@DanRosiak

Over the past few months, amid wave after wave of impressive ai-math results, a bizarre framing has become increasingly common on this site: a mathematician's reaction to all this supposedly reduces to "truth vs. ego". Apparently either you are delighted by every ai breakthrough because you care about truth, or you never really loved math, you only loved being the person who solves things (ego). There's a lot going on here, and many caveats (like i do not actually think it's as dire as people suggest), but I'll skip all that to focus on attacking the framing. I find this framing ridiculous and disingenuous. Suppose a device has been invented that can make a child fully literate in 60 seconds. Decoding words, but also appreciating literature, understanding things like metaphor, and digesting hard books. As a parent, you're probably initially delighted that the child can read. You can't wait to talk to them about so many things and witness how their mind works! Incredible! But it would be astounding (and frankly concerning) if you felt no loss here at all, if you did not also mourn: mourn all the evenings you had imagined spending sounding out words together, watching comprehension gradually appear, helping them discover their favorite books, returning to those together. If someone interpreted that aspect of mourning as equaling: "You wanted your child to remain ignorant so that you could feel important!" I would assume that there was something very off with the person suggesting that. The much more likely train of thought here is: "Something extremely valuable (to me, to my child, and to humanity) was contained in the shared process by which this sort of knowledge was acquired." Or suppose someone installs a teleporter at the base of Everest. Anyone can now reach the summit safely in five seconds! This is astounding and really good for people who want the view. People claim it "democratizes" access to summit and prevents deaths. Hard to argue with that. It would be ridiculous to then tell old-school climbers: "You claim to love reaching summits, yet you seem unhappy that everyone can now reach one much more quickly. Evidently climbing was only about ego and exclusivity!" The obvious reply would be: "There has been a serious misunderstanding. My love of climbing was never about valuing occupying the coordinates at the top. The ascent was a core part of it: the preparation, endurance, testing courage, overcoming fear, pushing the limits of judgment, companionship, failure, and transformation through difficulty. These were always the main things. A teleport may be a better summit-reaching technology, but it can hardly be called a better form of climbing." Likewise, math colleagues grieving seem to be saying: a theorem machine may be a better theorem-reaching technology without being a better form of doing mathematics. The sadness they are expressing seems to come from the threat of losing an activity that organized attention, made time meaningful, and has been one of the most impactful forms of life in human history. Those calling this grief "ego" seem to want to imply that math was only ever a circuitous method for increasing the global inventory of theorems, and that any of its form of life aspects were secondary to this. But...YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING. EVERYTHING YOU DO, EVERYTHING YOU ARE, IS SOCIAL. EVERYTHING. So ask yourself: Is math more like removing tumors, where the process is an unfortunate means to the result? Or is it more like climbing, cooking, teaching, etc., one of so many activities in which the process is a large part of the good? Of course ego exists in math, as it does in every single human vocation. But it does not follow that every grief about what is happening is grief over lost superiority or specialness. You can celebrate the production of more theorems while grieving the possible disappearance of everything involved in math as form of life. This shouldn't be controversial