If you want to get paid for abstract analysis that is not mainly organized around current cultural or political fights, academia is pretty much the only game in town.
I like to see complaints in a formal format that explicitly states the grievance. He said he was going to complain, and then he simply made observations, which is intended to imply that this is his grievance. This is poor communication, and I won't stand for it on Substack
I think the point he was qvetching about crystal clear. I am not sure though, if the alternative behavior of showing off for the sake of showing off is without value. A lot of people have remarked that chicks absolutely dig it. In the current case, it would be selecting for genes enhancing fluid intelligence.
There's an interesting confluence here with Rod Dreher's recent thoughts. Yes, academia has been taken over by rent seeking, and has lost the vast majority of its proper sense of purpose. There's been too much optimization on of top of fundamental naivete, so that the wrong things get optimized. At one level, academics are given too much credit for always caring about truth. Thus, peer reviewers aren't paid, and yet they're vaguely expected to judge articles on the basis of some sort of merit that's related to truth. But their incentive is to judge articles based on whether it adds to their own citation count. And so the real game is to cite the people who will be invoked as peer reviewers. But that's all hidden. There's a lot of corruption in academia, and woke pressures make it worse because they're another reason not to be honest.
I would propose a reform based on re-qualifying examinations. Kill publish or perish stone dead. The masquerading of rent seeking as scholarship is the single most pervasive corruption driver. Instead, there should be major examinations drafted by the discipline as a whole, and it should be normal for a professor to flunk out of his job because he didn't read and study the latest scholarship and so he failed his re-qualifying exam.
Ultimately, you can't build systems so perfect that people don't need to be good. Only the intrinsic motivation to seek truth can reform academia in the right way. But the protocols and incentives can channel that force better or worse. They're really messed up right now.
Can you comment more about rent seeking in academia? I.e., what is the cornered resource that academics use to get above-market returns.
One way to filter for truth-seeking as a prime motivator is to pay academics well below market rate. Make it an unattractive career for those who don't place a high value on truth and their eventual legacy on the field.
A problem with business school professors is that they tend to be very highly paid relative to other academics, and they can often make more by trading on the prestige of their position to get speaker's fees, consulting fees, etc. The recent string of academic fraud scandals (Gino et al) have mostly been business school profs.
Paying academics badly will not work if you don't have other public amenities for free at high standard - I mean really good schools if your kids have merit, really secure but cheap neighborhoods, health services for free and at good levels. If you have to pay for every one of these items through the nose, and in addition get poor pay - you'd be selecting for lumpen proletariat.
Umm, taxpayer funded prestigious jobs good life, right? And it's closely above marketv value in the sense that willingness to pay for professors’ teaching services would be a lot less without the subsidies.
It's an incentives issue. Academics aren't incentivized enough to solve important problems, so they largely don't. They are, of course, excited about playing status games instead, which cashes out in picking fashionable and not too difficult directions.
If you solve important problems, you do get cited a lot. I still remember the disgust at people seeing half a mill cites for how to quantify protein content, or how to make a polyacrylamide gel for electrophoresis.
On the one hand I think we need some group of people who think about things that aren't directly tied to immediate material benefit. One never knows what will be useful in the future.
On the other hand, the self-referentiality of defining importance by what other people in the field think is important – carries a significant risk of spiraling in strange and useless directions. The Sokal prank said it all. There is also the imprint of history. In my field, physics, there was a lot for fundamental theorists to do in the 20th century, but much less so today. But we never see an entire field say, "well, we've solved the important problems, time to move on." The first order of business is always to sustain and grow the field.
I always liked the idea of having funding decisions etc. be done not by peers in your same field, but by peers in adjacent fields. That way everyone has to make some effort to stop huffing their own fumes and explain themselves to an outsider.
Interesting take. I wonder—is it necessary for all academic work to be justified strictly in terms of immediate utility to others? Throughout history, some of the most valuable knowledge has emerged from curiosity-driven inquiry with no clear application at the time. If we only pursued research with direct, demonstrable benefits, would we risk missing the long-tail gains that have historically come from open-ended exploration?
