Post #2438849

2026-04-27 15:22 UTC

This can be contrasted with a communal meal in a society used to food abundance, such as a pot-luck event in a developed country. Now that food can be readily sourced in many ways, arbitrary donations of raw ingredients are no longer appreciated; a stranger dropping off a carcass of mystery meat for others to clean and cook, for instance, would not be received well (though rare exceptions might be made if there was a particularly unique and interesting story behind how this carcass was obtained, and one could trust that the meat was safe for human consumption). Even properly inspected, well-presented, and safe-to-eat contributions, such as store-bought prepackaged meals, would often only form a portion of the accepted contributions at best. Thoughtfully home-cooked meals, made by trusted members of the community, are also often highly valued at such events; in particular, the conversations around such contributions can become an important social aspect of the gathering, as well as an opportunity to train a future generation of cooks. (3/5)

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@tao@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-27 15:23

Returning back to mathematics, the era of proof abundance means that some of the prestige previously awarded to being the first to generate a proof will need to be transferred instead to the humans who successfully verify and digest such proofs. Ideally, the same group of authors should be involved in all three activities; this has broadly been the case in the era of human-generated mathematics, but we are just now beginning to see "raw" proofs generated largely by AI for which the person prompting the AI has "no time" to verify the proof or summarize it to others. As we are beginning to see at the Erdos problem website, such "contributions" to the discussion around a problem do not measurably advance the progress around that problem; in fact they may have the unintended negative affect of killing off further interest in working on the problem as it is now "solved", even though no human is able to understand the solution. (4/5)

Open ##2438850