Michael Bailey

I think literally the opposite will be true. Academic journals that impose stringent restrictions on AI use will simply stop attracting the best papers. The pursuit of truth and knowledge is not a sport.

Hot take: “The great feminization” and the cattiness of wokeness/call-out culture stem from women not learning how to argue. I’m trying to learn how to argue my points, listen openly to opposition, allow for possible shifting—rather than retreat, apologize, get emotional or feel offended. Basic skills we all should learn, but women are less likely to.

You're all obsessed with @nathancofnas's work on race and IQ and totally sleeping on his most important paper. (We are not the same.) link.springer.com/article/10…

Today we published one of the best things I've read on the trans debate. Free of the usual acrimony that surrounds these issues, it's compassionate, clear-eyed, and a partisan only of evidence and reason. By @Edokwin. Check it out: freeblackthought.substack.co…

I disagree with many parts of this response, but I will focus on one in particular. The anonymous PhD student wrote: "seeing mathematicians greet this release of papers with excitement and joy is beyond confusing. Many celebrate the possibility that AI will relieve them of the burden of difficult calculations, technical lemmas, and other supposedly tedious aspects of mathematical research...I love technical work...I can tell you that I entered graduate school fully intending to pursue a career as a research mathematician. The actions of October 6th have reversed this, and I’m probably not the only one." Lozeno-Robledo responds: "We need to make sure students do not abandon mathematics because they think it has become unrecognizable." I disagree. We are going through a revolution in mathematics. It will change many aspects of what it means to be a mathematician. I believe mathematicians will continue to have a key role in mathematical discovery, at least in the near term, and the profession will continue to be one that attracts many people of the highest calibre. And yes, training these people will include us finding ways of making them struggle, perhaps in line with Niall Ferguson's "the cloister and the starship" suggestion. But there is no reason to expect that the people for whom the new mathematics will be the right profession are necessarily the same people for whom mathematics as we have known it was the right one. If a student finds that the profession is becoming unrecognisable, and that what it is becoming no longer appeals to them, then it may well be that the best course for them is to leave mathematics and pursue something else. That is not necessarily something we should seek to prevent. Every revolution changes the nature of a calling, and whom it calls.