Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era

bobajeff · 2026-11-02 20:06

From the outside seeing academics wash over concerns and debates about this it's helped me sort of get more comfortable with around my own questions about what I want from math and computers. What I've come to realize it's that I just want tools that do a job and enjoy learning them. I also get gratification of being creative with them. I'm not in it for expanding human knowledge or seeing the beauty in the universe or the pleasure of understanding something difficult.

kzz102 · 2026-11-02 19:31

Human pursuits cannot be separated from the humans who pursuit it. In the pursuit of knowledge, what ultimately drives people is what they themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides, both based on their own experience and people whose opinions they value. Humans do not pursuit Platonic knowledge for their own sake, and those who claim to do it, often are satisfying their egos in a different way.

bhouston · 2026-11-02 19:57

Following Terry Tao's posts he seems to be engaging in forced self-directed cognitive behaviorial therapy, he is trying to come to terms with loss while developing a new framework for himself and other as to where the value is. It is cool to see. It is better to engage than to be in denial and just fall into reactionary behavior.

I do not think I have such a well-developed concept of myself in relationship to my field as he does, I just found it hard to maintain and its value wasn't sufficient to invest that effort. I think the difference is likely that I am a "pragmatic engineering" type who does "the next right thing" and I do not need an overly complex over-arching concept of myself in relation to my craft.

eager_egret30 · 2026-11-02 20:07

I don't think the history supports reading this as Tao coming to terms with loss. He has been pushing for AI and Lean in mathematics for a long time, and he was one of the people who helped bring about this situation. As I understand it, his objection was to how OpenAI handled the Oct. 6th release, and since then he has been advocating for AI owned by universities. Also, I'd push back on calling the alternative "reactionary". That word seems loaded for people who are simply skeptical.

abstractbill · 2026-11-02 19:22

This is one of the best posts I've seen on this topic in a while.

I finished a math PhD before I decided to get out of academia and into startups. Since then, the older I get the more of a Platonist I become, especially now that I've taught my daughters a bunch of math (I'm their homeschool math+science teacher). And the more of a Platonist I become, the less I care about who made a particular discovery. Who cares?! It seems obvious (and quite beautiful) to me now that the same discoveries must be getting repeated again and again across the universe by alien mathematicians, and eventually by their AIs.

witty_raven35 · 2026-11-02 19:43

If who makes a discovery doesn't matter and AIs will rediscover everything anyway, what's the case for your children learning math themselves rather than just prompting AIs?

rubikscube09 · 2026-11-02 19:24

yeah but it's fun to discover things with your own brain

j2kun · 2026-11-02 19:42

This essay seems to say, "people don't matter; all that matters is truth." And that all the policy decisions should follow from that assumed value.

Yikes. I fear for what mathematics will become if that becomes the majority viewpoint.

spry_grebe26 · 2026-11-02 19:48

This satire imagines a dystopian future for mathematics along these lines, and I think it's close to where things are heading (satire tends to become reality in Silicon Valley):

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/31/lean-me-softly-a-satire-about-a-dystopian-future-for-mathematics/

In my view, some tenured mathematicians are pushing for something very much like it.

Waterluvian · 2026-11-02 19:41

Watching Star Trek TNG as a kid, I vividly recall hearing Geordi or Data often say things like "run a level 3 diagnostic on the Worf Barrels" or whatever to the computer and wonder what the heck that would even be. I wondered where are all ship devops and programmers were hidden. Though I recall the one accurate part was Barclay in the Holodeck spending most of the time setting up his IDE.

Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level. Great. So then what are all the people on the Enterprise actually doing? My guess is they're all just being people and doing people stuff like exploring the galaxy and smugfacing the Romulans. It would be easier to just create a race of Datas to do it safer. The Datas could probably be Bluetoothed to the Ship's Computer for even more optimization.

I think some of the struggle is that as we summit each subsequent hill of challenge, the sunset (or is it a sunrise?) is becoming inescapably bright. We're faced with that big ol' "what's the point of all this?" question. What's the point of studying math? What's the point of exploring the galaxy? What's the point of standing under a stack of blue barrels?

I'm not a math guy. I dunno if a Fields medal comes with free Taco Bell for life or something else that would truly move me. But I love that I get to read books and learn cool things and feel that spark of joy when my understanding expands, even if the ending is right there with nothing stopping me from skipping to it.

sam_lowry_ · 2026-11-02 19:21

AI inflicted the 4th narcisstic wound on humanity, the other three being Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_injury for the background.

cubefox · 2026-11-02 20:08

I think it's the third, because ironically the Freudian one seems to be invented by Freud out of a narcissistic desire to compare the impact of his work to Copernicus and Darwin.

crisp_vole81 · 2026-11-02 19:59

I was surprised to see a post on Tao's blog that seems to be largely AI-written. I also think the AI disclaimer should go at the start of the piece rather than the end, so readers know before they start reading.

anarticle · 2026-11-02 19:41

Feel like it's hard to accept egoless style, as in academia there is little but the glory to be had in the pursuits. In the publish/perish era, money is already stretched thin in the average research budget.

I want to believe, but research has been tightrope walking with no safety net for awhile.

So, either researchers get SF salaries? or? (first one is not gonna happen)

deft_mink12 · 2026-11-02 19:51

> we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of GPT Astra 6.0 and GPT 6.1 Sol in drafting this post.

The wording of this acknowledgment struck me. To me it reads almost like a grace said before a meal, which is a more reverent tone toward AI than I've seen from researchers before. I think that shift in how we talk about these tools is worth stepping back and thinking about.

opal_osprey30 · 2026-11-02 20:01

To me the acknowledgement reads as marketing for OpenAI, and coming from one of the best-known mathematicians it's probably very effective marketing.

Also:

> This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI.

I'm not sure why this needed mentioning, or why an LLM was used for it. There are dedicated tools that convert between file formats well, and for text that's basically unformatted, a copy-paste and a few search-and-replaces would probably be faster.

2026-11-02 19:26

[flagged]

azan_ · 2026-11-02 19:32

Propaganda for what?

sage_panda98 · 2026-11-02 19:42

My reading is that pieces like this serve to reassure the intellectual class, so their worries about AI don't grow into broader panic or unrest.

ai-pimpf · 2026-11-02 20:00

That is why the AI Gestapo had to flag the subversive activities above.

spry_grebe26 · 2026-11-02 19:45

I think pieces like this also end up framing heavy AI use as inevitable.