Every Day I’m Galerkin

No disrespect to Prof. @AlexKontorovich. This is however exactly what I have been warning you about. It takes guts to admit that we are training people today for jobs that used to exist 55 years ago. And that is what got said. Remember what I am claiming: top students used to survive in mathematics. See the graphics attached from top advisors in the earlier era when jobs existed...the students survived! It was never as Alex portrayed it to be. No current advisor anywhere has these kind of survival statistics. That is what is being covered up. And there are MANY MANY more advisors who shouldn't be advising a single PhD student. Ever. We were training our future colleagues. Now we are exploiting workers misclassified as students so we can import them in massive numbers and work them in a plantation system. The students generally don't survive. And then we lie about them and say that they weren't good enough! That is literally how the system was rearchitected when the jobs stagnated over 55 years ago. And the sharp elbows edge out the sharpest minds often in the academic hunger games. Literally that is what happened. That's why the greats mostly dried up. Now we have *worse* mathematicians on average who are more incrementalist survivalists than romantic heroes and we are stuck pretending that there has not been a massive decline from the Grothendieck, Mllnor, von Neumman, Atiyah, Serre era. I am not blaming Prof. @AlexKontorovich. He has survived and I salute that. But make no mistake, he never saw the system that actually worked. I barely did when I was around 20 and it was already in flames. But unlike Alex, I was often in the room in the 1990s in Washington DC when the post-cold war sausage was being made at NSF and on the Hill. And what we did was to largely destroy the university system. Read what he writes. He is talking about the Hunger Games where one of the most important mathematicians, Zhang, worked at @subway and that is just fine. It's like training highly specialized neurosurgeons to be baristas or call center operators. It just doesn't make any sense and the mathematics community does not notice that it is operating a planation where it has to dispose of bodies and train our geopolitical rivals in sensitive subjects to stay afloat. I am sorry. But we went mad under Reagan and then insane under Clinton. This actually makes no sense now and made no sense then when I tried to stop it. It's a suicidal plantation economics operation that makes us weak and our geopolitical rivals strong. Full Stop. That's all there is to it.