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I very much like that people like Tao are famous. It’s relatively good for the intellectual spirit and hopefully it inspires others. However this fixation with

I very much like that people like Tao are famous. It’s relatively good for the intellectual spirit and hopefully it inspires others. However this fixation with his “extraordinary capacity”, scores, medals and accolades; I wish we could skip it. Let’s talk about the awesome work and why it’s awesome. Let’s play through some of it: I’m relatively sure most people know nothing more about Tao than “he’s a genius”. What’s the point of that? I think we’d be better off if we took the time to understand great work and let our appreciation of great people live through that.

throwlaplace 7y ago
i've said this same thing (on r/math), because it feels like blind hero worship and fetishization, but i got pushback that "it's only human". oh well. most people don't care about the math but only about hero worship and math is just another opportunity.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  I think our world would be in better shape if people like Terry Tao were the heroes more people worshipped.
abnry 7y ago
For my own mental (and moral) health, I always remind myself to focus on what's published, not the publisher. Too often when I see a cool math result I think, "darn, I wish I published that." Then I realize what that attitude does to me.
gist 7y ago
I agree and think that the drippy accolades are actually counter productive. Why? Because it can become discouraging (as opposed to encouraging) to most (what I would consider) 'normal' smart people. It's the equivalent of walking into perhaps a high school dance and seeing a bunch of tall and good looking men (if you are a man) or beautiful, thin and poised women (if you are a woman). It becomes overwhelming in so many ways and intimidating. Now sure that feeling will spur some people on but just the same it will also turn some people off. And good people. [1] Think of all the people that might think 'wow this is what you get at Princeton'. Of course logically you know that is not the case and that this is a feature on one very special person. But emotionally (more powerful) that is not what the feeling is. [1] In reverse if you want proof of this point look at all the people that have entered politics and in particular the Presidential race since Trump was elected. People who in years earlier would have been scared off thinking they were not 'smart' enough. These are people who never realized that a President (regardless of what you think about Trump) does not have to know everything as he relies on others who have expertise (in theory).
mistermann 7y ago
> However this fixation with his “extraordinary capacity”, scores, medals and accolades; I wish we could skip it. I wonder though if such narratives may be necessary (in the world as it is, rather than how it should be) in order to generate fame, specifically the kind of fame that is best able to propagate and reach the eventual endpoints who may be inspired to follow in his footsteps. Annoyances like this may be some sort of social evolutionary adaptation.
knzhou 7y ago
This is an unsolvable problem. There already is plenty of expository content about what Tao actually does, e.g. his excellent blog. It's just that it can't get popular because it's technical; that's the iron law of STEM popularization, you can only choose one. The most press he's gotten recently has been from this "eigenvectors from eigenvalues" thing that he solved three ways in two hours, probably because it's the least technical thing he's done.
- opportune 7y ago
  He is also active on mathoverflow, even answering not very popular questions, which I think is really cool: https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao
- mncharity 7y ago
  > This is an unsolvable problem. [...] it can't get popular because it's technical; that's the iron law of STEM popularization, you can only choose one. I'm reminded of education research of the form "We tried to teach topic T to students in grade G. We taught it really, really badly. Surprisingly, that didn't work! We draw the obvious conclusion... students in grade G are developmentally unready to understand topic T." So yes, it might truly be unsolvable. It's certainly difficult. Non-interactive defusing of misconceptions is dauntingly hard - even harder than remedial filling of foundational gaps. Then you add constraints on article length, and the medium may just not be adequate. But I would be more comfortable with such an argument, if there was wider recognition of how wretched our current science education content is, and how badly it's failing students. How poor the stories we tell about the physical world. If your five-year old wants to know what finger-paint color to use for the Sun, don't ask first-tier astronomy graduate students - there's a wide-spread misconception, so they'll mostly get it wrong. On HN a few days back, there was something like a 'best 2019 astronomy books for children'... and the books were something vaguely like 0 of 10 on getting it right. We're just not set up to teach misconception-free transferable broad understanding. Seeing research talks, I frequently think "Oh nifty - that concept/description/graphic/video is awesome: accessible and clarifyingly insightful. It should be part of every introduction to this topic. Down to primary school even." ... and won't be any year soon. The pipeline from researcher conversation, to talk, to paper and professional tome, down and down to education and popular content, is regrettably also a gradient from accessible/insightful/transferable/correct to confused/superficial/unusable/nonsense. There just hasn't been the incentives and infrastructure to do better. In another comment you mention intro physics and olympiads. So take friction. We now know how friction works, down to nanoscale. But last I saw, we don't even try to teach that. Instead it's the decades-old