> For example, polls found that these goals best explain ~7% of which research projects academics pick, and ~9% of which papers/projects academics approve via peer review. Such choices are instead explained 32% and 58% respectively by topic/methods being in fashion. The remaining 62% of project choice is explained by building on prior work/skills, and the remaining 33% of peer review choice is explained by work showing impressive abilities.
Come on. You know better than this. If you want to say that X explains 7% of Y, you cannot show this with a poll where 7% of people think X best explains Y. That's just people's opinions, it has no bearing on the actual answer. Especially when the people you've polled are your X followers, who share your outlook, and most of whom are not even themselves researchers. And when the question you asked in the poll isn't even about the amount that X explains Y; you only asked whether X is the "single best" explanation of Y.
If you wanted to actually show X explains 7% of Y, you would need to, instead, gather data about X and Y directly, and perform an ANOVA showing that 7% of the variance in Y is explained by X.
I am not an academic so can't comment from that standpoint, but Robin, surely your complaint, if that's what it is, could be applied to almost anything, not just (parts of) academia. And if we want to be reductive in the 'hospitals save lives' mode, then 'academics seek knowledge' works for me. Personally I think reductionism is unhelpful, though if pushed, as a medic, I would say hospitals treat sick people, rather than save lives. And even that is false, as it's mixed up with health policy, staffing, resources etc. In fact, public health saves more lives than, say, emergency surgery. Even if that fact is recognised, which it rarely is, I still want 'useless' research to continue in all spheres. Curiosity is intrinsically human and new knowledge is (almost) always welcome.
You seem to have missed the point that new knowledge is not really being generated, at least not beyond “Academic Y wrote another paper on X this month showing off some clever math. No one changed their mind.” It is generating less knowledge than an online fanfic forum, and is less useful.
Now it’s fine if people want to spend time doing that, but it is not obviously something to spend tax dollars on.
" The arts are the other main area of life where specialists poorly justify their specific actions in terms of the usual area purposes. So if the arts are mostly about showing off personal abilities, and abilities to judge such abilities, likely so is academia."
I think you're being unfair to the arts. Art that was designed to be clearly justifiable in terms of its social purposes is propaganda, not art, and we have far too much of that presently. IMHO good art poses a question the artist doesn't know how to answer, If something /has/ an answer, it should be explained in an essay. Art is for the things we can't yet explain, which makes it inherently hard to justify other than by saying "It feels important to me".
It's possible to create art that is socially useful, but it's hard to do so on purpose. There are examples: Huckleberry Finn, Guernica. But the harder you try to make socially useful art, the more you make propaganda instead of art.
I'm not saying propaganda is always bad! But the priors are strong.
PS- I also don't think artists make things mostly to show off their abilities. You make what comes to you. This is even more true of modern and contemporary art, in which showing skill is a major faux pas. I think it's mostly musical /performers/ of certain genres who show off, e.g., violinists, opera singers, keyboardists, jazz performers.
> PS- I also don't think artists make things mostly to show off their abilities.
Does the peacock know why he has a fancy tail? He probably keeps it well-groomed for his own internal reasons. Ditto not all men will necessarily introspect their true motivations for buying a $20k Rolex watch or becoming a rock musician.
We have neglected the peacock's tail. But if we extend what we mean by "show off" to include completely unconscious, instinctive showing off, then we shouldn't even be having this discussion. Nearly all social behavior would then count as "showing off", it would be unsurprising and morally unobjectionable, and Robin would have no excuse for making an issue of it.
I think about this question often. On the one hand, to justify society financially supporting a pursuit there should seemingly be a a clear and tangible service being provided.
On the other hand, less (non corporate) money is being poured into academia than into the entertainment industry. I mean, Hollywood can often spend more money on one movie than the worldwide Assyriology budget. While Hollywood is certainly pushed by economic incentives, can we really say that entertainment contains more cultural values than even abstract and impractical academic fields?
