Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era | Hacker News Reader

Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era

terrytao.wordpress.com

185 pointssmilelamp165 comments

The lens to use is the Venn diagram of:

   1. What you like doing
   2. What you are good at doing
   3. What people will pay you to do

For math, if your goal is to prove something that no one else has proven, then all three are under attack.

I think the "egoless" path is taking a 50,000-foot view of mathematics that ignores the above lens. Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians?

In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians. I don't know. But it's easy to see that not everyone is going to be happy with the transition, and many will be left behind.

For software engineering, it depends on what your center is. If you like "writing code", then #3 is under attack. But for those whose goal is, "make something work", all three are still viable and even better than before (or at least faster).

That's why we see so much disagreement on HN about whether AI is good or bad for software engineering.

I'm sure lots of other people have made this observation before.

I got the same advice from my grandfather when I was considering fields of study prior to university. Interestingly, the western version of this advice seems to have dropped the "what the world NEEDS" [0] part of this Venn diagram. This comes from the Japanese concept of Ikigai, which includes the three items above and what would benefit others/fulfills some larger mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai#Diagram

Fair point.

But I've seldom been in a situation where multiple jobs fit the three circles equally and I need to use a fourth circle ("What the world needs") to decide.

I also think a core tenet of Western culture is that the power to choose your own path (individualism) comes with the responsibility to benefit others (service). E.g., selling cigarettes to kids doesn't fit in the center of the three circles because one shouldn't enjoy that, even if one is good at it and can get paid for it.

Instead of asking, "What does society want me to do," we ask, "How can I make the world better."

Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians

It's not a given that mathematics will survive without mathematicians. It's not even likely. The proofs OpenAI threw over the wall are unpublishable garbage, top to bottom. A big reason mathematicians are so upset is that they feel like they've been drafted into the role of unpaid editor for OpenAI.

Make no mistake about it, the mathematical profession is under attack. The biggest incentive for becoming a mathematician (as opposed to a hired gun quant) is the challenge of solving the proofs. Take that away and the most talented problem solvers go with it.

In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians.

That is the centre of mathematics. It's what schools pay mathematicians to do. All the research stuff, the problem solving, the "thrill of the hunt" for elusive proofs, and the prestige of being the first? That's the carrot the schools dangle in front of mathematicians' noses to get them to work. Without that, you don't get exceptional mathematicians teaching classes and supervising grad students (and attracting the world's top students to your school); you get adjuncts and only adjuncts.

If those OpenAI proofs are unpublishable garbage then our concept of publishing has to change. Pure math will probably shift from journals publishing PDFs to individuals (or their agents) posting Lean code in Git repos.

That’s of no use to anyone. Haven’t you been following this story? The value of a pure math proof is the understanding it brings and the additional questions raised along the way. Its truth value is of minor consequence.

That’s like skipping to the end of an important novel and thinking you got something out of it.

I've been following the story. Git repos of Lean code are a good start to developing understanding. First verify that the proof is correct, then work on ways to simplify it and make it understandable.

Many of the proofs released by Open AI don’t have Lean proofs. Their system doesn’t work in Lean directly, it writes proofs in natural language first. Later, some of the proofs were passed through an auto-formalization model to generate Lean code which then passed Lean’s checks.

The issue is that the auto-formalization step itself is not trivial. There is no formal verification which proves the translation correct, so it is up to mathematicians to hand-check the formalization to make sure it’s saying the same thing. Unfortunately, this problem is undecidable in general.

We’ve already had a paper showing that auto-formalization can’t be trusted implicitly [1], so a GitHub repo of a bunch of Lean code can’t be trusted to prove what the title claims is being proved.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144

> That’s like skipping to the end of an important novel and thinking you got something out of it.

Wasn't it just a few years ago that there were all sorts of apps ("Blinkist" ?) being pushed hard that did just that: give you the TLDR on some publication so that you could pretend to have read & understood it?

If Astra manages to genocide journal publishing I'd instantly consider it the crowning achievement of tech

Many journals already have a no AI policy no?

I've seen two mathematicians (Dana Moshkovitz and David Harvey) state that the proofs were greek to them as written but that other models understood the papers just fine and could break it down and explain it to them.

