Mike severino

803 posts

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Mike severino

Mike severino

@mikesev19

I like mathematics, especially combinatorics, music, and surfing the mountains and the sea.

Montana, USA Katılım Ocak 2016
162 Takip Edilen71 Takipçiler
Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@Noahpinion @PlexInphinity @tlbtlbtlb There have been numerous ways mathematics have been economically productive, we just don't know it until decades later. No one in the 50's thought Grothendieck's work would have any economic impact. 50 years later, the tools he built became instrumental in modern encryption.
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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion·
@PlexInphinity @tlbtlbtlb This is probably true. Maybe AI will push us to confront the fact that most theoretical research these days is more like cosmology or archaeology -- stuff that's fun to investigate and fun to know, but not economically productive.
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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion·
Everyone talking about AI job displacement was always so focused on the working class. They thought only the highest-IQ people would still be valuable. But it turned out mathematicians got replaced long before truckers did.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@littmath @krishnanrohit My grief is about the possibility that mathematicians become a bunch of verifiers rather than creators. Not sure that will happen, but that is what I worry about. Not for me, I am too old, but those that are starting their PhD in the next few years.
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Daniel Litt
Daniel Litt@littmath·
@krishnanrohit I also find it a bit hard to understand what grief we're supposed to be feeling. Some kind of hit to the ego maybe, but this seems (to me) net positive.
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rohit
rohit@krishnanrohit·
Maybe it's just me, but I feel no grief at all. A bit concerned about what the future will bring, sure, but that's because the future is unknown. In general this has been mostly joyous! The world is so rich!
Alex Imas@alexolegimas

I have been thinking about this post for days. During pauses, when things slow down during the day, this is the emotion I’m left with. Things are going to change. We will (I hope) get to other side with something better. But we will also lose many things, and it’s okay to grieve for them.

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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@predict_addict Probably true, but I am glad I did my PhD at a time when it was a path to something more than a career verifying results.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@Pablonorm @WiredApe @Noahpinion The issue is that it is difficult to get students to use digital educational products responsibly. So many try not to touch pen and paper. Now that Gemini is in the chrome tab, students are not even guessing anymore on online HW. I've returned to written HW, quizzes, and exams.
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Emo Support Cobra Chicken🌎
Emo Support Cobra Chicken🌎@Pablonorm·
@WiredApe @Noahpinion Digital distractions are very obviously part of the problem. I'm not sure your claim about "learning digitally" is true, but even if it is, learning digitally does not have to mean you never touch a pen and paper. I think you are conceptualizing it to narrowly.
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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion·
The utter failure of pre-AI EdTech is a sign that humanity was hitting a wall before AI came along.
Jonathan Haidt@JonHaidt

Still more evidence that EdTech harmed American education: Across states, the year that the state imposed mandates requiring computers/tablets, that's the year that test scores stopped rising and in most cases started falling. From Jared Cooney Horvath thedigitaldelusion.substack.com/p/when-correla…

