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Aryeh Kontorovich

@aryehazan on X

3 captures, most recent first. Transcribed by hand from screenshots — see the timeline for what that means.

Aryeh Kontorovich @aryehazan

quoting @carney — saved image

Aryeh Kontorovich [verified] @aryehazan · 2h
losing our jobs will be the least of our problems

[quoted]
John Carney [verified] @carney · 2h
I'm going to admit that I don't understand the mathematician takes on AI.

It seems like they sound like they have some "problem" they've been thinking about so long ... [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

X reply by Aryeh Kontorovich (@aryehazan) to John Carney's post, terse retort that 'losing our jobs will be the least of our problems' — quote-tweeting Carney's puzzlement over mathematicians' psychological reaction to AI solving open problems.

ai progressmathematicstwitterexistential reaction

Aryeh Kontorovich @aryehazan

reply from @littmath — saved image

Aryeh Kontorovich ✔️ @aryehazan · 22h
ok, math and cs is not 80% fake nonsense

but I heard a senior colleague opine that some 80-85% of all published papers add zero value and nothing would be lost if they hadn't been published

I tend to concur

[quoted tweet:]
Adam Wren ✔️ @aswren · Aug 2
I know this is obvious to everyone that follows me but it's not just Jason Arday. Academia is 80% fake nonsense. Towers of abstraction with no basis in reality and they believe they should govern the world because they've given …

12 replies, 8 reposts, 256 likes, 13K views

Daniel Litt ✔️ @littmath · 5h
One thing that would be lost is the human expertise developed in the course of their production, which has  arguably always been the main justification for most (though far from all) papers.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Tweet thread debating whether 80% of academic papers add zero value, starting from Adam Wren's claim about academia being 'fake nonsense', with Aryeh Kontorovich partially agreeing for math/CS, and Daniel Litt noting the counter-value of expertise development.

academiatwitterscience criticism

Aryeh Kontorovich @aryehazan

Aryeh Kontorovich @aryehazan · 23h I have vociferously disagreed with Scott Aaronson on a number of things I'm not even willing to endorse everything he wrote in this latest post but I'll fully endorse this bit, it's dead on [Embedded quote image, presumably from Scott Aaronson's blog:] "Let me make something clear: I don't focus so much on antisemitism only because of parochial concern for the survival of my own kids, although I freely admit to having as much such concern as the next person. Instead, I do so because I hold with David Deutsch that, in Western civilization, antisemitism has for millennia been the inevitable endpoint toward which every bad idea ultimately tends. It's the universal bad idea. It's bad-idea-complete. Antisemitism is the purest possible expression of the worldview of the pitchfork-wielding peasant, who blames shadowy elites for his own failures in life, and who dreams in his resentment and rage of reversing the moral and scientific progress of humanity by slaughtering all those responsible for it. Hatred of high-achieving Chinese and Indian immigrants, and of gifted programs and standardized testing, are other expressions of the same worldview."
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

A tweet by mathematician Aryeh Kontorovich endorsing a passage from a Scott Aaronson blog post arguing antisemitism is "bad-idea-complete" — the universal endpoint of resentment-driven worldviews, linked to hostility toward meritocratic achievement more broadly.

antisemitismscott aaronsonpoliticsmeritocracytwitter