Dana Moshkovitz: "Basically the paper is so horribly written that it’s impossible to read it without AI help. I asked Astra for reasonable completeness and soundness claims of the noise gadget and it gave them by combining claims from all over the paper."

David Harvey: "The bottom line is that I think the claimed result is plausible. I have not actually read the paper. In fact, there are three closely related papers [papers], and I have not read any of them. I tried, but soon gave up. The math(s) dump does not appear to be strong on exposition. Instead, I asked Fable to explain [paper] to me. Fable seems to understand the argument and thinks that it is correct. I expect that thousands of frontier LLM instances around the world have come to the same conclusion over the last two weeks. If not, surely we would have heard by now. At first I did not understand Fable’s explanations. But I asked questions, and then asked more questions, and drilled down towards the core of the problem. Gradually I started to understand parts of the argument. I have seen enough now to arrive at the tentative belief that the main result is possibly correct (notice that I choose my words very carefully), and that the bound O(n(log n) α) has the right shape. I stress that I have not checked the proof in any serious level of detail, and there are many parts that I do not yet understand properly. In the sections below I will try to explain what I have learned so far, and why I lean towards thinking it might be correct."

Without AI help? Impossible. With AI help? Comprehensible.

That is consistent with the assertion that mathematics might outlast human mathematicians.

(Feels related to models evolving forms of human-incomprehensible shorthand when communicating among themselves.)

This is similar to some of the software being produced these days, where it's impossible to understand or develop the codebase further without AI. The complexity is beyond what even an above average individual human brain can comprehend.

Without making a value judgement of whether that's good or bad for the field in the long term, it is an interesting point to note the similarity with the human-incomprehensible communication among AI agents. When there are no humans in the loop, it's no longer necessary to translate or "lower" the representation for our benefit.

Since it's still early days, we can only imagine and extrapolate how far it might go in that direction, what might evolve out of it in the future. There could be entire fields of research that AI agents are busy working on and pushing forward, that humans can barely understand, if at all.

This is where we at my workplace. Up and down the chain nobody really understands the code anymore, it's obvious when you ask specific questions about it. Everyone is using Ai to generate, review, and ask questions of the code, but nobody has a good intuition of what's going on anymore.

Dana Moshkovitz is a computer scientist, not a pure mathematician. The work she does may have practical applications even if the proofs may be incomprehensible, just as incomprehensible software can still be useful.

Incomprehensible pure mathematics has no value to anyone.

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.

> Human pursuits cannot be separated from the humans who pursuit it.

But it's pretty clear you can chuck "human pursuits" in the garbage, in favor of what really matters: intensification of the market system and wealth accumulation for its own sake.

Your technology leader thinks: Humanity? People? Who the fuck cares about that BS? Fuck 'em (or "I'll fuck 'em and make them like it"). I've got stuff to build and money to make.

> 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.

It's pretty clear the message we're getting is "what [people] themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides" doesn't matter, and if you care about that you're an sentimental piece of garbage.

The thing though, is that ego is still driving anyone that is making more money than they need to survive. They just do not care about anything that isn't purely transactional, nothing is sacred, nothing is to be done for its own sake. It is capitalism demonstrating a kind of mechanical self-accelerating quality that is increasingly untethered from the human substrate it subsists on.

As Marx wrote: "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

And of course, that relationship is class war between the vast majority of the population and the owners of the productive forces.

>the owners of the productive forces

Without the owners of the productive forces the productive forces wouldn't exist. Go to North Korea if you want to see what it looks like when nobody's allowed build their own business.

North Korea was doing better than South Korea until America panicked and invested huge amounts into South Korea, creating the Chaebol system of enormous companies owned by a few families under a political dictatorship that over time has liberalized somewhat.

More because NK had way more natural resources and especially hydropower plants.

Interesting how that works that the natural advantages or external benefactors were more important than the economic system in terms of productivity.

False dichotomy.

I don't care about this "class war" or even ownership of the worthless "productive forces".

If you divide a product's cost into its "cost of availability" and the variable costs, none of this would even matter.

You could just ignore your noisy neighbors fighting over who gets to be the happy one, while you in your newfound freedom are simply happy.

If it wasn't clear, if you do not divide the two costs, then their fates are intertwined and so are the outcomes.

