Shawn Ryan

I think the coolest thing is to try to think, okay, there's a lot of things in our field that you would never do because again, resource limitations.

So when you have a couple of thousand people

who, awesome smart people, definitely, I feel dumb all the time, they're awesome people, and they do their thing, and you self-select accidentally for the type of people who just love mathematics to the extent where then you can accidentally be ostracized if you are too ambitious within that framework because, again, who are you, right?

And then also...

just, it doesn't help you get a job.

So like there's some things where it's like almost like an emergent phenomena of things that people try to say are institutional problems.

It's like, it's really not anybody being a bad actor.

It's just like, you get kind of stuck in the way that things are done because people like, obviously like what they do and the people who like it stay in it and the people who don't are expelled, right?

So imagine like you have something where it's like, if you feel comfortable with things operating this way, then you stay and otherwise you leave and you resent the field.

Then like, that's a bad thing sometimes.

But now I think, you know, there's enough,

So you have this thing where basically before a lot of people would go and like you wouldn't value doing brute force straightforward things that are just like scanning over spaces of stuff because that won't lead to a breakthrough or like is it one individual you can't do it.

But if you can automate that, like sure, there's a lot of value to types of questions that nobody would have cared about.

But that then makes it a problem with benchmarking.

So like, for example, in other fields where there's more of an engineering challenge or like a very specific goal in mind.

You can say, this goal is valuable, and then protein folding or whatnot, they can do it.

Or even in math, there's more, I guess, tests for kids.

The community seems a bit more organized, a lot more IMO problems, different benchmarks of how good is this thing.

In our field...

I think that we kind of don't like often to say whose research is more valuable than others.