This is a 1:1 Telegram chat with basedmachina, after he read doomslide’s Against Mathematics. We started talking about what makes mathematics matter, at what scale, and what kinds of value we mean when we say that it does. I’ve loosely grouped the conversation into five themes.
His angle is that mathematics is a practice people become absorbed in, and a shared way of life that can be sufficient on its own terms (he makes a similar point about poetry, philosophy and even model railways). Its value doesn’t have to come from a career, an institution or what the rest of society finds useful. He imagines a possible “golden era” in which careerists and strivers lose interest and the people left are the “hardcore radicals”.
I keep coming back to knowledge as a social and historical artifact: something that is taught, circulated, argued over and built upon. My defence of institutions is mostly about those functions, and what happens to them if the institutions disappear (teaching, transmission, shared standards, the accumulation of knowledge, etc…). People continuing to do mathematics because they love it is one thing; preserving the capabilities built around that activity is another. A lot of the discussion is about which of those capabilities need institutions, what other forms they could take, and the different senses of “mattering” that keep getting mixed together.
Still doing math
im going in…..
Replying to basedmachina, 21:55: im going in…..
didnt end up reading the whole thing, skipped middle part, overall its ineresting as an overview of dynamics , funding, social aspects of mathematics, but its a lot of words…also I feel like this way to look at it would automatically lead t the next step which is people doing math outside of institutions, like perelman (who is briefly mentioned at least) , but he doesnt go into that, maybe there will be a follow up article? because it doesn't seam clear why people would stop being obsessed with it. I think if you take away the funding and position from mochi (or any of his fanboys) he would keep doing the same thing, just on unemployment welfare or whatever I guess, bc these guys are just mono-obsessed autists (like perelman)
gm
at least in the conclusion part he writes that math is free now, this is kinda interesting way to look at it.
idk, I mean I didn’t read it yet
but isn’t he talking about mathematics acedemia?
in which case that is dead so to speak or will die soon, no one cares that Perelman apparently does math on his own
He doesn’t publish
Same for mochi
Nothing matters outside of the social engine for mathematics as we understand it†
I sometimes push a position to an extreme to make the structure of the point easier to see, then work through the qualifications in conversation. That’s what I’m doing with these early “no value” claims. The distinctions between personal meaning, a shared practice and accumulated knowledge become clearer as we go.
it has no value if done individually, there are no truths worth anything in math that can be gotten to alone in a cabin
Replying to ludwig, 11:38: Same for mochi
(He does publish, I just meant same for mochi if he went that route)
Replying to ludwig, 11:38: Same for mochi
i think perelmans friends still care about what hes working on, same for mochi, they would just follow this in any case
so i guess we could also call that academia, but i understood frog talked about academia in the institutional/career sense
that guy for example
Two images shared by basedmachina, shown with the crops retained from the chat.
i dont see these guys just stopping their obsession for any reason
A mathematician in the woods
yea, I dont think that matters though imo, and only institutional academic mathematics matter†
it doesn't have to start in there, or end in there
but certainly an idea is worth nothing if it's not propagated at scale and the only way to do that is through current incarnation of mathematics academia, because math is not like engineering where you can just build a better bridge or sell IP
so idk
Replying to basedmachina, 11:52: i dont see these guys just stopping their obsession for any reason
i havent read it as i said but i doubt he argues that people will stop being interested in mathematics
mostly because that's nonsense, so idk…. if he makes that allusion then frog is stupider than i thought
i would hope he is making the point that mathematics will die as a profession and current incarnation, not the hobby side
im actually curious about your thoughts bc you have a very strangely romantic notion of what it means to "do mathematics" in the sense of what is the purpose of it, maybe in my head it's because there is this idea of like the lone mathematician working towards the Truth of whatever he might be working on, and how that will not stop (that I agree with), but I think where I disagree is that this is "mathematics" in the sense of the profession, again because my point is that mathematics in a vacuum has no value (outside of philosophical ones about one's individual understanding… which is important and good but isn't how mathematics including the ones people like Mochi or Perelman worked on top of were solidified)
(imo people overindex on the idea of say, a Galois, but underindex on the fact that his work came to matter basically ONLY because of mathematics as a profession over the decades after, which set up (at the time, a very different version of) mathematics as a field of academia… if Galois writes the fundamentals of abstract algebra and galois theory in the woods and no one is around to hear it, did any knowledge get created? and if so (or not), does it matter and why? what does it even mean that they continued stringing various symbols and logical clauses together? that is my point re perleman and an alternate-reality mochi that drops out the field)
Sufficient for what?
