Terence Tao lecture slide sparks debate: efficacy trumps mechanism comprehension
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-10-11
A slide from Terence Tao's 'Math 2.0' public lecture at Caltech, shared by Andrew Curran, sparked a debate: if a cure actually worked, almost any Stage 4 cancer patient would say human comprehension of its mechanism is irrelevant. Quoter Scott Kominers added that many real cancer treatments and celebrated math results are used without fully understanding why they work — an argument often extended to deep learning and large models.
Related event: Terence Tao's 'Math 2.0' Talk on AI and Mathematics Sparks Debate(26 posts)→
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