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Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? Ho

Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in full, they just accepted the results as passed on by several layers of teacher. I have a paper on routing algorithms, which I have attempted to read to my cat. I don't think my cat retained much, but they seem to be enjoying the cat food that got delivered using the results. I'd suggest that we're going to be a lot closer to the cat than the author of the paper when AI takes off.

bluefirebrand 2mo ago
> how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? "Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us"
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  Yeah. We're only starting the journey of building tools better at thinking than the human mind, so expecting me to have examples of things it produces is a little hard, don't you think? The best I can do is things that are incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but still provide value. There's a small leap of imagination to consider an author that understands it and can show others how to leverage results without understanding be mechanical rather than biological.
chongli 2mo ago
You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand. All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value. Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  You asked for examples, for a technology that we're still building. Maybe you can see the issue with that? Anyways, people benefitted greatly from Newton's laws of gravity, even though we still don't have a quantum-compatible set of laws for it. The laws of gravity are still incomprehensible for people, but the approximation that we've observed is still immensely valuable.
  - chongli 2mo ago
    No, I gave you a lot more leeway than that. Take any utterly incomprehensible piece of writing from the entire history of civilization and demonstrate its value. You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand.
    - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
      Can you give me an example single piece of writing that the author didn't claim they understood? I don't think that any utterly incomprehensible writing exists. If you want examples where nobody but the author understands it, examples are a dime a dozen.
      - chongli 2mo ago
        So you concede the point then. The age of humans comprehending things is not coming to an end. And therein lies the rub. When it comes to intellectual labour: Understanding == Value If a mathematician produces something incomprehensible then it has no value. It's meaningless. Indistinguishable from random noise. An AI which produces incomprehensible text is producing no value. We didn't need to spend trillions of dollars on LLMs to figure that out. Markov chains can do that job perfectly well.
        a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        You may have missed the present tense. I didn't say it's over, but that it will be. Please pay attention and don't make straw men. Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand? Maybe an LLM could help you notice what I was saying, since it's clearly beyond at least one human's comprehension!

bluefirebrand 2mo ago

> how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? "Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us"

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
Yeah. We're only starting the journey of building tools better at thinking than the human mind, so expecting me to have examples of things it produces is a little hard, don't you think? The best I can do is things that are incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but still provide value. There's a small leap of imagination to consider an author that understands it and can show others how to leverage results without understanding be mechanical rather than biological.

chongli 2mo ago

You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand. All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value. Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
You asked for examples, for a technology that we're still building. Maybe you can see the issue with that? Anyways, people benefitted greatly from Newton's laws of gravity, even though we still don't have a quantum-compatible set of laws for it. The laws of gravity are still incomprehensible for people, but the approximation that we've observed is still immensely valuable.
- chongli 2mo ago
  No, I gave you a lot more leeway than that. Take any utterly incomprehensible piece of writing from the entire history of civilization and demonstrate its value. You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand.
  - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    Can you give me an example single piece of writing that the author didn't claim they understood? I don't think that any utterly incomprehensible writing exists. If you want examples where nobody but the author understands it, examples are a dime a dozen.
    - chongli 2mo ago
      So you concede the point then. The age of humans comprehending things is not coming to an end. And therein lies the rub. When it comes to intellectual labour: Understanding == Value If a mathematician produces something incomprehensible then it has no value. It's meaningless. Indistinguishable from random noise. An AI which produces incomprehensible text is producing no value. We didn't need to spend trillions of dollars on LLMs to figure that out. Markov chains can do that job perfectly well.
      - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        You may have missed the present tense. I didn't say it's over, but that it will be. Please pay attention and don't make straw men. Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand? Maybe an LLM could help you notice what I was saying, since it's clearly beyond at least one human's comprehension!