plug-and-chug on Amontons' Laws of large objects sliding on pig fat. Sure, there's some nice training on system decomposition. But if we cared about actual understanding of the physical world, rather than the educational artifact of "Introductory Physics", our teaching focus would need to be different. Similarly, professors complain about PhD candidates lacking a rough quantitative feel for the field, and the current educational focus is far from fixing that. But, perhaps I'm out of date, and things are more-recently improving? Fermi problems are becoming much more common, for instance. Ending on an upbeat note. An MIT project to create introductory cell-biology VR, obtained domain expertise by pulling in and interviewing researchers. One challenge was apparently... getting them to leave. Such was their enthusiasm. Suggesting that if infrastructure has the right shape, the massive and scarce expertise needed for better content might actually be plausibly obtained. And personalized education via XR might be sufficient, and sufficiently disruptive, to deliver it. So perhaps there's hope to do transformatively better than we have been.
bhntr3 7y ago
I became a "fan" of Tao after reading this piece in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/the-singular-mind-of-terry-tao.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/the-singular-min.... It talks about how normal and well liked Tao is. How much he collaborates and assists others in his work. I think I saw it linked along with this article about the warped portrayal of genius Hollywood feeds us (especially in the Imitation Game): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/turing-the-myth-of-the-heroic-soloist_b_6644460 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/turing-the-myth-of-the-heroic... So Tao's celebrity status as a genius does have that positive aspect. I think he disproves many stereotypes of genius and helps people believe that it's possible to brilliant, decent, humble, social and likable. I think that's useful. He talked about this eloquently in his own blog where he argues against the "cult of genius" and says one needn't be a genius to be a mathematician: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t... So, by lionizing him as a genius I think media actually undermines its own narrative about what genius is. In that sense, maybe the cult of genius is bad but if we have to put a genius on a pedestal, it's great to have it be one who seems so normal. With respect to his work, I always think of what Richard Feynman said in the start of this book "What do you care what other people think?" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393355640 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393355640) He tells a story about an artist who holds up a flower and says "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." Feynman thinks he's nutty. He can see the beauty of the flower and the beauty of the science. People who don't understand Tao's work probably think it's dull. I can't understand Tao's mathematical work. I'm studying math and I really hope someday I could. But math and science have gone so far now that work at the cutting edge really is incomprehensible to people outside the field. So, I'm inspired by the person who does the work. It's just the surface but it's what I have access to. Feynman talks about this at the end of the chapter that starts with the flower. His father helped him love science and taught him how to think. Then he sent him to university to learn all the things he hadn't. But when Feynman came home, he couldn't explain quantum mechanics simply. So his father never learned what he didn't know. I hope he still loved his son for understanding it.
- opportune 7y ago
  It's easy to say you don't need to be a genius to be a mathematician when you're a genius celebrity mathematician. Personally I gave up on math as a career once I realized all the people who got into top grad schools for math were like international IMO participants, USAMO or equivalent at least, started taking classes beyond calculus in 10th grade, etc. Even though I love it and even have an undergrad degree in it, and maybe could have performed that well if adults in my life nudged me in that direction, the fact that there were so many people who would always have massive advantages turned me off from it.
avip 7y ago
I'd (conservatively) speculate most of us here are in the global 1% in terms of "ability to understand math". Have tried multiple times to follow his work (from the blog). But I'm not math-fluent enough to understand or otherwise appreciate the content. Possibly I could but it requires so much effort. It's much easier to enjoy Bach's or Messi's genius :)
- ska 7y ago
  This (Bach) is a parallel that comes up often in both lay and professional music on the nature of "genius". I've had some success with the following analogy. Music is not math, but the conversation between research mathematicians is a bit like the conversation between composers. In order for them to understand each other well they must understand the notation, but also the instruments/tools, the history, etc. However we non-composers can still listen to what they wrote if someone performs it for us - we may not catch everything another composer does, but we can enjoy it. The tough thing about mathematics is that there is no orchestra or possibility of one; in order to consume it at all you have to learn some of the details.
  - mistrial9 7y ago
    its often said around school, that the higher level mathematicians cant sit down and talk to each other about their work much .. things go too far into specialization..
    - ska 7y ago
      This is true, that there are lot of silos in mathematics which make communication difficult. In this sense the analogy breaks down a bit.
  - nightcracker 7y ago
    Music is no exception either. Many if not most people (myself included) do not appreciate highly advanced jazz as it's 'spoken' in a language too technical for it to make sense to them.

