is it so hard to understand that after a few such events, you wish for authors to check their own work by formalizing it, saving countless hours for your readers, by selecting your paper WITH machine readable proof versus another author's paper without a machine readable proof?
To demonstrate with another example: "Gee, dying sucks. It's 2025, have you considered just living forever?"
To this, one might attempt to justify: "Isn't it sufficient that dying sucks a lot? Is it so hard to understand that having seen people die, I really don't want to do that? It really really sucks!", to which could be replied: "It doesn't matter that it sucks, because that doesn't make it any easier to avoid."
- Locating water doesn't become more tractable because you are thirsty.
- Popping a balloon doesn't become more tractable because you like the sound.
- Readjusting my seat height doesn't become more tractable because it's uncomfortable.
The specific example I chose was for the purpose of being evocative, but is still precisely correct in providing an example of: presenting a wish for X as evidence of tractability of X is silly.
I object to any argument of the form: "Oh, but this wish is a medium wish and you're talking about a large wish. Totally different."
I hold that my position holds in the presence of small, medium, _or_ large wishes. For any kind of wish you'd like!
What do Bitcoin etc. actually prove in each block? that a nonce was bruteforced until some hash had so many leading zero's? Comparatively speaking, which blockchain would be more convincing as a store of value: one that doesn't substantially attract mathematicians and cryptographers versus one that does attract verifiably correct mathematicians and cryptographers?
Investors would select the formal verification chain as it would actually attract the attention of mathematicians, and mathematicians would be rewarded for the formalization of existing or novel proofs.
We don't need to wait for the magic constellation of the planets 20 years from now nor wait for LLM's etc to do all the heavy lifting (although they will quickly be used by mathematics "miners"), a mere alignment of incentives can do it.
On HN, that might be as simple as display sort order -- highly engaging comments bubble up to the top, and being at the top, receive more attention in turn.
The highly fit extremes are -- I think -- always going to be hyper-specialized to exploit the environment. In a way, they tell you more about the environment than whatever their content ostensibly is.