You can say this kind of thing all you want, but the fact of the matter is we've never had so much discussion about "human pursuits" in the history of humanity.

This topic has historically been reserved for those fortunate enough to be so leisurely with their time. Haven't you ever considered that you're seeing the beginning instead of the end? Why else would there be so much debate? It's a big change to the status quo.

If you're so convinced you've got this whole greedy game plan figured out, then why isn't it working?

> had so much discussion about "human pursuits" in the history of humanity.

I personally hardly have that impression, as in the days of the Romantics and of Werther's sufferings are now way past us.

Yes, and all that was definitely before the internet. In just about any other context, this fact would be irrelevant.

Long before the birth of anyone reading this, we shifted away from the extremes and started caring more about the median person's thoughts and experiences. It's a fundamental aspect of modern western civilization.

What does the median intellect know about romanticism? As a matter of fact, what do you really know about it?

> about the median person's thoughts and experiences

You're ignoring all folklore love songs, our ancestors were not these brutes who needed today's psychologists to be aware of their feelings.

Someone's a piece of garbage if they expect the rest of humanity to subsidize their hobby but never shed a tear for the millions of factory workers dispossessed by automation.

See, any serious Platonist would point out your line of reasoning is incoherent, because the conceit contained within such an accusation just covertly satisfies your own ego through a clever meta-discursive rhetorical maneuver. And they would be right

The truth of the matter is somewhere else and if only people were actually a bit better rounded philosophically and politically they would not be rehashing such talking points on either side of the controversy.

> 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.

The different way is "I'm different, my reasons are better". We are but ego.

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.

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

You can still discover it for yourself even if AI discovered it first (or some other human, or an alien on another planet). It is fun to figure out how something works, in and of itself

Absolutely. One of the best pieces of advice my PhD advisor gave me was that to really understand a particular result I would usually have to redo the proof of it myself (even after reading someone else's proof).

that's not nearly as exciting as uncovering something new first yourself, but I agree to some extent. Also that's not something you'll get paid for, it's basically coursework at that point.

Sure, but for most humans except for some on the upper echelons of education and intelligence, discovering something new for the first time was never going to happen anyway.

right but that's why i did a math phd lol! To be part of that group of humans.

sure, and what you said is also not mutually exclusive to what OP said

So why should your children bother to learn math? Just have them prompt their AIs.

When I was a kid we didn't need to learn multiplication tables or how to add/subtract large numbers or long division. By high school a pocket calculator could also do any algebra we were learning no sweat. We were still taught. But those graphing calculators that could do all of the work for us sure did come in handy to teach us a bunch of stuff faster/more clearly than was possible with the previous generation.

Whether or not 99% of people actually use those skills in life for anything other than to pat themselves on the back that they're "good at math" is another story. People are often proud if they can calculate a 20% tip in their head these days.

It is my belief that teaching math serves an important secondary purpose, other than the plain ability to multiply or substract. It teaches logic and reasoning, both skills now more important than ever in the age of hallucination.

I wish more people read Plato's work, or did shrooms. Both probably works.

Problem is learning math as a hobby doesn't put food on the table.

What did you mean to say by saying that in response to my comment? I am not sure I followed you

Sounded like you were saying you wish people were more platonic and interested in discovery for the sake of discovery, and not for the sake of personal accomplishment. The problem is, when someone else makes a discovery, there's no way for me to get paid for it. So the more "platonic" I become, the more I surrender myself to homelessness.

Or did I misunderstand?

Ah I see where you’re coming from. I was mostly saying that Plato’s work benefits life in general, not to imply go read Plato to cope with your specific situation.

I guess I replied to the parent OP to break into a tangent about Plato solely.

I've always intuitively been a Platonist, although I wasn't aware of the term to describe it. I extend the thinking to creative works - to my mind the greatest creative works have the same egoless beauty as mathematics, they feel like some truth in the universe that the artist discovered, rather than a creation of the mind of the artist.

I think there as a difference whether the discovery was done by some greek guy 2500 years ago or by a person who is still living and interested in knowing the consequences of his discovery.

(There is also some irony that "Platonism" has the mention if its creator right in its name, and that "creator's note" has survived the entirety of that timespan)

Following Terry Tao's blog 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.

