> From one of the answers [...]

Thank you for highlighting that answer. It is one of my favourite pieces of writing about the culture of mathematics. I just want to add that that particular answer is now affectionately known as Thurston's Paean.

This is why I think Brady Haran is one of the coolest living mathematicians. Numberphile is educating a new generation of young mathematicians for anyone with access to youtube. Accessible math communication is so important. So many cool things are buried in textbooks and papers the average person would never read.

> Everything people have figured out needs to be in living form to carried on.

It would appear that LLMs are invalidating this claim. Things can live in synthetic form and carry on just fine. Instead of cultivating a population of learned minds we are just feeding a few dozen egregores of models and training corpuses.

Living culture is a concept that I think is quite unintuitive to modern minds. Examples of it are all around us... but it's usually blatantly missing from our "big picture" thinking.

For example. Take a modern country with a modern economy. Flatten it. Destroy all the factories. Bankrupt all the companies. You can get back to a fully modern economy again quite quickly. WWII demonstrates it.

Taking an unindustrialized country through the development process... that's very tricky. It can't really be rushed.

For a long time, economic development was seen as mostly capital and technology. You need time to develop all the capital needed. Roads, factories, etc. But... development efforts underperformed. Then the idea of "human capital" got popular as a way of explaining the deficit. Education, mostly. Development efforts still underperformed.

I think the "living community" thing is the answer to this. It' ecology. You can't make a rainforest by just dumping all the necessary organisms into the right climate. It's the endlessly complicated relationships between all those organisms that make the rainforest.

This is one of the things that worries me about the pace of modern change. When writing and literacy resurged in classical antiquity... we totally lost all the ways of (for example) doing scholarship orally. Socrates (through Plato) wrote about some of the downsides to this.

...and we did completely lose oral scholarship. We have no idea how to do it. Once the living culture died... it stayed dead. All the knowledge contained within it went away.

In theory, sure. In practice, our society is a) not set up to value things which don’t have an immediate financial ROI, b) is valuing them less as time progresses, not more, and c) is experiencing some very serious transitions that may destroy the financial viability of devoting a lot of your time and energy to some very important things.