Incentives, Not Destinies

I’m not a huge fan of Yancey Strickler’s ideas, but they are in the same realm as mine1, so I continue to pay attention. His “The breaking of the world” continues in this it feels close but…off? vein, but has a couple of things that resonated, starting with the phrase I lifted for this post’s title. But starting with his post’s title: I feel like it would have served his ideas better to call it The breaking of my world, as after reading it and looking back at the title I had to wonder, whose world? One of the best parts is actually a quote from Hacker News of all places. In a Hacker News discussion about a recent batch of proposed mathematical proofs published by OpenAI, a commenter who had worked on one of the problems for 24 years writes: I don’t know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don’t know, there’s…