no i dont think he means that
i would ask counter question: what is the value of poetry (or any art really)
for me its all just en expression of fundamental human desire , more like instinct, i dont think any other framing matters, in the sense of career, value, academic or other
niche of people do certain things because they become obsessed with it
and for this niche it matters, they dont need any outside
more funny or absurd example: there are people absolutely insane about model railway..
what else do you really need ? who cares what "society" thinks or values, when you are in your own world
so for math, math is a practice, and becomes more interesting as a social or group practice, a way to view an issue and communicate about it, and that results in certain way of life. some people enjoy and i think that is already sufficient (where i would apply the same logic to any subculture)
ok so I wrote a bunch of stuff, to try and make you understand what I mean, but I think the best way here is to simply ask a question (it's the same question as earlier, but in a different shape), and for you not ask a counter question there but either force yourself to attempt to answer, or broadly gesture at the feeling you have about the answer (or to refuse to answer it):
"so for math, math is a practice, and becomes more interesting as a social or group practice, a way to view an issue and communicate about it, and that results in certain way of life. some people enjoy and i think that is already sufficient"
what does it mean to be sufficient here? what is sufficient about this? (I will tell you what I think you mean, it's the italic part here from earlier: "outside of philosophical ones about one's individual understanding… which is important and good but isn't how mathematics including the ones people like Mochi or Perelman worked on top of were solidified"
if your answer is within the loose boundaries of what I meant by "philosophical ones", like moral, aesthetics or religious reasons of an individual, then we dont disagree, but you collapse the meaning of "mattering", "sufficient" etc… in ways that aren't actually describing the world as a whole and only this viewpoint (of the individual, their quest for Truth or Beauty or whatever)
as far as your analogy on arts and poetry, I think it's nice, and there is a sense where both things are some human expressions etc… but poetry is nothing like mathematics,1 poetry is not some recursive self-descent of axioms+logic+alphabet,2 because poetry is more liquidy, it is more subjective. Maybe for God (or a universe-sized computer) it is possible to see the "rules" of poetry but certainly for us it is nothing like mathematics, mathematics has statements which are logically true and follow from the axioms and our rules of logic. The beauty in mathematics is different, and is highly depending on human aesthetics and drives and instincts, the kind structures and patterns and problem shapes we tend to like,3 with a wide range of humans meaning we do explore a wide range of mathematics for us, so while it's a bit the same, it's really not the same, and I do not mean that for mathematics in academia but mathematics as an actual thing that is done, both internally in a human's mind and outwardly, by the manipulation of symbols with some logical inference running on top of axioms (now, you could take an angle for mathematics to be more abstract than this, something less rigid in definition, one could argue that we do math in different ways, certainly we do that internally, but that is not in any sense the common definition of math - that's ine and personally i believe "internal math" is a thing and it isn't so rigid in its definition, unfortunately internal math cannot be verified (maybe for now or never)4
Replying to basedmachina, 12:18: and for this niche it matters, they dont need any outside
i dont know what that means, this "for this niche it matters", I know what it means and I dont know what it means because it means something and nothing, I mean it might matter to the individuals, in some sense, but again, what does it mean for something to matter? Sure it matters to this niche, and then what? No one is arguing that people have to do things that matter exclusively to the world at large, societies, academia, more than the kind of "matters" and "value" you get from one or the other are fundamentally different in essence
again yeah from an individual perspective this makes sense, I mean this is my own personally philosophy also, so that makes sense to me, but it would hard to argue that something mattering to me in a cabin in the woods and dying with me is the same as something that is distilled for others, learnable from, buildable upon, etc… maybe it's completely fine for something to matter only to the individual in a divine sense that it is in accordance to God, that's OK, but that's what I encompassed under philosophical reasons on the above
The community and the institution
sufficient means there is no need for any outside validation. same for philosophy, and this is also where (modern, pure) math is coming from originally
also I wouldnt agree with your view on that the philosophical part of it is for ones own understanding. that is also a group/society thing
do you you mean then "sufficient" in that it is sufficient for self-sustaining as a community, having new brains and talents coming in?
