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A comment on ‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem (2015). Parent comment

Re:‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem (2015) by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @08:32PM (#15857796)
It has very little to do with credential creep. The problem is that, in order to do work at the frontier of a field, you first have to get to the frontier - you have to learn what's going on there, which means that you have to learn all the stuff you have to learn in order to actually understand what's going on there. The learning to actually understand enough to get to the frontier is taking longer and longer. That's not credential creep, that's creep in how far away the frontier is from the foundations.
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Re:‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem (2015) by jfoutz on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @01:02AM (#15858907)
That sounds like an abstraction problem. I’m totally willing to accept I’m crazy. But my gut feeling is there is a lot of technical debt in representation, so it’s hard to move to the frontier.
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Re:‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem (2015) by ggggtez on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @02:50AM (#15859320)
In this case, you're probably just wrong. Consider for half a second how many programmers fail Fizz Buzz, and then think about how much work it takes to get from that to the frontier of computational science (i.e. not just installing another javascript library, but actually computation).

There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there, but you still have to actually know how to find it.

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Re:‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem (2015) by jfoutz on Thursday December 07, 2017 @12:44AM (#15867893)
I want to point out that Maxwell had like 40+ equations for electricity that wound up being 4. I suspect that many fields have rules, but those rules aren't the most concise representation.

it will always be hard to get to the frontier. but that path should be easy. we can get years and years of explorers by building good roads.

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Re:‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem (2015) by AstralStorm on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @04:12AM (#15859703)
Regardless, will written undifferentiated paper is way better than a paper mill and badly written or worse, lying paper. These happen all the time in algorithms.

Cannot even rely on citation indeed as it is a common practice to cite papers from your surroundings without quality control. Or barely on topic.

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