alt Hacker News> You say that like it’s even remotely feasible at the frontier of mathematics and not a monumental group effort to turn even established proofs into such.
people on hn love making these kinds of declarative statements (the one you responded to, not yours itself) - "for X just do Y" as a kind of dunk on the implied author they're responding to (as if anyone asked them to begin with). they absolutely always grossly exaggerate/underestimate/misrepresent the relevance/value/efficacy of Y for X. usually these declarative statements briskly follow some other post on the frontpage. i work on GPU/AI/compilers and the number of times i'm compelled to say to people on here "do you have any idea how painful/pointless/unnecessary it is to use Y for X?" is embarrassing (for hn).
i really don't get even get it - no one can see your number of "likes". twitter i get - fb i get - etc but what are even the incentives for making shit up on here.
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Do selection dynamics require awareness of incentives? I would think that the incentives merely have to exist, not be known.
On HN, that might be as simple as display sort order -- highly engaging comments bubble up to the top, and being at the top, receive more attention in turn.
The highly fit extremes are -- I think -- always going to be hyper-specialized to exploit the environment. In a way, they tell you more about the environment than whatever their content ostensibly is.
I grossly underestimate the value of the time of highly educated people having to decode the arguments of another expert? Consider all the time saved if for each theorem proof pair, the proof was machine readable, you could let your computer verify the proclaimed proof as a precondition on studying it.
That would save a lot of people a lot of time, and its not random peoples time saved, its highly educated peoples time being saved. That would allow much more novel research to happen with the same amount of expert-years.
If population of planet A would use formal verification, and planet B refuses to, which planet do you predict will evolve faster
It feels good to be smarter than everyone else. You see your upvotes and that's good enough for an ego boost. Been there, done that.
I wish we were a bit more self-critical about this, but it's a tough problem when what brings the community together in the first place is a sense of superiority: prestigious schools, high salaries, impressive employers, supposedly refined tastes. We're at the top of the world, right?