throwlaplace 7y ago

i've said this same thing (on r/math), because it feels like blind hero worship and fetishization, but i got pushback that "it's only human". oh well. most people don't care about the math but only about hero worship and math is just another opportunity.

lonelappde 7y ago
I think our world would be in better shape if people like Terry Tao were the heroes more people worshipped.

abnry 7y ago

For my own mental (and moral) health, I always remind myself to focus on what's published, not the publisher. Too often when I see a cool math result I think, "darn, I wish I published that." Then I realize what that attitude does to me.

gist 7y ago

I agree and think that the drippy accolades are actually counter productive. Why? Because it can become discouraging (as opposed to encouraging) to most (what I would consider) 'normal' smart people. It's the equivalent of walking into perhaps a high school dance and seeing a bunch of tall and good looking men (if you are a man) or beautiful, thin and poised women (if you are a woman). It becomes overwhelming in so many ways and intimidating. Now sure that feeling will spur some people on but just the same it will also turn some people off. And good people. [1] Think of all the people that might think 'wow this is what you get at Princeton'. Of course logically you know that is not the case and that this is a feature on one very special person. But emotionally (more powerful) that is not what the feeling is. [1] In reverse if you want proof of this point look at all the people that have entered politics and in particular the Presidential race since Trump was elected. People who in years earlier would have been scared off thinking they were not 'smart' enough. These are people who never realized that a President (regardless of what you think about Trump) does not have to know everything as he relies on others who have expertise (in theory).

mistermann 7y ago

> However this fixation with his “extraordinary capacity”, scores, medals and accolades; I wish we could skip it. I wonder though if such narratives may be necessary (in the world as it is, rather than how it should be) in order to generate fame, specifically the kind of fame that is best able to propagate and reach the eventual endpoints who may be inspired to follow in his footsteps. Annoyances like this may be some sort of social evolutionary adaptation.

knzhou 7y ago

This is an unsolvable problem. There already is plenty of expository content about what Tao actually does, e.g. his excellent blog. It's just that it can't get popular because it's technical; that's the iron law of STEM popularization, you can only choose one. The most press he's gotten recently has been from this "eigenvectors from eigenvalues" thing that he solved three ways in two hours, probably because it's the least technical thing he's done.

opportune 7y ago
He is also active on mathoverflow, even answering not very popular questions, which I think is really cool: https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao https://mathoverflow.net/users/766/terry-tao
mncharity 7y ago
> This is an unsolvable problem. [...] it can't get popular because it's technical; that's the iron law of STEM popularization, you can only choose one. I'm reminded of education research of the form "We tried to teach topic T to students in grade G. We taught it really, really badly. Surprisingly, that didn't work! We draw the obvious conclusion... students in grade G are developmentally unready to understand topic T." So yes, it might truly be unsolvable. It's certainly difficult. Non-interactive defusing of misconceptions is dauntingly hard - even harder than remedial filling of foundational gaps. Then you add constraints on article length, and the medium may just not be adequate. But I would be more comfortable with such an argument, if there was wider recognition of how wretched our current science education content is, and how badly it's failing students. How poor the stories we tell about the physical world. If your five-year old wants to know what finger-paint color to use for the Sun, don't ask first-tier astronomy graduate students - there's a wide-spread misconception, so they'll mostly get it wrong. On HN a few days back, there was something like a 'best 2019 astronomy books for children'... and the books were something vaguely like 0 of 10 on getting it right. We're just not set up to teach misconception-free transferable broad understanding. Seeing research talks, I frequently think "Oh nifty - that concept/description/graphic/video is awesome: accessible and clarifyingly insightful. It should be part of every introduction to this topic. Down to primary school even." ... and won't be any year soon. The pipeline from researcher conversation, to talk, to paper and professional tome, down and down to education and popular content, is regrettably also a gradient from accessible/insightful/transferable/correct to confused/superficial/unusable/nonsense. There just hasn't been the incentives and infrastructure to do better. In another comment you mention intro physics and olympiads. So take friction. We now know how friction works, down to nanoscale. But last I saw, we don't even try to teach that. Instead it's the decades-old plug-and-chug on Amontons' Laws of large objects sliding on pig fat. Sure, there's some nice training on system decomposition. But if we cared about actual understanding of the physical world, rather than the educational artifact of "Introductory Physics", our teaching focus would need to be different. Similarly, professors complain about PhD candidates lacking a rough quantitative feel for the field, and the current educational focus is far from fixing that. But, perhaps I'm out of date, and things are more-recently improving? Fermi problems are becoming much more common, for instance. Ending on an upbeat note. An MIT project to create introductory cell-biology VR, obtained domain expertise by pulling in and interviewing researchers. One challenge was apparently... getting them to leave. Such was their enthusiasm. Suggesting that if infrastructure has the right shape, the massive and scarce expertise needed for better content might actually be plausibly obtained. And personalized education via XR might be sufficient, and sufficiently disruptive, to deliver it. So perhaps there's hope to do transformatively better than we have been.