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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@littmath @dann0bann0 According to Tao’s GitHub page on Erdos Problems #851 was found to have at least partial solutions in the literature, however it does seem #1051 was found in the literature.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@kar_nels @Noahpinion We will not know for another 50-100 years. Historically, many academic mathematics results do not have a practical use in the present. Look at prime numbers, studied for thousands of years without any practical use, then bam it's everywhere in the internet era.
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kar nels
kar nels@kar_nels·
@Noahpinion Ignorant question. How much does modern academic mathematics contribute to STEM advancements?
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@BillAckman Seriously? I mean it’s fine to tell Walz to take the temperature down, but not without saying it ten times louder to Steven Miller, Noem, Trump, Vance, etc.
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Bill Ackman
Bill Ackman@BillAckman·
What is it about Minneapolis that the two tragic ICE shootings took place there within two or so weeks of each other? Could it really be a coincidence? It is almost as if the governor of Minnesota called for protestors to intervene in ICE enforcements in an incendiary manner? Inciting the people to rise up against law enforcement is guaranteed to end badly, and now we have seen the tragic consequences. @GovTimWalz and those that emulate him, it is time to take the temperature down before more lives are lost.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@newstart_2024 Not sure what's coming, but, up to now, philosophy majors have done quite well. Often outperforming business majors by mid-career. I also bet he said the winners would be CS degrees up til 2024. Nonsense that this vocational push is not going to over produce those job candidates
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Camus
Camus@newstart_2024·
Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) at Davos 2026 drops a blunt reality check on AI & jobs: “Philosophy majors from elite schools? That one is going to be hard to market. It was always hard to market.” He argues the real winners will be vocational technicians, battery builders, hands-on operators — people who can be rapidly upskilled into irreplaceable roles. White-collar foundations built on university degrees? Shaken. Karp: “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training… These trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill.” Larry Fink presses: Are we heading toward fewer white-collar jobs overall? Karp: Yes — but we need better ways to test real aptitude. Example: A former police officer with junior college now runs high-end global targeting for the U.S. Army via MAVEN. “Irreplaceable.” Watch the exchange. It’s raw. Your take: Is the university-to-white-collar pipeline overrated in the AI era? Or are vocational + aptitude-focused paths the future? Thoughts below.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@chamath This sounds a lot like affirmative action and will result in your dreaded "DEI" hires. The best way to get within that range is to pay professors more. Why do you think republicans are best represented in business schools.
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Chamath Palihapitiya
Chamath Palihapitiya@chamath·
A crazy idea would be a mandate that federal funding for universities can only happen when/if the ideological balance of its professors are within +/- 20%. Any institutions that opts out/takes zero funding from the federal government (ie from taxpayers) can still do whatever they want. Assuming neither side is more wrong nor right, the debate and ultimate quality of students coming from schools with more ideological balance would be meaningfully better I suspect.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@Noahpinion @littmath It seems to me that it was a bad idea to allow other departments to offer intro to statistics courses over the past 30 years and it may have contributed to the growing amount of papers that are non-replicable or contain a misinterpretation of p-values.
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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion·
It seems like there's a possibility that AI just eats the entire field of statistics and makes it irrelevant (and that this has been happening for decades now www2.math.uu.se/~thulin/mm/bre…)
Ben Golub@ben_golub

It's surprising and worrying that the University of Nebraska is shutting down its department of statistics Usually we think of this happening to marginal departments, but one would think that a good state university should have statistics? 1/

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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@HuxleyDick @littmath While I think teachers should get paid more, I think the problem here is that administrations are acting like a fed holding interest rates down by pushing an environment which teachers are rewarded for making D’s and F’s disappear from their classrooms.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@heresyfinancial @Erst_Officer I disagree. Teachers, especially, do produce things. They produce competent engineers, writers, mathematicians,… and those people produce products. By the way, higher ed and government produced internet, lasers, encryption schemes, computers, smart phones, chips, …..
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Joseph Brown
Joseph Brown@heresyfinancial·
@Erst_Officer by definition, yes That's very different than unneeded or unnecessary, but they receive a paycheck only by taking from the paycheck of the private sector
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Joseph Brown
Joseph Brown@heresyfinancial·
For every 10 people in the US: - 1 is a government employee - 5 are unemployed - 4 have productive jobs Only 4 out of 10 people produce everything Everyone else only consumes
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Dr Kareem Carr
Dr Kareem Carr@kareem_carr·
i was thinking about how academics lean left, but doctors, bankers, and engineers lean right, and how the difference is probably just money. if republicans really wanted to convert academics into conservatives, probably all they'd need to do is just pay them more.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@chamath While you make a valid point, this amount of money in one person's hands can have some negative effects on the democratic process. One thing I worry about is vote inflation as it seems my vote is worth less and less the more money that goes into political campaigns.
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Chamath Palihapitiya
Chamath Palihapitiya@chamath·
Your rhetoric is so corrosive because you sneakily never use words like “earn” or “reward”. Instead you always favor helplessness words like “give”. In everything you say, it’s clear you hate personal agency - it is always about the invisible hand of big brother coming to the rescue. And of course you should control that hand. To set the record straight, for Elon to earn that kind of money, many tens of millions of people on earth will need to buy Elon’s products and pay for it with their hard earned money. In order for that to happen, his products will need to be revolutionary, cheap and superior on multiple dimensions. This is not obvious or straightforward. So, if that happens and then people buy Tesla products, they will now do so also knowing that some percentage of the profit goes to the CEO of that company. It couldn’t be more transparent and obvious.
Bernie Sanders@BernieSanders

Tesla is proposing a deal that could give Elon Musk $2 trillion in wealth, more than the bottom 59% of Americans combined. Does anybody in America think this is sane?

