Front of the crowd

If you don't know the legendary punk/ska band Operation Ivy, you probably aren't missing out on anything.  However, if you do know them, and the only album they put out back in 1989, then you may appreciate knowing that their legacy has been preserved by the combination of Catbite and Laura Jane Grace playing their album live here.  However, this post - which I promise is relevant to mathematics - is not about the glory of ska music, nor the important role that Laura Jane Grace played being one of the first trans punk musicians to publicly come out. This post is actually about a random person in the audience in that video.  (Disclaimer: I don't personally know this person, they just happen to be a good metaphor, so my apologies to them for being a focal point of criticism in this post.)

Let me give some context so you don't have to watch the video.  At many punk shows, the cultural norm is to have some active engagement with the music - singing along to the music, dancing, pushing in the mosh pit, etc.  It's a way of showing the band your support, especially if you're in the front.  In contrast, respecting personal space is not really a cultural norm. This is of course very different than say an opera where any of this would be totally inappropriate.  In the video above, there is one person standing in the very front of the audience the whole time, doing absolutely nothing.  You can see the majority around them rocking out or singing along.  It stood out to me immediately watching the video and they were all I could look at.  If I were at this concert, I would be very judgmental about this person.  Why is this person in the front? Are they even a fan of any of these bands?  Why don't they just do it "right"?  But I also wonder, is it justified for me to have this judgment?  Are these even good norms?  For example, the prevalence of physical contact at concerts inherently comes with lots of nonconsensual touching of women, which is certainly a problem.  Punk rock is supposedly about non-conformity and so maybe I'm in the wrong for wanting this concert "invader" to behave a certain way.     

More recently I've been thinking about this in the context of entities outside of traditional academia entering mathematics through AI.  Math is a field that has really strong cultural norms.  Of course, they are not all good, but there are many which I find to be valuable: understanding your own work, communicating it clearly in a variety of settings, being able to take responsibility for and explain your mathematics, striving towards being welcoming, putting effort into maintaining the community, etc.  

Lots of recent work, whether it's from big AI companies dropping hundreds of poorly written and unvetted articles or certain amateur mathematicians adopting AI tools irresponsibly, does not necessarily fit into these cultural norms around math.  Does that mean that this work and these communities don't have a place in mathematical spaces?  I kind of go back and forth on this.  I like a lot of the values that we have, including trying to be an encouraging and welcoming community.  I probably wouldn't want to do math if I wasn't connected in the way that I am.  And there's also a benefit of non-conformity, and for people to challenge the norms, especially the bad ones.  But I am worried about a major cultural shift for the worse both in the way that mathematics is done and how the community functions.  And I also take major issue with the norms being altered by people outside of the field whose interests are so misaligned.  But is math maybe too insular?  Are we missing out on something valuable by being too stringent in how the discipline operates?  

I am not advocating for AI in mathematics as part of this cultural shift; I am on the total opposite of the spectrum.  But I do like the idea of a field that more readily involves people from outside of academia in a more serious and substantial way; I think there is truly a lot of value there.  And I think there is some second-order value from all of this in our norms being challenged.  We are responsible to think through not just which ones serve our community, but also how to uphold our commitment to society as scientists and as educators.  

I unfortunately don't have the answers to how to address these issues at the moment, but I do hope we can keep having discussions around our norms as we focus on absorbing the seismic shifts that are currently happening in the discipline.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 f...
Read more

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

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