bhntr3 7y ago

I became a "fan" of Tao after reading this piece in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/the-singular-mind-of-terry-tao.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/the-singular-min.... It talks about how normal and well liked Tao is. How much he collaborates and assists others in his work. I think I saw it linked along with this article about the warped portrayal of genius Hollywood feeds us (especially in the Imitation Game): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/turing-the-myth-of-the-heroic-soloist_b_6644460 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/turing-the-myth-of-the-heroic... So Tao's celebrity status as a genius does have that positive aspect. I think he disproves many stereotypes of genius and helps people believe that it's possible to brilliant, decent, humble, social and likable. I think that's useful. He talked about this eloquently in his own blog where he argues against the "cult of genius" and says one needn't be a genius to be a mathematician: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t... So, by lionizing him as a genius I think media actually undermines its own narrative about what genius is. In that sense, maybe the cult of genius is bad but if we have to put a genius on a pedestal, it's great to have it be one who seems so normal. With respect to his work, I always think of what Richard Feynman said in the start of this book "What do you care what other people think?" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393355640 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393355640) He tells a story about an artist who holds up a flower and says "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." Feynman thinks he's nutty. He can see the beauty of the flower and the beauty of the science. People who don't understand Tao's work probably think it's dull. I can't understand Tao's mathematical work. I'm studying math and I really hope someday I could. But math and science have gone so far now that work at the cutting edge really is incomprehensible to people outside the field. So, I'm inspired by the person who does the work. It's just the surface but it's what I have access to. Feynman talks about this at the end of the chapter that starts with the flower. His father helped him love science and taught him how to think. Then he sent him to university to learn all the things he hadn't. But when Feynman came home, he couldn't explain quantum mechanics simply. So his father never learned what he didn't know. I hope he still loved his son for understanding it.

opportune 7y ago
It's easy to say you don't need to be a genius to be a mathematician when you're a genius celebrity mathematician. Personally I gave up on math as a career once I realized all the people who got into top grad schools for math were like international IMO participants, USAMO or equivalent at least, started taking classes beyond calculus in 10th grade, etc. Even though I love it and even have an undergrad degree in it, and maybe could have performed that well if adults in my life nudged me in that direction, the fact that there were so many people who would always have massive advantages turned me off from it.

avip 7y ago

I'd (conservatively) speculate most of us here are in the global 1% in terms of "ability to understand math". Have tried multiple times to follow his work (from the blog). But I'm not math-fluent enough to understand or otherwise appreciate the content. Possibly I could but it requires so much effort. It's much easier to enjoy Bach's or Messi's genius :)

ska 7y ago
This (Bach) is a parallel that comes up often in both lay and professional music on the nature of "genius". I've had some success with the following analogy. Music is not math, but the conversation between research mathematicians is a bit like the conversation between composers. In order for them to understand each other well they must understand the notation, but also the instruments/tools, the history, etc. However we non-composers can still listen to what they wrote if someone performs it for us - we may not catch everything another composer does, but we can enjoy it. The tough thing about mathematics is that there is no orchestra or possibility of one; in order to consume it at all you have to learn some of the details.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  its often said around school, that the higher level mathematicians cant sit down and talk to each other about their work much .. things go too far into specialization..
  - ska 7y ago
    This is true, that there are lot of silos in mathematics which make communication difficult. In this sense the analogy breaks down a bit.
- nightcracker 7y ago
  Music is no exception either. Many if not most people (myself included) do not appreciate highly advanced jazz as it's 'spoken' in a language too technical for it to make sense to them.