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Reply to @Virginicus@universeodon.com
Tony Vladusich@TonyVladusich@mathstodon.xyz (2026-09-25 08:55:24)
@Virginicus @johncarlosbaez 

Ha! I'm sure none of them have read about the "power structures" of organisations, academia included:

The theme that underlies all Foucault's work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter. What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century 'madness' was used to categorize and stigmatize not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome.
— Philip Stokes, Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2004)[188]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
---Reply---
John Carlos Baez@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz (2026-09-27 18:23:37)
@TonyVladusich  - I think "What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control" is too extreme - for example, I don't think the discovery that there are many galaxies is "really just a means of social control".  Foucault and some deconstructionists may want to completely explode the concept of scientific knowledge in this way.  But we can be less extreme and still notice that LLM companies are using the *prestige* of mathematics to advertise their LLMs: they are not really claiming people are going to spend trillions of dollars proving new theorems with LLMs, they are saying "you'll buy our product because it's so good because it can beat the world's best mathematicians".   Prestige is always connected to social control; people bow down to prestige.   

Luckily, lots of mathematicians are pushing for the the board of nine to take a skeptical attitude toward OpenAI.

By the way, it's a good sign of how prestige and power works in mathematics that @Virginicus assumed the nine are all men.