i spent a little time thinking about math again because of the lovecraft thread and made a little progress articulating my criticism of what i saw in my time in grad school. basically i think pure math has become almost entirely highly technical bullshit
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not in the sense of indifferent to its truth value but in the sense of indifferent to its *significance*. almost nobody in pure math has a compelling vision of what kind of math would *matter* to do. if you read writing by mathematicians from 100+ years ago it's not like this
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people used to do math because they were trying to understand the *world*. there just was not a pure / applied distinction, or even much of a math / physics distinction. modern pure math is an almost totally closed system, people do math to understand *other math*
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i left grad school among other things b/c it became clear to me that my thesis work did not matter in the slightest, that i had in large part only been drawn to doing math because i was good at it, so once i hit a real difficulty i no longer had any real motivation to continue
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this really hits for my whole math undergrad, esp algebra. i did all my homeworks, passed exams, got pretty good grades, without ever *really* understanding wtf we were talking about
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yeah that's another part of it, algebra especially makes it too easy to write down proofs and stuff without ever really understanding at any point what you're doing and why