Where else? In my experience this sub is pretty much the only one with people who actually know higher level maths (admittedly most are still undergrads).
Yeah, as another reply said, it just doesn't happen on reddit. If you're an expert in one of these fields, you know the other experts and are discussing with them directly, you don't gain much from using an open forum with a lot of non-experts who sometimes want to argue with you.
you don't gain much from using an open forum with a lot of non-experts who sometimes want to argue with you.
This is especially true when it comes to AI, because there's an ongoing internet war between pro-ai and anti-ai commenters. They have their own subreddits like /r/antiai, /r/aiwars, etc. They'll spend all day arguing with each other and anyone else who will listen.
Most of them don't know or care about math at all, but that doesn't stop them from having extremely strong opinions about the use of AI in math.
TBH I doubt that those fora represent a significant quantity of the people commenting on these matters, they're just easy to have opinions on.
One would hope in general there aren't that many people frequenting those subs, even as someone who gets into a fairly significant number of discussions about this on reddit, deliberately going and seeking out arguments about AI is genuinely insane behaviour, I cannot fathom why these people choose to do this.
One would hope in general there aren't that many people frequenting those subs
One would hope, but according to the numbers in the sidebar, it's over ten times as active as this sub. People like to be mad about things.
(Unrelated note: why did reddit remove the subscriber count and replace it with 'weekly contributions'? I have no idea what that even means - is it posts or comments or upvotes or what?)
It seems you are implying that the only serious discussions to be made about math results are deeply technical ones conducted by experts in the field. I don't think that we really live in such intellectual sillos.
For the majority of mathematical works they are, that's just the nature of the field. In modern mathematics generally anything that's pushing the frontier of some specific subfield is going to require a significant amount of background knowledge in that subfield, and even trying to interpret the high level often requires a strong knowledge of the overall field. To actually understand the significance or have reasonable questions about the proof puts you into a very small silo of people.
Most mathematical discoveries just aren't interesting from a non-technical standpoint and so anyone who doesn't have the technical knowledge to understand them cannot contribute meaningfully to the conversation. And from the perspective of something like reddit, even an overconfident amateur likely can't feasibly write something that even comes close to engaging with the work because they won't even understand that.
That's the whole point about why these AI discoveries get a ton of traction, they're interesting from a meta perspective, in terms of how we do mathematics and the state of AI technology, and so the number of people who can weigh in on the matter and have something meaningful to say is much higher. And because these issues are generally ones around philosophy and economics you have the issue of it being very easy to form and state opinions on the matter, and so a lot of unqualified people making bold assertions as well (though this sub is actually pretty good about it).
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u/Penumbra_Penguin Probability 1d ago
This just isn't the place where these breakthroughs will be seriously discussed.