I'm also reminded about Abraham Flexners Hallmark 1939 essay on the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. He argues that only when pure theory is given space to flourish can true breakthroughs occur that transform society. Those who consider the driving forces of the Enlightenment to have been primarily intellectual (admittedly a contentious position) would consider this claim to have been empirically confirmed.
This was in fact the explicit goal of the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. This can be appreciated as both a cultural value and often practical as well.
But obviously, the biggest challenge of many academic fields is irrelevance. I aspire to be successful in the field of religous studies which is of particular irrelevance. Religous communities themselves tend to rely on their internal scholars and their own intertia, and non-religous communities tend to have little interest in the whole subject. Indeed, when speaking to scholars about their research choices, it's mostly about what interests them and their small circle of peers. Is that something in the interest of general society?
But then I think what academia's raison d'etre. If we as a society are only interested in pure material goods and the truths academia seeks to uncover are ignored out of industrial considerations, does that mean we are shallow and materialistic? Of course survival comes first, but can't we afford a bit of higher knowledge that is enlightening and cultured? Admittedly, we are no longer in a place where society assigns deep ontological value to pure knowledge, but is it not one valuable facet of culture as a whole?
in that case, cutting funding to academia as an institution wholesale should reduce the effect of both of those things being neglected, if we assume current incentives in place are hard to change? I think we are on that path politically speaking.
"Important", like "interesting", is a 2-place predicate. Scholars tend to believe that what they study is important, even if laypeople or other scholars don't think so. And those scholars are right: the topic is important _to them_. Experience shows that this is better than trying to force them into topics important _to the laypeople_ (that's exactly the death-by-thousand-cuts grant system slowly causes).
You are always super on point when talking about academia, which is part of why I'm here. I like the observations you make. I wish it wasn't so, but on the other hand, I can pat myself on the back for at least trying to do better? I will say, in my corner of academia, which is not the same corner as Robin's, every thing he says is absolutely true, not that you could get many people to admit it! Showing off is huge. People like other people's work not because it's getting at anything truly important but because it sounds sufficiently important, is complex, is trendy, is similar to their own work.
I would have thought philosophers would be especially good at responding to challenging observations like these, but I have been consistently unimpressed with their responses.
Philosophers are the worst show offs of all. I studied philosophy with the intention of pursuing it at the graduate level but was very turned off by the way argumentation was used to show cleverness and not getting at the truth. The students were obnoxious (elite public school in Canada) and the papers not much less so (Daniel Dennet comes to mind).
I like to criticize analytic philosophy but Dennett was one of the best of his generation. Dennett was also my professor at Tufts and I interacted with him many times in person. He was a great professor. I'm disappointed to find that someone was not fond of his work, but I do encounter that sentiment a lot.
I don't doubt Dennett is brilliant and original, but his solution to the hard problem in philosophy of mind was not a solution at all. In fact I do like truth and that's part of the problem. Dennett getting more at truth than others of his generation doesn't actually say much, though I personally much prefer Nagel and Strawson. Staunch physicalists who denied the problem of mind never appealed to me. To each their own! I'm sure he was lots of fun to have as a professor.
What's wrong with rejecting the hard problem? I agree with those who reject the hard problem. If anything, I think Dennett doesn't go far enough. Not only do I deny that there's a hard problem of consciousness, it doesn't seem to me that there is one, nor do I think the hard problem is "intuitive" or common among laypeople.
I think it's a philosopher's fancy, a philosophical confusion invented by philosophers, and ultimately a pseudoproblem. So I don't think phenomenal consciousness is an illusion; I don't even think there is a meaningful notion of phenomenal consciousness at all. I don't think Nagel and Strawson provide any compelling insights into consciousness at all.
I imagine most would. I mean, only crazy ambitious teams are trying to do things like solve the Riemann hypothesis, but I am pretty sure they could explain their work as in 'there's this problem x in this area that is important for such and such reasons and because it's a stepping-stone to answering an important question'. And they wouldn't be lying. Of course, I imagine most people wouldn't consider most deep, important questions in math 'important'.
