You got the hindu date wrong. The Hindu cosmology actually has scales comparable with what modern cosmology believes.

Someone should correct Wikipedia then. It’s got errors for sure sometimes.

What your Wikipedia link says is already correct, ie that 3000BC is when kaliyuga started. The start of kaliyuga is not when the universe was created. Kaliyuga is just the last four hundred thousand years of a four million-year cycle, at the end which all the evil folk get purged and then the next cycle starts with a high quantity of good again.

The universe as a whole is created and destroyed in four billion-year cycles (one kalpa each). We're currently in the middle of the cycle, ie the universe was created two billion years ago. And Brahma the creator god lives for a longer time than that - three hundred trillion years - and we're halfway through that period as well.

Of course all these numbers are entirely "beautiful" mathematical constructions, and don't have any actual basis in observations or reality.

Sure, the best chess/go players on this planet are not humans anymore and those games are full of novel situations with no known solutions.

That seems pretty different though, they have relatively few relatively straightforward fixed rules, you can just compute possible outcomes for moves.

The branching factor of Go prevents brute force calculation of the best possible moves. It isn't even obvious how to write a function that evaluates how strong any given board position is. The AI had to learn functions to do that.

Stock Fish and AlphaGo aren’t LLMs - which is the type of AI ChatGPT is.

Deepmind is trying to combine "Alphazero" style algorithms with LLMs to build Gemini.

We will see if they succeed and create a better AI that doesn’t relies solely on memorising answers.

For the stacks project, absolutely yes.

While there can be advantages to reading a lot and reading fast, I would also suggest that there is value to reading less (but still consistently) and letting your brain mull things over. Some thoughts really do require time.

Reading two hours gives you 22 hours to "mull"

(Not disagreeing at all, btw)

Mathematician too. I would say we still don't really know what a set is. ZFC "explains" sets in terms of... axioms and models of them which are also just sets? Should I worry about this recursion? Who knows, we just pretend things work.

I am not pursuing a PhD in pure math so I certainly have both interest and ability in doing academic stuff but I found it incredibly hard to get acceptable grades in high school.

> I am not pursuing a PhD in pure math so I certainly have both interest and ability in doing academic stuff

I don't see how the second half of the sentence follows from the first half. Did that "not" slip in by accident? Or do you consider a PhD in pure maths to be evidence of not having academic ability?

-- Yours, offended holder of PhD in pure maths :)

I guess this was written on a phone: "now" became "not"

I did too. But I've gotten much better at studying/learning over the years, and I attribute my high school problems with grades as a combination of ADD and my head being focused on trying to deal with what, in retrospect, were psychological problems. What I needed back then was a really great therapist and some training in mindfulness meditation. Alas.

He has spent a large amount of time coordinating and strategizing health care interventions in multiple countries over the last couple of decades. Seems like he would be in a very good position to explain this stuff to the public.

I am one such mathematician.

No comment about the broader picture but there have been very smart people who have quit academia and gone into industry for whatever reason. Maybe the most famous is Jim Simons (he had an exceptional mathematical career before going into finance) but I know a few more examples.

And financial companies seem to recruit from high scorers on math contests. They often sponsor the contests too, and get their names displayed where possible, such as on free swag given to contestants.

The abilities and skills that win math contests aren't identical with those that would do well in academic research, but I think there's a good amount of overlap.

The discussion is really about the Chinese (and American) governments. The US government is really... Not great. See wars in the middle east, spying on its people, military industrial complex, bad environmental record, bad civil rights record and all of these are ongoing problems. I dont think the US government is any better than the Chinese government. They have been responsible for so much instability in the world in the middle east, Africa, south asia and south America even if we just want to focus on how they treat people.