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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@Noahpinion And yet the market awards the social media moguls with billions of dollars.
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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion·
Remember: Before social media, you would never have seen people saying things like this, or seen people approving of it. It would all be official condemnations and condolences. Social media is what unleashed the hate and chaos from the lowest depths of our society.
Merrick, Very Disrespectful Woman🦂@punishedmother

Maybe Charlie Kirk shouldn’t have spent years being a hateful demagogic fascist and this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe he should take some personal responsibility.

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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@justinskycak I get this point, however what is the minimum effective doses of instruction? Also, does this just enable short attention spans?
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Justin Skycak
Justin Skycak@justinskycak·
🎯 "Traditional lectures are terrible ways to transmit content. And elite universities are no better than anyone else at this." As Carl Wieman put it: traditional lecturing is the educational equivalent of bloodletting. What's better? Rapidly alternating between minimum effective doses of guided instruction and active practice.
Justin Skycak tweet media
Michael Strong@flowidealism

Not at all surprising. The “content” side of education will rapidly be replaced by tech. Mentoring and Socratic education will remain human, but traditional lectures are terrible ways to transmit content. And elite universities are no better than anyone else at this.

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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@justinskycak This is so true and yet I have to constantly remind my students. There is no doubt that is how mathematicians solve problems. I think part of it is they are so scared to write anything wrong down on paper. I am not sure why.
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Justin Skycak
Justin Skycak@justinskycak·
If you say you're learning math but you're not filling up pages of scratch paper like this then you're not really learning math. I know that sounds harsh but learning math without producing scratch work is like exercising without producing sweat. It means you're not really doing it.
euvin@euvin_keel

last week and this week's scratchpaper

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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
New advice to students: Do not be an LLM, ask questions and do not pretend you know things you do not.
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Mike severino
Mike severino@mikesev19·
@tunguz It is a little unhinged and the result is impressive, but I think it is not "real math" because the model did not ask the question, a fundamental part of doing math.
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Bojan Tunguz
Bojan Tunguz@tunguz·
They are panicking.
Edward Frenkel@edfrenkel

This is an unwise statement that can only make people confused about what LLMs can or cannot do. Let me tell you something: Math is NOT about solving this kind of ad hoc optimization problems. Yeah, by scraping available data and then clustering it, LLMs can sometimes solve some very minor math problems. It's an achievement, and I applaud you for that. But let's be honest: this is NOT the REAL Math. Not by 10,000 miles. REAL Math is about concepts and ideas - things like "schemes" introduced by the great Alexander Grothendieck, who revolutionized algebraic geometry; the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem; or the Langlands Program, tying together Number Theory, Analysis, Geometry, and Quantum Physics. That's the REAL Math. Can LLMs do that? Of course not. So, please, STOP confusing people - especially, given the atrocious state of our math education. LLMs give us great tools, which I appreciate very much. Useful stuff! Go ahead and use them AS TOOLS (just as we use calculators to crunch numbers or cameras to render portraits and landscapes), an enhancement of human abilities, and STOP pretending that LLMs are somehow capable of replicating everything that human beings can do. In this one area, mathematics, LLMs are no match to human mathematicians. Period. Not to mention many other areas. Calling on my friend @EricRWeinstein and @GaryMarcus, who has been one of the few sane expert voices on these matters lately. 🙏 h/t @hellheff

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Keşfet

@Noahpinion @PlexInphinity @tlbtlbtlb @littmath @krishnanrohit @predict_addict @Pablonorm @WiredApe