Software engineering is verifiable, you can run it through the compiler and see if it works. AI has obviously gotten really good at making software. If you believe the world is just software, that means AI has gotten good, it's done. You can see the labs are talking about how they've achieved AGI or they will very soon and it is very much connected to the ability of AI to write software. I'm just not discounting that that's important. I'm just saying once you get outside of software, verifiability gets way harder.
I just don't think there's any denying academics have decided they're no longer or academic institutions centers of excellence pursuing truth that they're engineers of a political orthodoxy. And that that political orthodoxy sometimes is very fragile and wants to accept a certain truth or pursuit of the truth as long as it aligns with the political orthodoxy that overwhelms 90 plus percent of the views of people who are drawn to academia.
Humans are becoming the bottleneck of verification for AI. And now the question is, where does that leave us? Is this the end of the road for reliable mathematical discovery? Are we resigned to drowning in a sea of unverified claims where we can't really tell truth from fiction?
Most of us intuitively understand that we are shaped by the unusual circumstances of our own lives. But we rarely think about the ways in which our era, our country, and our culture have shaped our beliefs, intuitions, and desires — making them feel universal when they are anything but.
Expert means you have certification, you've done the diligence, you have the domain expertise, and perhaps you've devoted your life to not only trying to, okay, it's arrogant to say they have the right answers, but they have the least wrong answers of anyone because they devoted their life to understand the [ __ ]
We can feel a paper cut, but we cannot feel a collapsing planet. We have more data than any generation in history, yet reality feels further away. We're drowning in information but starving for meaning.
We don't see the world as it is. We see the world through mental maps that we've constructed over a lifetime of experience. And the problem with mental maps is that they can become outdated — they can lead us astray in a world that has changed, or in situations that are different from those in which the maps were formed.
We often think of our beliefs and mental models as reflections of reality — accurate maps of the world that help us navigate our lives. But what happens when the map is wrong? What happens when the map itself is the problem?
The thing that's really changed for me is I used to think that the most important thing was finding the right answer. And what I now believe is the most important thing is creating the conditions for truth to emerge. Because if you create the conditions for truth to emerge, the right answer will find you.
Against I would be worried about unknown unknowns. Pro. While there isn't much human data, the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong. Against anecdotes are not enough for me. Pro. Fair. It is for me.
5mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
