Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

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> That’s what technology does. And he might be upset but we’re the ones paying for it and frankly, I’m happier to have more questions answered than for fewer answered but in an artisanal fashion.

Would you prefer if graph theory didn't exist but we could answer if you can pass all bridges in Königsberg, without going through same bridge twice?

Or if we could answer any question without knowing why? What about answering Hilbert without theory of Godel's Incompletness theorem? Or knowing Nth digit of Pi without calculus.

Because that's essentially what you're asking for. If you gave humans a Djinn that could answer perfectly any question, it would kill most of our endeavors. Because it's not a problem that was unsolved for years "It's just the thing Djinn already answered so why bother?" Even if one is extremely curious, and devote a chunk of their life answering it, others would not see value in that curiosity. Because a Djinn can answer it in a few minutes.

Where's that from?

Now math isn't my wheelhouse, but every LLM I've seen provides far more than just the final answer and is quite willing to answer questions.

It's from this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/afLSVRFzsFc

Imagine you are Euler and magical Djinn's exist (that possess all mathematical knowledge written up to that point exist and function identical to LLMs). You ask it to tell you answer to the bridge riddle and it says that's not possible and even gives some plausibly sounding examples even. Then it throws a 11 pages of gibberish proofs at you, which are all true but very convoluted.

And what if you start digging into it? Won't other people say - "Hey Euler go back to ploughing the fields? We can have Djinn's answer all the math questions but this field isn't going to plough itself."

Today's, the Djinni-Euler's equivalent of someone looking at LLM's Navier Stokes equation proof.

Perhaps they would discover new Liquid Set theory that would turn Liquid dynamics from a field fraught with problems into a beautiful mathematically simple meadow.

> And what if you start digging into it? Won't other people say - "Hey Euler go back to ploughing the fields? We can have Djinn's answer all the math questions but this field isn't going to plough itself."

Seems like an overly pessimistic take to me.

If you have a magical Djinn happy to answer questions, why wouldn't you badger it a bit for the details? I can't imagine Euler of all people just wanted the answer.

Well you could, but would it produce its own unique theory just to simplify for people? Probably not. It definitely didn't do it for Navier Stokes.

It’s not pessimistic at all. Look at the advances in math thanks to hundreds years of pursuit to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem before Andrew Wiles finally did it in the 90s. You will not get that with LLM. That’s what mathematicians are mourning over.

This genie only knows the details that other people already formulated, because it doesn't actually think for itself, it just regurgitates human thought. That's what everyone seems to be forgetting.

Remove the human theorizing and the LLM won't be able to fill in that gap. All it can do is remix. It cannot formulate and, equally importantly socialize new mathematical theory. Without social acceptance and promulgation theory is meaningless. I might have a private "sort of graph theory but not" studying a slew of new mathematical objects called quizzgams, but if I cannot actually articulate this theory to anyone and get an active participatory body of people around it, it's pointless. Any "theory" an LLM can create de novo is such a theory. Because, again, it doesn't actually produce novel thought, just novel byte sequences. A thought is more than just its encoding, it is processual and social, which all the nerds and vc bros seem to not understand.

I’ve been on the other side of that, getting badgered for details by people who don’t have the conceptual frameworks to understand what I’m doing, and my experience is that it doesn’t really work. Sometimes, when they have a concrete goal in mind, they can communicate it to me and I can produce a demo showing that the software I’m working on achieves their goal. More often, they ask questions that don’t fully make sense, and can’t understand either my answers or my guidance towards the questions they should be asking.

If I were a Claude instance, rather than a software developer fielding these questions as a small component of my job, could I take a step back and instruct them from first principles until they do understand? Maybe. But maybe there’s just too big of a gap to be crossed in one step.

This reminds me of the X Minus One episode "A logic named Joe".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQuH5nI-pHQ

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