Likewise, I doubt that you are correct when you write:
it’s VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he’d go back to his life.
Think about what this entails: you’re essentially saying that the fact that Terry Tao spends his time solving math problems rather than hobnobbing with east-coast social and policy elites is the result of a miscalculation on his part with regard to his own values. As opposed to a selection effect where Tao happens to be in the small group of people who actually do prefer math to schmoozing and affecting government policy.
Now I do find it plausible that there exists a class of people for whom what you say is true—that there are successful mathematicians who in their heart of hearts would rather be the Jim Simons of today than the Jim Simons of the 1970s, or even today’s Terry Tao. But for your claim to be true as stated, there would essentially have to exist nobody in the entire human population with the opposite preference (because if there were, Tao, Wiles, etc. would surely be among them), and given the psychological diversity of our species this strikes me as absurd.
As for monastic orders, that’s exactly where I would want to be if I had to live in the Middle Ages. You may say that they were “outside of society”, but the fact is that most of the people we remember today from that period were monks. (The others being kings and popes.)
You’re positing a very strong selection mechanism connecting math interest with math jobs. I’m sure Terry likes solving math problems, but miscalculations like that are the norm, not the exception, in human affairs.
I’d rather be a monk than a peasant too, but I’d much rather be Chaucer, and I think that most monks would too. The difference between monks and professors is that one works a LOT harder to become a professor. If you are going to work that hard, you may as well make something of yourself.
Likewise, I doubt that you are correct when you write:
Think about what this entails: you’re essentially saying that the fact that Terry Tao spends his time solving math problems rather than hobnobbing with east-coast social and policy elites is the result of a miscalculation on his part with regard to his own values. As opposed to a selection effect where Tao happens to be in the small group of people who actually do prefer math to schmoozing and affecting government policy.
Now I do find it plausible that there exists a class of people for whom what you say is true—that there are successful mathematicians who in their heart of hearts would rather be the Jim Simons of today than the Jim Simons of the 1970s, or even today’s Terry Tao. But for your claim to be true as stated, there would essentially have to exist nobody in the entire human population with the opposite preference (because if there were, Tao, Wiles, etc. would surely be among them), and given the psychological diversity of our species this strikes me as absurd.
As for monastic orders, that’s exactly where I would want to be if I had to live in the Middle Ages. You may say that they were “outside of society”, but the fact is that most of the people we remember today from that period were monks. (The others being kings and popes.)
You’re positing a very strong selection mechanism connecting math interest with math jobs. I’m sure Terry likes solving math problems, but miscalculations like that are the norm, not the exception, in human affairs.
I’d rather be a monk than a peasant too, but I’d much rather be Chaucer, and I think that most monks would too. The difference between monks and professors is that one works a LOT harder to become a professor. If you are going to work that hard, you may as well make something of yourself.