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oh i like this one a lot, especially @3blue1brown.com 's commentary on credit and ownership and, approximately, meaning-making it resonates with a central conflict i have with society; y'all way too into 'status' and 'credit' and it's a wonder anything useful ever gets done in that context

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

but steve, being a credentialist little fictional weasel, needs the credit to do the work, and so we have a system to give it to him. it's rather recent, and it's not very good, and people act like it's a central pillar of society