At the merch table

(Thanks to John Baldwin, Juanita Pinzón-Caicedo, and Steven Sivek for comments and moral support.) 

In grad school, the AMS (American Mathematical Society) would have merch tables at conferences where they sold t-shirts.  These shirts were pretty goofy with slogans like "You want the proof, you can't handle the proof".  At the time, I thought I was too cool for that.  But for a brief period, maybe around 2013 or so, the AMS had these long sleeve shirts that I thought were surprisingly stylish.  I thought the AMS was finally "with it".  One shirt I got is apparently cool enough that a hipster ex still wears it (and I'm probably not getting it back).  For the past 10 years or so I've checked the AMS website to see if they've got cool new math gear, and I'm always very disappointed with the shirts.  

This week I'm disappointed with the AMS for a more serious reason.  Recently, they put out the following statement around the Navier-Stokes frenzy:         

"The news today of progress on resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, one of mathematics’ great longstanding challenges concerning the equations that govern the flow of fluids, represents a milestone advance in human knowledge. This story began with Navier, Stokes, Leray, and Ladyzhenskaya and has culminated in the recent breakthroughs of Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa, then — assisted by new technologies — Alpöge and Buckmaster, with the final steps taken by OpenAI mathematicians. The purpose of mathematics is human understanding, and this achievement, and the process that led to it, will bear fruit for a long time to come.  - Ravi Vakil, President of the AMS, and John Meier, CEO of the AMS"

If you live in a math cave, then OpenAI has claimed a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millenium Problem, coming on the heels of work of Alpöge and Buckmaster on a related problem.  I know nothing about Navier-Stokes and I don't know any of the parties involved, so rather than try to summarize, I think it is worth reading the following statement by Buckmaster that alleges various forms of ethical misconduct, which, in short, amount to plagiarism, attempting to get an author booted, and threats to the career.  (There's also this recent article by the New York Times.)  OpenAI and the relevant employee there also put out statements either refuting the actions or meanings of the quoted statements.  

While I am very anti-AI in general, I don't claim to know the truth to any of the story, claims, or mathematics.  However, I think it is a major problem that the AMS is putting out a statement about the situation before a) the misconduct allegations have been clarified and b) the paper has been fully vetted by the math community.  Since the AMS loosely speaks as a representation for mathematicians in the US, they are implicitly endorsing this as allowable behavior by AI companies or random non-mathematicians for that matter.  

I encourage everyone that is in the sphere of influence of the AMS to read their Ethical Guidelines.  For example, I will point out a few items from the guidelines that I think are particularly relevant here: 

"...mathematicians have certain responsibilities, which include the following:

  • To endeavor to be knowledgeable in their field, especially about work related to their research;
  • To give appropriate credit, even to unpublished materials, materials on websites, and announced results (because the knowledge that something is true or false is valuable, however it is obtained);...

....On appropriate occasions, it may be desirable to offer or accept joint authorship when independent researchers find that they have produced identical results. All the authors listed for a paper, however, must have made a significant contribution to its content, and all who have made such a contribution must be offered the opportunity to be listed as an author. ....The growing importance of mathematics in society at large and of public funding of mathematics may increasingly place members of the mathematical community in conflicts of interest." 

I strongly encourage the AMS to alter or retract their statement until the situation is settled more definitively.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Expert in a Dying Field

I don't necessarily think the various areas I discuss below are more or less important than the others, just what I view as their popularity.  Others likely have a different view.  Recently, I was listening to The Beths' "Expert in a Dying Field".  It's a break-up song about all the minutia you learn about a person which no longer feels relevant when the relationship ends.  (Don't worry, I'm not going through a breakup/angst phase.  I just like the song.)  When I listen to it, I often times think about Heegaard Floer homology.   Heegaard Floer homology, developed by Ozsvath and Szabo, exploded in the early 2000s.  It seemed to pack most of the punch of gauge theory while being super computable.  When I started grad school there was this incredible flurry of activity, both in theory building (e.g. bordered Floer homology) and applications (e.g. structure of the knot concordance group, classifying fillable contact structures).  Hot fi...
Read more

Happy Birthday Cameron! (part 1)

Image
There is an upcoming conference celebrating Cameron Gordon's 80th birthday.  Cameron has had a big influence on my career (both directly and through his mathematics), so I wanted to write some posts giving quick summaries of his influential work.  These will be short samples instead of giving full details on anything.  This post was inspired by a comment of Josh Wang. I thought it might be kind of cliche to start with the most famous results, like the Knot Complement Theorem, so I'll instead start with one of my personal favorites: "Only integral surgeries can yield reducible manifolds" by Gordon-Luecke.  While the title is the result, we'll see some more background and at the end, I'll give a really nice application to the unknotting number of knots.   First, we need to have a little chat about Dehn surgeries.  (As an aside, Cameron is also a historian of topology.  Since Dehn came up, I'll point out Cameron wrote a historical arti...
Read more

Tools of the trade

It's winter break, so here's a short post.  I am trying to spend some time doing new non-math things.  The other day I was trying to help out with a fence repair.  If you have spent time with me, you'd likely think that I would not know how to help someone repair a fence - if you thought that, you are indeed correct.  I was not particularly helpful, but while I was embarrassing myself not knowing how to use a hammer, I did gain some insight into the mathematical process, which I wanted to mention here. In low-dimensional topology, as I hope to convey in this blog, it is very beneficial to have a wide range of tricks and tools.  This includes knowing topological tools (e.g. the Montesinos trick or Kirby calculus), invariants (e.g. gauge theory, Khovanov homology), but also perspectives and connections from other fields (e.g. viewing torus knots as links of singularities of algebraic curves).  However, knowing that hammers exist is not the same as being able ...
Read more