I worked for a couple years with a formidable and incomprehensibly smart engineer who ascended the IC ranks faster than anyone I’ve seen at an elite tech company. He quit the job a few years ago, and when I asked him his plans he told me he was going to work on the busy beaver problem. I can’t help but wonder if he is mxdys, the pseudonymous contributor mentioned in the article who wrapped up the formal proof of BB(5). I’ll probably never know.
I didn’t know him that well, but could see him being the kind of person who wants to avoid attention. He was happy to spend some time explaining the problem to me and why it was interesting and difficult.
I didn't mean to suggest anything. I was just interested in whether they thought that remaining anonymous was in keeping with their ex-colleagues character. Written communication is hard!
This is just the same extremely poorly thought out argument against any type of pure research.
Pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake always results in improvement down the line, even if it's impossible to predict when and how.
Do you think Benjamin Franklin expected a payoff from the experiments that led to the discovery of electricity? Or Newton researching gravity? Much of our knowledge about the universe comes from researchers picking at a topic just for the hell of it.
> I would rather someone of the intellectual calibre you describe work on problems more relevant to improving the world.
Impressive amount of entitlement here. Nobody owes you anything, and people are free to do anything they want. Not everyone wants to be a hero or great inventor, even if they have the skill for it. Nor is it some universal moral obligation for skilled people to spend their lives producing something profitable or beneficial to society.
Do you have hobbies? If so, you should feel bad because you're wasting your talents on useless unprofitable activities. Better go out and solve the world's problems.
Category Theory was called abstract nonsense by theoretical mathematicians, but it has helped improve type theory for computer language design.
G.H. Hardy was a British mathematician who expressed pride in the "uselessness" of his work, believing that pure mathematics was an art form that should not be tainted by practical applications. Ironically, his contributions to analytic number theory now underpins modern cryptography.
It’s weirdly difficult to study something for years - no matter how abstract — and successfully avoid any practical applications!
> It’s weirdly difficult to study something for years - no matter how abstract — and successfully avoid any practical applications!
This reeks of survivor bias and I'm interested to hear arguments why you're so confidence this is the case without resorting to the obviously very well-known survivors (as opposed to the thousands of research projects that ended apparently nowhere and long forgotten...)
Personal happiness? It's also more than short-sighted to assume that just because there is no immediately obvious overall benefit, that no such thing exists.
The techniques and insights developed and found during the pursuit of such fundamental and elusive problems can have profound side effects that may materialize only decades or even centuries later.
Why is it a smart person should be expected to use their capabilities for "the betterment of humanity"? There's a level of entitlement that goes with statements like that.
I think we already do pressure artists into “productive” work - it’s very hard to make a living as an artist. I personally would like more art around my life!
At the time when they were first explored, you could've easily said the same thing about subatomic particles, imaginary numbers and many other concepts of the like. Scientific advancement isn't always linear and the value of many discoveries is often only apparent after the fact, often after a considerable amount of time has passed.
I would classify advancing the state of the art knowledge in math/computers/science to be a noble feat in itself that doesn't need any justification (especially to those who have done less).
