I agree that there’s an important insight here, but I’m not sure it quite shows that mathematics requires less magical ability than advertised. Perhaps navigating your way through the detailed scutwork as effectively as Feynman or Tao requires genius to just the same extent as spotting the beautiful streamlined arguments would have. Perhaps sometimes it requires some bit of your brain already to have spotted something a bit like the beautiful streamlined arguments, in order to figure out which way to swing the machete when hacking through the details.
I’m also not quite sure I buy “systematically try to make their work seem more like a work of genius”. Other candidate explanations: (1) hoping, perhaps misguidedly, to make it more comprehensible by removing a lot of intimidating grinding, (2) trying to make it more beautiful because aesthetics matter, (3) trying to get to the heart of why a thing is true, so as to provide more enlightenment for all, (4) trying to reduce the page count so that journals won’t refuse to publish. I expect there often is an element of trying to look clever too, but I don’t think that’s the whole story and I think the other reasons are more respectable.
I agree that there’s an important insight here, but I’m not sure it quite shows that mathematics requires less magical ability than advertised. Perhaps navigating your way through the detailed scutwork as effectively as Feynman or Tao requires genius to just the same extent as spotting the beautiful streamlined arguments would have. Perhaps sometimes it requires some bit of your brain already to have spotted something a bit like the beautiful streamlined arguments, in order to figure out which way to swing the machete when hacking through the details.
I’m also not quite sure I buy “systematically try to make their work seem more like a work of genius”. Other candidate explanations: (1) hoping, perhaps misguidedly, to make it more comprehensible by removing a lot of intimidating grinding, (2) trying to make it more beautiful because aesthetics matter, (3) trying to get to the heart of why a thing is true, so as to provide more enlightenment for all, (4) trying to reduce the page count so that journals won’t refuse to publish. I expect there often is an element of trying to look clever too, but I don’t think that’s the whole story and I think the other reasons are more respectable.