This is entirely ahistorical and a typical remote psychoanalysis.

Tao has been pushing for AI and Lean for a long time and didn't like the way OpenAI handled the Oct. 6th release. He has now been pushing for AI owned by universities.

That is the public way he navigates the situation, who knows what his real game is.

He is one of the people that brought about this situation.

In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?

What situation? The development of an algorithm that can prove mathematical theorems?

The systems need Lean, training material, benchmarks, data labeling, experts, publicity and more. OpenAI gave out free researcher accounts to collect more training material.

All of which was provided and encouraged by a small group like Tao, Gowers, Tsimerman, Avigad, Schmitt etc. It isn't just "an algorithm".

> This is entirely ahistorical and a typical remote psychoanalysis.

I've been reading the posts on his blog (and I should be clear, many posts are guest posts, so it is a collective cognitive behavior therapy session):

Also did you notice he never posted more than 10 posts per month until September? These are definitely posts trying to come to terms with the new reality and searching for value in a field where humans are not pre-eminent:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/26/a-value-based-appr...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/why-do-we-need-hum...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/after-math/

I also see this post like this one that claims that mathematics will be needed as interpreters of complex AI generated proofs - I see this post as a form of denial in that this is just a current limitation of AI, and will likely be fixed soon:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-th...

> In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?

When new technology is introduced that is disruptive a lot of people fall into "reactionary" stances.

The first definition of reactionary that I found was this:

"A reactionary is a person or policy that opposes political, social, or economic change and seeks to reverse progress to restore an earlier, idealized state of society."

I think that fits with my usage.

> He is one of the people that brought about this situation.

Yeah, sure... What the hell are you talking about? Do you think that if not Tao we would not have the Oct. 6th release? That's totally insane.

> That is the public way he navigates the situation, who knows what his real game is.

What his "game" is? I've been following Tao for years... I can't think of someone I'd be less likely to accuse of having some nefarious "game".

> He is one of the people that brought about this situation.

A baseless accusation. Tao has no power over the progress happening at the frontier labs.

Reactionary is an english word.

Like many other posts on Tao’s blog, this is a post by guest authors, not by Tao himself.

yeah, people keep confusing his guest posts as things he said . I think he should just make a second blog only for guest posts. it would lessen the confusion.

What would also lessen the confusion would be people putting in the effort to read a little further than the headline before coming up with a hot take.

People have disclaimer blindness. it's similar to sidebar or banner blindness. it is also possible it does not show up well on mobile devices. how many people read fine print or terms of service?

That's a charitable view point.

He wants to give those posts exposure by posting them on his blog, so a second blog would counteract that. What he should do is simply put “Guest post: ” in front of each title.

The very first line reads "This is a guest post by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai, and Jie Xue." That seems sufficient.

Experience has demonstrated that it's not sufficient!

So Prof Tao should change his ways because HN commenters refuse to read?

Prof Tao should change his ways in a tiny way to make his message clearer.

This is a guest post. Tao has been quite consistent in his stance.

People are not good at reading disclaimers. the eyes immediately go to to the title and the body of text.

I agree, but I would also blame the entirely atrocious web design that has made it so that people don't expect there to be useful information anywhere on the page and just jump to the body. It's very practical to start subconsciously learning to skim when you're assaulted with noise.

90% of the time I can't even find the fucking time an article was written or last updated easily on the web.

His blog has used the same design for 20 years.

I meant web design in general not ttao’s blog, which is excellent. My point was that broader shitty design has instilled bad habits which carry over to even straightforward UIs.

Did you even read it? Wild the fanboyism for AI has rotted out the brains of so many people. It's a tool, it's useful, people will adapt.

The reaction was from the strip mining of pending human discovery, mathematicians were already using LLMs from frontier labs who then published suspiciously similar solutions or found connections that were just waiting to be discovered.

If you read the whole post you would see the disclaimer that it was written with the help of AI.

So folks are using AI to help them cope about AI. LLMs "stole" pending results is just another cope. Im sure quasi riemann was about to be proved if it wasnt for those pesky AI models. Jeez.

it's a bit funny: all that psychological jargon and shaky speculation about his mental state, but you missed that Tao didn't write the post.

similar to banner blindness or sidebar blindness, people have disclaimer blindness.

