this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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For any not in the loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman
From the wiki article :
Anybody have any idea what the ethical standards might be that he's referring to? Not sure if there's a scandal or something or just an overall sense of displeasure with the field.
I tried to google it and it’s not super clear.
-Perelman gets his phd in russia super young and is hired at NYU/SUNY
-Publishes some groundbreaking stuff on arxiv (a free site to post white papers in math and physics) in 2002/2003
-There is some drama with another scientist who is known for stealing people’s work trying to downplay Perelman’s contribution
-Perelman quits his US jobs and returns to russia to work in math (making wayyyyyyy less money), then quits that job too and becomes a recluse
-Turns down fields medal and millennium prize (1M dollars for solving)
-Says some mathematicians are unethical but the rest of them tolerate it so they’re shit too so the whole thing is shit. Also says he doesn’t want to be put in a zoo or treated like a pet about it.
—
I’m going to go ahead and assume I don’t understand enough about being a math superstar to understand where he’s coming from, but he certainly sounds like a principled guy and now I respect him.
Punk rock as fuck. May this dude find many morsels and enjoy the morning dew for the rest of his days.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200309104931/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/08/28/manifold-destiny
This new Yorker article goes into some more detail. Apparently there was an underlying conflict between rival Chinese academics over succession of university admin postings in Beijing.
According to the article it was one Chinese dude trying to hog credit and Perelman basically went "oh i'm not brave enough for politics" and bailed. If he accepted his choice was basically becoming a conformist or getting involved by trying to improve things. He chose not to choose.
p.s. Also between some behavioral tics (very picky eater, refusing to trim nails, trouble socializing) and the elevated sense of justice I nominate him as an honorary autist. we stan
I'm totally for how and why he dipped out. I've made a few decisions in life in a similar fashion. But a man as principled as he is, with feelings and ideas that intense, is a hell of a thing to lose in the pursuit of truth. Just imagine, if instead of resigning to almost insurmountable odds where most would be against him, he instead chose to be a stubborn man in the opposite respect and didn't rest until the truth and was common knowledge or had created groups and institutions to further pursue it if not able to do it himself.
Things like this are way bigger than one person, and to understand the problem and try to tackle it would consume your whole life. Go on and pick some mushrooms my man. You made your contribution to society and decided the rat race isn't worth it.
AMAB?
Just a few bad apples.
Problem:
A fruit vendor receives a shipment of 500 apples. It is known that for every bad apple in a bunch, the entire bunch spoils. The apples are packed into bunches of 10. After inspecting the shipment, the vendor finds that 5% of the apples are bad.
How many bunches of apples will spoil due to bad apples?
between 3 and 25, depending from the distribution... And your point is? 🤷
You mathnificent bastard.
And 3 to 25 bunches is between 30 and 250 apples gone bad, so that A few bad apples could spoill half of the apples, and there you have the problem with the police force, especially of the USA where officially it's not a crime to drive a car whilst having dark skin tone but you can definitely still be summarily executed for it.
Yes, i got it, but it depends from the distribution. If there is correlation on where the bad apples appears (e.g. for cultural or socio economic conditions), it is more likely that we are close to the case of 3 bunches (that is 30 apples, just 5 more than the "original" apples)
If we stop this parallelism (that is what I disagree with) and we move to the actual issue with the police, i think it's a problem with all power positions: all positions that come with power (no matter how small) attract certain kind of people. This is true from the folks that check tickets in public transportation to teachers. Police is worse because there is a lot of unchecked power and close to no accountability
The solution is not how to do bin packing of the bad apples, the solution is reducing the power, increasing accountability and add checks (e.g. while body cam have some privacy implications that i don't like, it's a step in that direction)
You're very right.
How many?
It's complex.
Don't be so hyperbolic
Screw you apples, I'm gonna go hang with the mushrooms.
Homie really said AMAB.
I mean math is the backbone of science and technology. And technology can lead to fucked up things.
Nuclear bombs wouldn’t be possible without fairly recent math.
Not to mention the unethical hell that is the whole financial sector / trader type where mathematicians often end up working.
And finally these days, by making new discoveries in some fields your directly contributing to the growth of AI and LLMs.
An infamous example of someone who quit math over ethical concerns (ironic given the rest of the story) is Ted Kacyznski (the unabomber), who saw math as leading to more and more advanced technology which oppresses people and destroys nature.
I think his issues more stemmed from academia and the rat race within it, not so much the ethical issues of mathematics and what they can lead to. Just shitty crabs trying to escape the bucket.
When you're just crabs in a bucket, be the sea slug that got dredged up with the rest.
....and a beautiful sea slug too
I too find economists unethical by trade. Statisticians with a gambling problem, the lot of them.
😆
Damn I didn't know mathematicians go this hard.
Most mathematicians I know go REALLY hard. There's something about the field...
Goals.
Not from that field, and I think it depends a lot of the field, country, etc, but research is not an idilic world at all and deal with huge flaws from the real world, institutions, society and economics, not aside of human being's flaws, so it can be deeply disappointing in some aspects. I believe is a natural in any guild (there is shit everywhere, e.g. police require internal affairs for a good reason, but not only, they suffer from funding restrictions, metrics for promotion, etc, and the same can be said for medicine, politics, etc) so in the end it may be your ability to deal with real world shit... and luck.
