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status is kinda baked into who we are, species-wise. I mean what do you want people to value, money?

I think there’s a less egocentric form of status/rep that can still apply. Part of why I left philosophy-as-profession is that I realized we don’t really have movements anymore. Everyone wants their own named theory, and once any new direction has more than a handful of people in it they split and

i don't know! like, i appear to be incapable of properly valuing reputation, so from my pov, what i want i think, is for people to really value a sense of "well fuck somebody's gotta do it so i guess it's me" it's like that thing ppl say they like about scandi-socialist countries

that kinda points to the synthesis, right? there are ways of gaining status and reputation that are 1) non-monetary and 2) not distinguished by being first-past-the-post on some pointless metric

God, I wish I could like HG more than I do 😅

oooh tell me why he bugs you

None of it is particularly charitable? “Biologically curious, biologically drawn toward understanding” is a red flag for me, and I noticed that he got his math understanding by talking to a mathematician but got his understanding of why OpenAI did that by “thinking about it”…

(miss me with the "it's capitalism" take. i know people need to eat. huge parts of this are orthogonal to people needing to eat)

a lot of what is bad about capitalism (as opposed to the market economy, yes I seperate them) *is* basically this though - a society constructed around megalothymia, the idea that "I, and I *alone*, brought this great thing to life, and deserve *all* the money/recognition/etc from it"

it's not that I don't agree. it's that I think the megalothymia predates the capital structure a bit, like it seems to ride in on much earlier. historical developments

math is not dead, but first-past-the-post credit in math might be, and that means a lot of individuals' motives to fuck with math might be but that's deeply distinct from math being dead!

there's plenty of evidence that the first proofs of big theorems are supplanted by later more elegant and intuitive work. my pet example is erdos-ko-rado: the original proof was a tedious double induction, the current popular textbook proof came a decade later

personally i'm excited for the proto-borg thought that promptly emerges when you can't expect to have your name on the world changing paper that's how operators are, broadly. no one gets credit for the site staying up. so it takes a type

it's sorta bullshit to credit the openai paperdump papers to "openai", but not because collective credit is bad. it's bullshit because 90+% was done before they appeared. but that means it'd also be bullshit to credit steve the math professor

idk i think it’s pretty load-bearing that a portion of the population is motivated to work insanely hard for something as cheap as “credit”/“status”

it probably is! i still think it's bad. i also don't think those are cheap, at scale. it's cheap for the university exploiting i mean assisting the individual researcher, but said researcher will often turn it into...idk if this is a word, but, soft-capital, post-haste

like how many dinners do we think erdos paid for, yknow?

fame in fame/money/love being devalued?