Lack of accessible understanding and application of mathematics for laypeople

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 2 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “>>However, on one point I increasingly agree: virtually none of this stuff is possible with technology any normal citizen has access to. So basically nothing changes, Math was subject to gatekeeping and policing of the worst kind. If you were not among the geniuses, and it didn't come to you automagically, you were simply supposed to leave it to the people who did get it and go do work for people of your intelligence. Smugness was too much to take. Math people, like chess people never made any genuine attempt to help people understand the processes and methods that made math happen. To me it should have been a field as teachable and ubiquitous as accounting. The net result is once these methods and processes were worked out by AI, it was over for the human mathematicians.”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “The reason we (as in university-funding society) need mathematicians is so that there's a steward over math that can help me, a complete layman, understand and apply mathematics. "Being a steward" will sometimes not look like much. Sometimes it's just going to be dicking around with LLM's. But math is too important for it to be abandoned by humans and left to models. I, the tax-paying bonehead engineer, need mathematicians to exist. They can have their ego beaten up by Claude, sure, whatever, but they're not allowed to just close up shop in despair.”

  Hacker News · request