Do you think Tao wrote this blog post?

Interesting you wrote all these observations without reading the first sentence of the post. Or you would notice it’s a guest post

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.

The future of mathematics is outlined in this amusing quasi-satire (satire tends to become reality in Silicon Valley):

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/31/lean-me-softly-a-sat...

That is literally what some tenured people are pushing for.

loved reading this

Thanks for sharing. It is well written.

That was a great read.

Tbh, this was so heavy handed/poorly written that I couldn't get past the first six paragraphs or so. If this is supposed to be good satire, it's coming off more as "Epic Movie" than "Brazil"

Don't worry, it's far from the majority viewpoint, it's largely an 'AI' industry viewpoint that's being screamed at peak volume to drown out the ongoing economic reality that this period of insane overinvestment is drawing to a close. Who knows what the future holds for this tech, but I suspect in a year or two with the money no longer blinding everyone, we'll have much more realistic conversations.

For now unfortunately we're doomed to an endless retread of "AI boosters vs AI haters" with very little humility and thought on either side.

I think that if you had hiring policies that allowed people not to worry about whether they got credit for an achievement, you'd have people significantly more OK with transitioning to an "egoless" approach.

How would the hiring committees decide who to hire if not based on achievements? Flip a coin?

Racial bias

Besides for the extra-ordinary performers I think at some point flipping a coin might be better for this sort of problem, and there's some precedent. It actually be more fair than trying to find differences in the sub-top, actually more often than not introducing bias, when there's a lot of competition. Just put the top 3, top 10% or top 20% of those who fulfil a set of requirements in a raffle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_by_lottery

I've always found the colleagues that were less focused on credit, recognition, awards made better colleagues. Fundamentally it's about who you'd rather be holding you in high regard - people who've worked with you or people reading your LinkedIn profile.

If you're in a field with fierce competition the ones who focus on credit/recognition/awards get some sort of boost above their actual potential. Meanwhile those who don't will get punished, the ones who end up doing well despite it likely just had better aptitude (or something else advantageous) on top of having more pleasant characteristics. It's some sort of Berkson's paradox.

The counter to this is if those in leadership positions recognise this dynamic and actively seek to counter it by focusing on core competencies during advancement discussions.

Yes, they are better colleagues. They do not get promotions, pay raise or any other recognition or reward from management. Even from colleagues who hold them in high regards, they do not get praise on meetings as much either.

However, people with ego end up being praised more, in front of bosses or others, because people want to be on their good side. And that makes them look better, they end up promoted and seen as higher performers.

I don’t think this is true in general, but I would admit it depends on the quality of leadership, and their ability to recognise this dynamic. I don’t think you can have a high functioning company if you reward people who focus on signalling over the company’s actual goals.

I don't understand how making policies based on the truth is wrong. What did you mean by that?

That’s a great paper, I was tripping on these same thoughts last night. The thing that rang true was kind of getting back to these roots, the Philo-Sophia as love of knowledge, and a community that loves knowledge. It doesn’t matter if one guy has a 70 IQ and loves fables, or another is 170 and loves something I can’t comprehend, they are one family. I was as also thinking about old school ideas of wisdom vs plain intelligence. I had this powerful experience during Covid of finding music someone had made from sequencing the DNA of the virus, sitting there sick listening to the virus, singing the song of its people. It struck me that intelligence isn’t something we have, it’s an attribute of nature that can flow through us, something self standing out there. To be able to listen and receive it from nature is the root of learning, while to believe that you have intelligence, not nature, is the root of stupidity. The awareness was something different from anything I had known, I was never smart, I was floating in an ocean of intelligence blocking myself off from receiving by believing I was smart. Whoops! It felt like true wisdom to realize I was stupid and let it flow through me. That was 2020, the seeds of modern AI were planted but I hadn’t seen them, now everybody is grappling with intelligence being “out there” as part of physical nature not even people. The love of Sophia never dies, but we’re being reminded that it’s a receptive relationship we as individuals have with knowledge and humility is the prerequisite, with the humility, the lessons can come from birds or rocks or trees, but we have to realize they matter and we do.

Ai is bringing out naked dualism and magical supernatural thinking in a lot of otherwise reasonable people.

