I concede that a math expert can start usefully contributing to a math-heavy area fairly quickly. Having expertise in an unrelated area can also be useful, as a supplement, not as a substitution. I do not recall a single amateur having contributed to math or physics in the last century or so.
Do you consider the invention of the Chomsky hierarchy to lie outside the field of math? Do you think that Chomsky had 10k hours of math expertise when he wrote it down?
Regardless having less than 10k hours in a field and being an amateur are two different things.
I don’t hold economists in very high regard but I would expect that one of them did contribute at least a little bit in physics.
I remember chatting with a friend who studies math and computer science. My background is bioinformatics.
If my memory is right he has working at a project that an applied mathematics group gave him because he knew something about mathematical technique XY.
He needed to find some constants that were useful for another algorithm.
He had a way to evaluate the utility of a certain value as a constant. His problem was that he had a 10 dimensional search space and didn’t really know how to search effectively in it.
In my bioinformatics classes I learned algorithms that you can use for a task like that. I’m no math expert but in that particular problem I still could provide useful input.
I would expect that there are quite a few areas where statistical tools developed within bioinformatics can be useful for people outside of it.
But to come back to the topic of AI. A math expert working in some obscure subfield of math could plausible do something that advances AI a lot without being an AI expert himself.
Do you consider the invention of the Chomsky hierarchy to lie outside the field of math?
Don’t know. Maybe a resident mathematician would chime in.
I don’t hold economists in very high regard but I would expect that one of them did contribute at least a little bit in physics.
I am not aware of any. Possibly something minor, who knows.
But to come back to the topic of AI. A math expert working in some obscure subfield of math could plausible do something that advances AI a lot without being an AI expert himself.
Yes, indeed, that sounds quite plausible. Whether this something is important enough to be potentially dangerous is a question to be put to an expert in the area.
I concede that a math expert can start usefully contributing to a math-heavy area fairly quickly. Having expertise in an unrelated area can also be useful, as a supplement, not as a substitution. I do not recall a single amateur having contributed to math or physics in the last century or so.
Do you consider the invention of the Chomsky hierarchy to lie outside the field of math? Do you think that Chomsky had 10k hours of math expertise when he wrote it down?
Regardless having less than 10k hours in a field and being an amateur are two different things.
I don’t hold economists in very high regard but I would expect that one of them did contribute at least a little bit in physics.
I remember chatting with a friend who studies math and computer science. My background is bioinformatics. If my memory is right he has working at a project that an applied mathematics group gave him because he knew something about mathematical technique XY. He needed to find some constants that were useful for another algorithm. He had a way to evaluate the utility of a certain value as a constant. His problem was that he had a 10 dimensional search space and didn’t really know how to search effectively in it.
In my bioinformatics classes I learned algorithms that you can use for a task like that. I’m no math expert but in that particular problem I still could provide useful input.
I would expect that there are quite a few areas where statistical tools developed within bioinformatics can be useful for people outside of it.
But to come back to the topic of AI. A math expert working in some obscure subfield of math could plausible do something that advances AI a lot without being an AI expert himself.
Don’t know. Maybe a resident mathematician would chime in.
I am not aware of any. Possibly something minor, who knows.
Yes, indeed, that sounds quite plausible. Whether this something is important enough to be potentially dangerous is a question to be put to an expert in the area.