fathom how people enjoy that book. I appreciate the writing (and love other CM books) but Blood Meridian felt like a gratuitous ordeal to me. I tried watching lit professors lecture about it too but I still just don’t get it.
I love reading, do it a lot of and per my Goodreads I’m “well read”. I’m less convinced how much I’ve learned from all the reading that would make me a better writer though. I definitely fell into the trap of wanting to have written a book myself. I grew out of that but still felt/feel like I want to write. The issue that remains is that I’m just not sure I have anything to say!
This requires a little effort. Finding your voice, finding your themes and all that. Also, the Taste Gap, as it's sometimes called, is a real thing - plenty written about it online, but Ira Glass is considered the first person to really nail it [0].
As this is HN, worth noting Paul Graham also had something to say about taste [1].
This means you're going to have to put some work in to figure out how to write and to get good at it, but it's normally worthwhile. I've been trying to get myself into this groove for a while, but just not getting there for all sorts of reasons, so I can relate to everyone who is struggling, but I also know this is not a problem specific to me, it's specific to the art, in fact all art.
What about the fact that due to modern medicine many people now live twice as long and therefore need to stave off the effects of aging, e.g. loss of muscle mass and stability, to have a good quality of life in those bonus years?
I'm guessing, they too live a sedentary lifestyle and that's why their muscles are wasting away. Ive seen 90 year olds in rural Italy out every morning watering the garden. She didn't need to spend any time exercising because she gets "exercise" by simply doing stuff each day.
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