I am very skeptical of this but would love to see Robin tear into this counterexample. He's talked about physics previously, where you might think the usual shenanigans don't apply. Unfortunately that's not the case. I am going to guess that many (most?) mathematicians spend their time showing off to other mathematicians and it's sufficient to justify their work with the work of others without a broader reference to the importance of the question.
I doubt you can "show off" to other mathematicians. Either you have problems you've solved (or interesting hypotheses worth testing) or you don't. No glib talk is going to cover up for the lack of anything to show for it.
That's interesting speculation though I'd like to hear what actual mathematicians think about this. If philosophers show off, surely mathematicians can and do as well.
This is great. But it's not a complaint! It's an observation.
It's a complaint--he wishes it wasn't so. So do I.
I like to see complaints in a formal format that explicitly states the grievance. He said he was going to complain, and then he simply made observations, which is intended to imply that this is his grievance. This is poor communication, and I won't stand for it on Substack
How is my complaint ambiguous? I want more research picked and rewarded to answer questions and help non-academics.
I think the point he was qvetching about crystal clear. I am not sure though, if the alternative behavior of showing off for the sake of showing off is without value. A lot of people have remarked that chicks absolutely dig it. In the current case, it would be selecting for genes enhancing fluid intelligence.
Funny, it was perfectly obvious to me what his complaint was.
Maybe it's coming in part two... (one can hope--I would like more posts on academia.)
There's an interesting confluence here with Rod Dreher's recent thoughts. Yes, academia has been taken over by rent seeking, and has lost the vast majority of its proper sense of purpose. There's been too much optimization on of top of fundamental naivete, so that the wrong things get optimized. At one level, academics are given too much credit for always caring about truth. Thus, peer reviewers aren't paid, and yet they're vaguely expected to judge articles on the basis of some sort of merit that's related to truth. But their incentive is to judge articles based on whether it adds to their own citation count. And so the real game is to cite the people who will be invoked as peer reviewers. But that's all hidden. There's a lot of corruption in academia, and woke pressures make it worse because they're another reason not to be honest.
I would propose a reform based on re-qualifying examinations. Kill publish or perish stone dead. The masquerading of rent seeking as scholarship is the single most pervasive corruption driver. Instead, there should be major examinations drafted by the discipline as a whole, and it should be normal for a professor to flunk out of his job because he didn't read and study the latest scholarship and so he failed his re-qualifying exam.
Ultimately, you can't build systems so perfect that people don't need to be good. Only the intrinsic motivation to seek truth can reform academia in the right way. But the protocols and incentives can channel that force better or worse. They're really messed up right now.
Can you comment more about rent seeking in academia? I.e., what is the cornered resource that academics use to get above-market returns.
One way to filter for truth-seeking as a prime motivator is to pay academics well below market rate. Make it an unattractive career for those who don't place a high value on truth and their eventual legacy on the field.
A problem with business school professors is that they tend to be very highly paid relative to other academics, and they can often make more by trading on the prestige of their position to get speaker's fees, consulting fees, etc. The recent string of academic fraud scandals (Gino et al) have mostly been business school profs.
Paying academics badly will not work if you don't have other public amenities for free at high standard - I mean really good schools if your kids have merit, really secure but cheap neighborhoods, health services for free and at good levels. If you have to pay for every one of these items through the nose, and in addition get poor pay - you'd be selecting for lumpen proletariat.
Umm, taxpayer funded prestigious jobs good life, right? And it's closely above marketv value in the sense that willingness to pay for professors’ teaching services would be a lot less without the subsidies.
It's an incentives issue. Academics aren't incentivized enough to solve important problems, so they largely don't. They are, of course, excited about playing status games instead, which cashes out in picking fashionable and not too difficult directions.
If you solve important problems, you do get cited a lot. I still remember the disgust at people seeing half a mill cites for how to quantify protein content, or how to make a polyacrylamide gel for electrophoresis.