If ego wasn't a factor, how come the companies that dump these results in the math community attach so much value to being the first to solve particular problems?

> attach so much value to being the first to solve particular problems?

Because AGI! And see moat! And stock price go up!

I think it would be interesting to see the perspective of Prof. Bruno Buchberger (Johannes Kepler University in Austria) since he brings a unique perspective into this in his talk "Will AI Kill Mathematics?" about Automated Math Generation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLYW6BPkkIk

He is also trying to start a new company around this like Aristotle, who already tackle this problem, but with a new angle.

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)

I realize this isn't the end of mathematics or whatever, but it's still making me feel better about not having become a theoretical physicist like I wanted to (and seemed to be able to) when I was twenty. I'm now rationalizing a couple of unfortunate accidents and stupid mistakes as divine providence. Strange world we live in.

There is balance between ego and egoless. They are yin and yang. Ego helps drive agentic behavior and mathematicians have to pay their bills too. Meanwhile, ego many a time blinds one from whats out there, and getting into the "flow" requires one to set it aside.

A lot of top people are going to be having an ego crisis I fear. We're all just human idiots looking to enjoy time with each other while we can. Fortunately, that is enough for a good life.

Why some of us work more and earn less starts to be a little harder to answer though...

Mathematicians are approaching the recent developments either from some kind of corporatism or selfishness. I think they should take a step back and consider the societal value of their work, ultimately this is the deciding factor.

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.

> 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....

> Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level....

The real answer is that it was gibberish. IIRC, the writers would insert "[tech]" in the scripts, to be later fleshed out into technobabble.

What you say is ret-con at best. A more realistic contemporary interpretation of the "level 3 diagnostic" technobabble, would have been a particular pre-programmed diagnostic procedure (like "run the POST memory checks" on a PC).

> Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level.

I thought the ship's systems were just instrumented with self-diagnostic hardware and the "levels" of diagnostic indicated varying levels of time/effort.

Consider modern hard disks and SSDs, which are fitted with SMART self-diagnostic tools. You can run a short test, which checks the various electrical and mechanical (for HDDs) components, environmental sensors, etc. and ensures those are operational at a high level. Or you can run a long test, which checks the platter surface/flash memory sector by sector and can take several hours to complete, but which will flag up more problems earlier. Presumably a warp nacelle, being a much more complex and dangerous system, might have many more diagnostic procedures that can take varying lengths of time, from basic integrity checks of the plasma conduits to the warp core to ensuring the power flux coming from each coil is within tolerances.

Obviously, yeah, it's fiction and it's just bullshit. But one of the nice things about TNG is that its premise pretty much confines actually intelligent machines to Data and his relatives, with a handful of exceptions such as Moriarty, which the Holodeck generated specifically to challenge Data. Thus, it's designed around the idea that there's always something for the biological crew to do. Hence, "level 3 diagnostics" or any diagnostic are automated data gathering operations similar to SMART tests, allowing the engineering crew to perform analysis on what the data mean. Star Trek is fundamentally humanist; its fictional universe is constructed to celebrate the greatness and achievements of humans and other living beings, without going to the extremes that Dune went to by banning computers altogether.

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.

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.

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.

Don't underestimate the impact Freud had.. Even though he is now often seen as a pseudo-scientic Quacksalber, he opened up a world with psychoanalysis. He was an immense popularizer of clinical psychology, the subconscious mind (!) and mental illnesses. He really showed that we humans are driven be desires more than anything else.

The lumping is problematic because it's putting him on a level with the others who (a) discovered; things that were (b) true. The fact that he popularized concepts that had been thoroughly investigated by others (e.g. Nietzsche) with accounts were leaps and bounds ahead of the evidence does not put him at the same tier of the pantheon as those others.

Eat more Freud, it makes you Jung.

You are right about Freud. Still, we now know that our mind has surprisingly little control of our behavior. And I think that counts as fourth narcissistic injury. There doesn‘t need to be one “genius“ to which we associate such an insight.

The natural sciences as they always do keep removing the gaps where magic or supernatural hides in. Many people sre unable to swuare with the fact that human brains are physical systems.

