Many "serious" mathematicians are aghast(twitter.com) |
Many "serious" mathematicians are aghast(twitter.com) |
But this tweet paints a somewhat misleading picture of the role peer review plays in practice in modern math research. Reading this tweet could leave you with the impression that when someone proves a new result, no one pays any attention until it's gone through peer review and published in a journal. This just isn't true. ArXiv preprints are much more widely read than the journals' version of articles, and they go up essentially as soon as they're written. Certainly no one's waiting the year-plus it would take to get the article published in a journal! And even before that, mathematicians communicate their results to each other through slightly less formal channels, like blogs, conference talks, and regular human word of mouth.
In short, despite the sclerotic and parasitic nature of the journal system, the way ideas get disseminated in the field in practice is actually a lot closer to the ideal prewar picture he's describing in the tweet. I'm led to understand that this was less true before the Internet, but even by the time I started my PhD in 2009 things had been working the way I just described for quite a while.
There is a quotation about peer review. I'm assuming that's also made up.
No "serious mathematician" (tm) is "waiting for peer review" nor do methematicians widely consider peer reviewed articles to be by default 100% correct just because they are peer reviewed. I have many times encountered conversations where mathematicians were doubting previous published/peer reviewed articles of others. That's not the main purpose of peer review, that's what some people outside of mathematics (like tweeter op; though his bio says that he is "ranked in the top 2% of scientists globally" so who am I to talk) think of peer review.
> It just became difficult for the average engineer to pursued more advanced mathematical considerations. I believe that this might soon change.
It reminds me of the arguments that now with LLMs "everybody can be a programmer" as if there was some kind of gatekeeper, apart from time and effort required, that forbade some people from coding. And as if suddenly one can become an expert programmer without putting an effort to learn just because they can prompt an llm.
Maybe llms can make certain subjects more approachable to beginners, but there is a certain type of people who act as if one can get that expertise without having to put an immense effort still to learn.
Many "serious" performance engineers are aghast
"Nooo the r00b0t can't make llvm faster and not tell us how!!! it has to make a commit to the open source!!!"
"Ha, that's peer review and politics"
Hard to cry this as a benefit after locking papers down behind a costly wall for decades.
I do think that there are two things going on that explains the past couple weeks' breakthroughs:
1) A lot of conjectures are weakly grounded.
2) Maybe humans are biased towards proving conjectures rather than finding counter-examples (prestige in finding proofs, tedium in searching for contradictions, etc.)
3) Math is one of the rare fields that can be 'solved' in pure token space without needing empirical or subjective-opinion support
For starters he's talking about how peer review is bad because of politics. That's fair.
But no one is saying that's the case with AI math. I think that the mathematical community wants to see the methods by which the Jacobian counterexample was constructed. As opposed to "lol xd my r00b0t solved le Jacoby conjectoor"
What? In EU Crelle's Journal is founded in 1826, while in the US the American Journal of Mathematics in 1878.
*unspoken or unintended consequence being so that the oligarchy can seize the authority of intellectual credibility