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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

Yup, and it always has been, we don’t even understand how our bodies or minds work, yet we use them everyday

The amount of unimaginable complexity contained in a seemingly very tiny amount of matter to us, is incredible, and it’s all around us in nature

We’ve never had the capacity to fully comprehend neither ourselves nor the environment we live in. But we do our best, and we do survive and sometimes even thrive

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well math has always been about "understanding things" -- hence proofs and etc is the main tool in the field

(and why math differentiates between conjectures (maybe true) and theorems)

so that "oh some 3rd party person/machine understood it for me" can feel... a bit icky

And yet for someone like me who is not a math expert, it has (all) always felt unapproachably foreign.

Even pre-AI, there have been proofs that took years to be verified, understood and some were disputed forever and still are (like the Mochizuki / IUT drama). So, even without AI, maths has reached a point of specialization, where only a few people in the world know the areas used in a proof well enough to check it. When „new math“ is invented for a proof, people may even be more disincentivied to put in the effort. So, I‘d argue, AI makes understanding new proofs easier, not more difficult.

IDK why this is relevant to the topic at hand.

Everyone in advanced math research understands the topics they are reading about deeply.

This person is just literally being victimized by the AI incompetence apocalypse.

Information overload + trained laziness.

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