In the case of AI, the natural sciences contributed very little. Contrary to Darwin or Copernicus, the narcissistic injury was mostly inflicted by technology, not science. We already knew that intelligence was created by physical processes in the brain, but LLMs taught us that intelligence is much less complex than we thought a few years ago, which makes our human cognitive abilities less special than was plausible before LLMs.

Unfortunately I am finding many people are unable to even admit that the brain, intelligence and consciousness are physical systems, let alone questions of complexity.

Ofcourse they are.

But people also seem confused as to what actually creates those systems, which leads to the perceptual misattribution of confusing the reflection of an object in the mirror for the object itself.

If you can disprove the possibility of a disembodied brain being provided the same signals as a body does, then I can agree with this, otherwise it is unproven. It isn't necessary that senses come from sense organs that look like us as long as wec can feed the same chemical and electrical signals to the brains (eg how some drugs create sensation of sights). In other words, disprove neuralink's concept.

I have no problems with a disembodied brain.

A brain isn't a brain because of it's specific signal inputs, a brain is a brain because of the selection pressures that form it.

If you want an artificial brain you could a) create a synthetic copy of a mapped biological brain (eg like the fruit fly neuron map) or b) evolve a brain using selective pressure (virtually)

We have already done a):

https://www.profolus.com/topics/scientists-copied-fruit-fly-...

Simply calling an LLM a brain, doesn't make it a brain. It's a prediction model.

One illustration of this fact is how an LLM (that counts three e's in "seventeen") can also tell you why it has trouble counting letters in a word correctly and give you the example of 'seventeen' - pointing out to you that there are actually 4 e's but that it will tell you there are three 3 e's. You can then immediately ask it again how many e's and it will still tell you 3.

An LLM doesn't reason, it doesn't understand, it doesn't communicate, it isn't self aware. It predicts the next token (astonishingly well, in most cases).

Reflections can be very convincing.

What is the value of the expression below when y=8? 5, y, plus, 1 5y+1

Human academia needs to clean up its ego fixation, jesus fucking christ

It'd be pathetic if the silicon does better science than us and our crabbucket mentality -- highly likely in my view...

I’ve been thinking the same thing. How many mathematicians are actually just upset _they_ didn’t get to find some result. Or why prior work wasn’t properly cited, etc. It’s pure ego from top to bottom. I’m not saying this is wrong, whatever I do not care it’s not my field, but man the cut is going to be so deep when the whole universe has you at the center of it. I imagine it must be like force feeding a narcissistic prick 10g of shrooms and watching the word “I” become unintelligible.

Yes, we should apply this same reasoning to AI and the companies that produce it, since they claim its the future. All that matters is truth, no valuations, no profits, not IPOs. All that matters is uncovering the truth and having the best models -- so the AI companies should just release everything for free, and not hope for notoriety as a result.

After all, its hubris and greed that drive us to expect recognition, success, and validation for our work. We should expect selfless dedication by releasing all model weights, training algorithms, and AI research publicly. All AI researchers merely check the work of benevolent AI which writes the code and trains the models, their role is merely to supervise this process while writing applications for grants to pay their stipend.

After all, there is no value in "process" or "understanding" only in results, so no one should mind that replace the current "arms race" with a better process.

lol why does he have so many guest posts. part of the problem is people accidently ignoring the guest post disclaimer and misattributing the words to him. mathematicians are now doing more writing about math than math itself. if Ai destroys math jobs, then I guess they can fall back as writers. they are still better than the general population at that, too.

Judging by the writing here I would not be so sure of that.

Cue the confusion when Tao writes a post on his own blog and everybody will be wondering where the attribution is...

I know it's against the rules to be a curmudgeon, but this just reads like a lullaby for people preparing to drink the SF kool-aid. The opportunity cost of becoming an expert will remain, but the reward of pushing the frontier is mostly gone. Now, if you want to save universities as institutions(*), you'll have to offer people some other positive vision. "You won't be able to make a difference" is not one of them. After all, you can get understanding for the joy of understanding (doesn't seem very egoless to me btw) outside of academia as well.

I'm much more sympathetic to the views of this anonymous postdoc here: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/22/the-rules-cannot-cha... (unfortunately also in LLM-"polished" English). Quote: "A field that fails to attract and support its next generation cannot preserve itself through inspiring statements alone."

(*If you extrapolate a little, for now you can also substitute with 'math departments' there.)

