Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era

Human pursuits cannot be separated from the humans who pursuit it. In the pursuit of knowledge, what ultimately drives people is what they themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides, both based on their own experience and people whose opinions they value. Humans do not pursuit Platonic knowledge for their own sake, and those who claim to do it, often are satisfying their egos in a different way.

Following Terry Tao's blog he seems to be engaging in forced self-directed cognitive behaviorial therapy, he is trying to come to terms with loss while developing a new framework for himself and other as to where the value is. It is cool to see. It is better to engage than to be in denial and just fall into reactionary behavior.

This essay seems to say, "people don't matter; all that matters is truth." And that all the policy decisions should follow from that assumed value.

Yikes. I fear for what mathematics will become if that becomes the majority viewpoint.

The lens to use is the Venn diagram of:

   1. What you like doing
   2. What you are good at doing
   3. What people will pay you to do

For math, if your goal is to prove something that no one else has proven, then all three are under attack.

I think the "egoless" path is taking a 50,000-foot view of mathematics that ignores the above lens. Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians?

In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians. I don't know. But it's easy to see that not everyone is going to be happy with the transition, and many will be left behind.

For software engineering, it depends on what your center is. If you like "writing code", then #3 is under attack. But for those whose goal is, "make something work", all three are still viable and even better than before (or at least faster).

That's why we see so much disagreement on HN about whether AI is good or bad for software engineering.

I'm sure lots of other people have made this observation before.

This is one of the best posts I've seen on this topic in a while.

I finished a math PhD before I decided to get out of academia and into startups. Since then, the older I get the more of a Platonist I become, especially now that I've taught my daughters a bunch of math (I'm their homeschool math+science teacher). And the more of a Platonist I become, the less I care about who made a particular discovery. Who cares?! It seems obvious (and quite beautiful) to me now that the same discoveries must be getting repeated again and again across the universe by alien mathematicians, and eventually by their AIs.

That’s a great paper, I was tripping on these same thoughts last night. The thing that rang true was kind of getting back to these roots, the Philo-Sophia as love of knowledge, and a community that loves knowledge. It doesn’t matter if one guy has a 70 IQ and loves fables, or another is 170 and loves something I can’t comprehend, they are one family. I was as also thinking about old school ideas of wisdom vs plain intelligence. I had this powerful experience during Covid of finding music someone had made from sequencing the DNA of the virus, sitting there sick listening to the virus, singing the song of its people. It struck me that intelligence isn’t something we have, it’s an attribute of nature that can flow through us, something self standing out there. To be able to listen and receive it from nature is the root of learning, while to believe that you have intelligence, not nature, is the root of stupidity. The awareness was something different from anything I had known, I was never smart, I was floating in an ocean of intelligence blocking myself off from receiving by believing I was smart. Whoops! It felt like true wisdom to realize I was stupid and let it flow through me. That was 2020, the seeds of modern AI were planted but I hadn’t seen them, now everybody is grappling with intelligence being “out there” as part of physical nature not even people. The love of Sophia never dies, but we’re being reminded that it’s a receptive relationship we as individuals have with knowledge and humility is the prerequisite, with the humility, the lessons can come from birds or rocks or trees, but we have to realize they matter and we do.

A lot of top people are going to be having an ego crisis I fear. We're all just human idiots looking to enjoy time with each other while we can. Fortunately, that is enough for a good life.

Why some of us work more and earn less starts to be a little harder to answer though...

I know it's against the rules to be a curmudgeon, but this just reads like a lullaby for people preparing to drink the SF kool-aid. The opportunity cost of becoming an expert will remain, but the reward of pushing the frontier is mostly gone. Now, if you want to save universities as institutions(*), you'll have to offer people some other positive vision. "You won't be able to make a difference" is not one of them. After all, you can get understanding for the joy of understanding (doesn't seem very egoless to me btw) outside of academia as well.

I'm much more sympathetic to the views of this anonymous postdoc here: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/22/the-rules-cannot-cha... (unfortunately also in LLM-"polished" English). Quote: "A field that fails to attract and support its next generation cannot preserve itself through inspiring statements alone."

(*If you extrapolate a little, for now you can also substitute with 'math departments' there.)