Keep reading. It's in the "Possible withdrawal from mathematics" section.
Just speculating, maybe it has to do with belonging to Russian academia.
Yeah, there was some background drama with his parent institution, if I remember correctly. He didn't have enough money to fly anywhere, his institution refused to donate and he was too embarrassed to ask elsewhere. Or something like that.
Also from the article:
I enjoy this man's focus and determination. I feel like the world probably missed out on good things when he left academia, but I can't blame the dude when I saw why he refused a million dollars for solving the Poincaré Conjecture. He seems like a person with very strong principles.
A million dollars buys a lot of food and shelter which gives you more time to do mushroom picking. And the process of accepting the prize probably wouldn't have taken more than a couple of days
The article says that he refused the prize because he felt that he hadn't earned it. He felt that the prize should be awarded to Richard Hamilton who developed the theory Perelman used to fully solve the Poincaré Conjecture. I'm not saying it was the wisest or easiest solution. I was only trying to express my opinion that I find his adherence to his strong principles admirable.
I'm absolutely not advocating for anyone to turn down a million dollars. For anyone in a position where they can just, like, get a million bucks, take that shit and live a happier life!
There is no taking the money and staying true to your principles here. Either you say the whole sphere of academia is corrupt and fucked, or you take a nice big cash prize and play the game. Can't say taking money is bad and then take that money yourself
Yes you absolutely could. It takes 1m away from what is "corrupt and fucked" and helps me being the opposite. E.g. could buy me a lot of ads telling the world how corrupt and fucked it all is.
No, you can't. If you believe that academia is corrupted by money to the point you walk away from it, taking their accolades and cash prizes would make you a complete hypocrite. And nobody would take you or anything you say afterwards seriously any more.
Sure, but also you do not accept the 1m and that's it. You're not changing the system, you're not furthering yourself, you "just" stood by your principles. Admitted, a million would alsp probably not help to correct the system.
With a million dollars you can buy mushrooms, making picking them feel pointless.
Once I got past the first few paragraphs, all I learned from that is that I don't understand the Poincare conjecture or really anything about topology
2D: If you draw a perhaps wobbly circle shape (loop) on the ground, it has an inside that you can colour in. If your loop is elastic, it can contract to be all in a tiny heap. Topologists call this "simply connected".
3D: The water on your bath is also simply connected. Your elastic loop, whatever its shape, can shrink back down to tiny.
2D: The surface of your tennis ball is simply connected because any elastic loop on its surface can shrink to nothing, but the surface of your ring donut isn't, because you could cut your elastic and wrap it arround the donut and it couldn't shrink because the donut would stop it. Ants living on the surface of the donut might not immediately realise it wasn't simply connected because they'd never drawn a big enough loop to find out that it couldn't be shrunk.
3D: The solid donut is also not simply connected, because the ring could contain an elastic band that goes all the way around the ring and back to the start, and it couldn't shrink to nothing because it would have to leave the donut.
2-Manifolds: a 2-manifold is some kind of surface that doesn't have an edge and when you look up close it looks like it's flat-ish. You could make it by sticking lots of tiny sheets of rubber flat to each other but there's not allowed to be an edge. The simplest 2-manifolds are an infinite plane, the surface of a ball and the surface of a donut. The small ones are called closed. The technical reason for that is to do with not having any edges but still being finite, but you can think of closed to mean finite.
Manifolds may not be as the srrm: If you live in a 2-manifold you might not immediately realise that it's ball surface and you might not realise it's a donut surface. If you have a computer game from yesteryear where when you go off the top of the screen you come back on at the same angle and position on the bottom of the screen, and the same for left and right, that's actually got the same layout as the surface of a donut. To help you see that, imagine your screen was triple widescreen and made of rubber. Roll it up to glue the top to the bottom and then glue the two ends of the tube to each other. You haven't changed the game play at all but now you can see it's the surface of a donut shape.
3-manifolds: anything that looks like 3D space up close is a 3-manifold. The simplest 3-manifolds are an ordinary infinite 3D space, a 3-sphere, which is like the 3D version of the surface of a ball, but it's hard to imagine the 4D ball it's wrapped around, and the 3D version of the computer game.
The universe: It looks simply connected, but we can't see that directly, because maybe there's a very long loop we haven't gone on yet that gets back where you started without being shrinkable. This is hard to imagine, but it could be like being in the 3D version of the computer game where there's a long loop that can't shrink because it goes through one side of the screen and comes out the other before coming back. It can't be shrink at all, especially not to nothing. The universe is a 3-manifold.
The Poincare conjecture says that every simply connected "closed" (finite) 3-manifold is essentially the same as the 3-sphere. If ALL your loops shrink, no matter how big, and the universe is finite and has no end wall, then it's the 3 sphere.
Mathematicians have been trying to prove that it's true for a long long time, and there was a 1M USD prize for proving it that this guy turned down. The prize was largely unnecessary because lots of mathematicians were trying to prove it anyway because it's so famous and enticing.