the academia around math is a more recent thing. so i dont see the death of that part as significant if it would happen. its not needed
because otherwise, that is certainly not the case for philosophy (no need for outside validation), and neither is it for pure mathematics imo
in pure mathematics, you have an external validator, that is proofs and logic, in philosophy you have an external barometer of your philosophy, which is the actions you take in the world and the reaction of others, i mean it's very hard to argue that these completely inward fields you
edit: and you add on top of that human shaped curiosities and incentives and attractions
most people work on philosophy out of pure interest, there is almost no money to be made, also most of the world will not apply most of the work . its a thing in itself, very self-referential
you mean academia in the current instantation, but certianly professional mathematics (not in the modern sense of academics) has been around for a long time and some of the core things have been unchanged for a while, for good reasons
yes it developed in a certain way but it existed before that, same as philosophy
if you have read these people's philosophies, then you already know what you said cannot be true, that they spread it regardless to get feedback from the world, which answers the "galois theory invented in woods" question… so clearly it is self sufficient but needs the world
else why not write you philosophy on paper and burn it for warmth in the evening?
yes but in your scnearios there is only one guy left doing mathematics
that will never happen, so there is always a community
even if there 15000, what does that mean? what are they gonna do with that mathematics?
so who cares about the institutional structure
its just an aspect of it
what is it that is the mathematics that they are doing? nothing, it is self recrusive descent over axioms and logical deduction, on it's own
yes
so that is my point, of course I agree that it will still happen, and it will be awesome
humans love stuff like this
and I hope I get to read these 15000 people's work
but it has no societal value on its own there, it does become almost purely like poetry (which does have societal values but not in the same way as building bridges, it's a different kind), then, and saying that this is completely OK
is very strange to me
because that is not and has not been how the world works, and the world is 100x less in a state where this will do anything - as it turns out, you need, if you mean to do things in the world, to exist within its systems and organizations and structures, especially for something as abstract as not applied, not PDEs or whatever mathematics - because on its own it is just a human curiosity engine thing game that we play…
yeah then we agree I think
I mean for me, this answer is perfect
because I do not need it "matter" in that way
but I won't lie and say that this a globally optimal point of view
What survives?
"because on its own it is just a human curiosity engine thing game that we play…"
….yes!
Replying to ludwig, 12:55: I mean for me, this answer is perfect
just staring into the void!
so from this point of view : if math academia would die, would it be so bad? (I kinda dont think it will die but thats another topic) maybe new golden era of math will come bc of it (and maybe most people on the planet will be aboslutely oblivous to it, and never know and never care….)†
basedmachinamybe just one clarification from my side: when i said golden era I didnt even think of the new ai results but more thought about that if all the careerist and strivers disappaear then maybe only the hardcore radicals are left
MAYBE MATH IS THE FRIENDS WE MADE ALONG THE WAY
i mean, it depends!!! i dont know, i think it depends! i think when you think academia you think organizational bloating, paper mills, google scholar rankings, ugly incentives and internal politics etc and in which case, not so bad! but there are undeniable things about institualizationed knowledge accumulation that are very important and them dying with no replacement in sight is a thing that i think is hard to argue is "not bad", and i can expand here (i would use master artisan <> pupil analogies, transmission of knowledge, scaling of knowledge through artifacts that encode knowledge (books etc), social engines and groups, incentives of various sorts (such as hierarchy of "important things to work on" as defined by colective feelings etc to build that case)
certainly, re a golden era of mathematics, it might just be the case yeah but in the way that like, we get more and more knowledge for the people who are interested, and that is neat on its own
but broadly i think most people have, do and will suffer increasingly from a general apathy to knowledge and a dilution of the meaning of it and its purpose, and will simply plug in their AR headset to watch AI generated BBL girls clapping ass with kirkified faces, an (ongoing) acceleration towards absurdism and "shock / subversion of expectation" as the primary mechanism for algorithmic content being pushed onto people from all angles as the monetary incentives are there (until some point…? and then what..? many scenarios there), and so while for you, and for me and for some others, i think it will be awesome, i think the world will be worse off as a whole
undeniably true. inject >"you are here" -meme
27 October 2026, 14:32 · Back to top