Whether I find a problem “interesting” has a lot to do with whether I think I can solve it, or make and measure progress towards solving it. Another way to put it: for a problem to be interesting it has to be easy. Academia is good at training people to find certain classes of problems “interesting” in this sense, and moreover to supply them with a steady source of such problems. That definitely can look like, or maybe it just is, a big intellectual circle-jerk.
But even stipulating that all that brain power going to solve easy made-up problems is pointless, I don’t have any sense of how high the opportunity cost is. What are you planning to do with your time instead of math research, and how scaleable do you think those plans are? There are probably more than 1000 new PhDs per year in each of physics, math, computer science, and economics. (Gently avoiding discussion of how many wind up with tenure.) Assuming you don’t mean to take them out of “thinking work” altogether how many of them do you think can be put to usefulness?
Whether I find a problem “interesting” has a lot to do with whether I think I can solve it, or make and measure progress towards solving it. Another way to put it: for a problem to be interesting it has to be easy. Academia is good at training people to find certain classes of problems “interesting” in this sense, and moreover to supply them with a steady source of such problems. That definitely can look like, or maybe it just is, a big intellectual circle-jerk.
But even stipulating that all that brain power going to solve easy made-up problems is pointless, I don’t have any sense of how high the opportunity cost is. What are you planning to do with your time instead of math research, and how scaleable do you think those plans are? There are probably more than 1000 new PhDs per year in each of physics, math, computer science, and economics. (Gently avoiding discussion of how many wind up with tenure.) Assuming you don’t mean to take them out of “thinking work” altogether how many of them do you think can be put to usefulness?