This reminds me of a 55 year old idea from software engineering, "egoless programming".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming

Watching Star Trek TNG as a kid, I vividly recall hearing Geordi or Data often say things like "run a level 3 diagnostic on the Worf Barrels" or whatever to the computer and wonder what the heck that would even be. I wondered where are all ship devops and programmers were hidden. Though I recall the one accurate part was Barclay in the Holodeck spending most of the time setting up his IDE.

Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level. Great. So then what are all the people on the Enterprise actually doing? My guess is they're all just being people and doing people stuff like exploring the galaxy and smugfacing the Romulans. It would be easier to just create a race of Datas to do it safer. The Datas could probably be Bluetoothed to the Ship's Computer for even more optimization.

I think some of the struggle is that as we summit each subsequent hill of challenge, the sunset (or is it a sunrise?) is becoming inescapably bright. We're faced with that big ol' "what's the point of all this?" question. What's the point of studying math? What's the point of exploring the galaxy? What's the point of standing under a stack of blue barrels?

I'm not a math guy. I dunno if a Fields medal comes with free Taco Bell for life or something else that would truly move me. But I love that I get to read books and learn cool things and feel that spark of joy when my understanding expands, even if the ending is right there with nothing stopping me from skipping to it.

From the outside seeing academics wash over concerns and debates about this it's helped me sort of get more comfortable with around my own questions about what I want from math and computers. What I've come to realize it's that I just want tools that do a job and enjoy learning them. I also get gratification of being creative with them. I'm not in it for expanding human knowledge or seeing the beauty in the universe or the pleasure of understanding something difficult.

Human academia needs to clean up its ego fixation, jesus fucking christ

It'd be pathetic if the silicon does better science than us and our crabbucket mentality -- highly likely in my view...

It's interesting to see Platonism and virtue ethics combined in such a way to try to make sense of what is going on.

This egoless attitude and the call for a broad humility may find itself in conflict with a supremacist humanism. There are people who will only ever want things that originated from a human. I see this attitude mostly in creative fields like art, music, film and games.

I therefore think we need to have different attitudes towards AI adoption depending on the field. In the case of math, some seem to want to excise any human emotion or physical need and create a pure refined space to explore propositional Truth. But extending this to all human activities doesn't seem to follow.

I guess what I'm saying is, there is probably still a place for human ego, even if that place is not math.

Feel like it's hard to accept egoless style, as in academia there is little but the glory to be had in the pursuits. In the publish/perish era, money is already stretched thin in the average research budget.

I want to believe, but research has been tightrope walking with no safety net for awhile.

So, either researchers get SF salaries? or? (first one is not gonna happen)

I call bullshit for the same reason the first reply to the post gives. It's great to reflect on your self-worth and where that worth comes from (regardless of AI). In a way, this post criticizes capitalism for reducing one's worth to productive output. But then you are asked to become pure and egoless, to detach yourself from your work, while others full on ego profit immensely and strip away your rights. How convenient, right? This post is a gross normalizing of the dehumanization of work. Did Terrence even review this shit before publishing?

Remember the science mines in Egan's Diaspora? It's like that

AI inflicted the 4th narcisstic wound on humanity, the other three being Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_injury for the background.

Omg such AI written slop. I read it three times and am none the wiser what his point is.

Crazy to see AI slop being posted on tao's blog.

Isn't it strange how the AI disclaimer is at the end of the writing instead of the start. Almost as if they are trying to hide it.

lol why does he have so many guest posts. part of the problem is people accidently ignoring the guest post disclaimer and misattributing the words to him. mathematicians are now doing more writing about math than math itself. if Ai destroys math jobs, then I guess they can fall back as writers. they are still better than the general population at that, too.

'Egoless' can mean a lot of different things. Here it seems to mean 'everything belongs to the corporations.'

It's awful how people with anti-AI psychosis now treat Tao. Just read comments here, people making some completely out of blue pseudo-psychologic diagnoses.

From the jump the premise seems reasonable. Having a too much of an ego is a source of all sorts of self-imposed problems or create roadblocks in interacting with others. But this literally brings up saintlike detachment as "not far from the truth" in describing the extent they're advocating for.

I'm thinking maths are kinda fucked rn.

> we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of GPT Astra 6.0 and GPT 6.1 Sol in drafting this post.

Holy. This is the closest thing I've seen one of these AI guys get to accepting it as the machine god. "Dear god, we gratefully accept this divine gift of sustenance that we are about to consume."

That might be a good time to consider what the fuck is going on.

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