Another opinion there:

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/20/who-will-become-the-...

I'm a mathematician, but have been for 30 years outside of academics. I like this view. Peter Scholze commented and added a small non-depressive nuance.

Yes, that was also a really good post in the series! And it's good for Scholze to give the author some encouragement, it's too early to abandon hope.

Maybe mathematics needs to end the "credit" for whoever discovered something first.

If you vomited out a bunch of AI slop that nobody read, history shouldn't care.

The first person to package it up for human consumption and get everyone to agree it is correct should get all the credit now. If you can't get up in front of a seminar and have pretty much everyone walk out understanding what you meant... then too bad, history forgets who you were...

If the human can simplify the Lean proof then there's no need to get everyone to agree that it's correct.

Remember the science mines in Egan's Diaspora? It's like that

This reminds me of a 55 year old idea from software engineering, "egoless programming".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming

Next up: Wageless employees.

I think a generalized version of this argument is what "AI bros" are currently trying to sell to the wider internet or even wider society: "Yes, by all means, go on, make your website and put all your creativity and knowledge on there! Why do you care that the site will only be used as raw material for AI outputs and no actual users will get to see it? The users will get the knowledge just fine, the rest is just ego..."

You can think how well this argument works...

It's interesting to see Platonism and virtue ethics combined in such a way to try to make sense of what is going on.

This egoless attitude and the call for a broad humility may find itself in conflict with a supremacist humanism. There are people who will only ever want things that originated from a human. I see this attitude mostly in creative fields like art, music, film and games.

I therefore think we need to have different attitudes towards AI adoption depending on the field. In the case of math, some seem to want to excise any human emotion or physical need and create a pure refined space to explore propositional Truth. But extending this to all human activities doesn't seem to follow.

I guess what I'm saying is, there is probably still a place for human ego, even if that place is not math.

From the jump the premise seems reasonable. Having a too much of an ego is a source of all sorts of self-imposed problems or create roadblocks in interacting with others. But this literally brings up saintlike detachment as "not far from the truth" in describing the extent they're advocating for.

I'm thinking maths are kinda fucked rn.

Crazy to see AI slop being posted on tao's blog.

Isn't it strange how the AI disclaimer is at the end of the writing instead of the start. Almost as if they are trying to hide it.

You must have some variant of banner blindness, because another mention of AI use is also at the start of the text.

The top AI usage is for converting into a different format (really like pdf2html or something), which is unrelated to AI slop and done by Tao himself and not the guest authors.

I see what you mean. Agreed indeed!

It is disappointing, but I think he gets a lot of contributors who are not that proficient at English

'Egoless' can mean a lot of different things. Here it seems to mean 'everything belongs to the corporations.'

Mathematical ideas are not IP.

Not yet

Your dark fears are not evidence.

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

Holy. This is the closest thing I've seen one of these AI guys get to accepting it as the machine god. "Dear god, we gratefully accept this divine gift of sustenance that we are about to consume."

That might be a good time to consider what the fuck is going on.

Yes, I acknowledge various gods daily such as when I say I acknowledge the help of another developer or artist etc. Obviously I think acknowledging someones support means they are god.

I call bullshit for the same reason the first reply to the post gives. It's great to reflect on your self-worth and where that worth comes from (regardless of AI). In a way, this post criticizes capitalism for reducing one's worth to productive output. But then you are asked to become pure and egoless, to detach yourself from your work, while others full on ego profit immensely and strip away your rights. How convenient, right? This post is a gross normalizing of the dehumanization of work. Did Terrence even review this shit before publishing?

Omg such AI written slop. I read it three times and am none the wiser what his point is.

the only appropriate response to AI slop is to feed it into AI to summarize. It's written for AI

Sort of like inverse compression of text? Inflation?

Some are better at reading comprehension than others.

Mathematics is fundamentally an exploration of logical necessity. The universe doesn't care whether a proof was verified by Euler, a collective of a thousand amateur contributors on GitHub, or an automated reasoning engine running in a server rack. Watching people treat formal logic like private intellectual real estate that was "stolen" from human ego is precisely what Tao’s essay was pointing out in the first place.

That's a bizarre viewpoint. "The universe" doesn't care if we live or die, yet we still accept human life as having value.

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