On the one hand I think we need some group of people who think about things that aren't directly tied to immediate material benefit. One never knows what will be useful in the future.
On the other hand, the self-referentiality of defining importance by what other people in the field think is important – carries a significant risk of spiraling in strange and useless directions. The Sokal prank said it all. There is also the imprint of history. In my field, physics, there was a lot for fundamental theorists to do in the 20th century, but much less so today. But we never see an entire field say, "well, we've solved the important problems, time to move on." The first order of business is always to sustain and grow the field.
I always liked the idea of having funding decisions etc. be done not by peers in your same field, but by peers in adjacent fields. That way everyone has to make some effort to stop huffing their own fumes and explain themselves to an outsider.
Interesting take. I wonder—is it necessary for all academic work to be justified strictly in terms of immediate utility to others? Throughout history, some of the most valuable knowledge has emerged from curiosity-driven inquiry with no clear application at the time. If we only pursued research with direct, demonstrable benefits, would we risk missing the long-tail gains that have historically come from open-ended exploration?
> For example, polls found that these goals best explain ~7% of which research projects academics pick, and ~9% of which papers/projects academics approve via peer review. Such choices are instead explained 32% and 58% respectively by topic/methods being in fashion. The remaining 62% of project choice is explained by building on prior work/skills, and the remaining 33% of peer review choice is explained by work showing impressive abilities.
Come on. You know better than this. If you want to say that X explains 7% of Y, you cannot show this with a poll where 7% of people think X best explains Y. That's just people's opinions, it has no bearing on the actual answer. Especially when the people you've polled are your X followers, who share your outlook, and most of whom are not even themselves researchers. And when the question you asked in the poll isn't even about the amount that X explains Y; you only asked whether X is the "single best" explanation of Y.
If you wanted to actually show X explains 7% of Y, you would need to, instead, gather data about X and Y directly, and perform an ANOVA showing that 7% of the variance in Y is explained by X.
I am not an academic so can't comment from that standpoint, but Robin, surely your complaint, if that's what it is, could be applied to almost anything, not just (parts of) academia. And if we want to be reductive in the 'hospitals save lives' mode, then 'academics seek knowledge' works for me. Personally I think reductionism is unhelpful, though if pushed, as a medic, I would say hospitals treat sick people, rather than save lives. And even that is false, as it's mixed up with health policy, staffing, resources etc. In fact, public health saves more lives than, say, emergency surgery. Even if that fact is recognised, which it rarely is, I still want 'useless' research to continue in all spheres. Curiosity is intrinsically human and new knowledge is (almost) always welcome.
You seem to have missed the point that new knowledge is not really being generated, at least not beyond “Academic Y wrote another paper on X this month showing off some clever math. No one changed their mind.” It is generating less knowledge than an online fanfic forum, and is less useful.
Now it’s fine if people want to spend time doing that, but it is not obviously something to spend tax dollars on.
" The arts are the other main area of life where specialists poorly justify their specific actions in terms of the usual area purposes. So if the arts are mostly about showing off personal abilities, and abilities to judge such abilities, likely so is academia."
I think you're being unfair to the arts. Art that was designed to be clearly justifiable in terms of its social purposes is propaganda, not art, and we have far too much of that presently. IMHO good art poses a question the artist doesn't know how to answer, If something /has/ an answer, it should be explained in an essay. Art is for the things we can't yet explain, which makes it inherently hard to justify other than by saying "It feels important to me".
It's possible to create art that is socially useful, but it's hard to do so on purpose. There are examples: Huckleberry Finn, Guernica. But the harder you try to make socially useful art, the more you make propaganda instead of art.
I'm not saying propaganda is always bad! But the priors are strong.
PS- I also don't think artists make things mostly to show off their abilities. You make what comes to you. This is even more true of modern and contemporary art, in which showing skill is a major faux pas. I think it's mostly musical /performers/ of certain genres who show off, e.g., violinists, opera singers, keyboardists, jazz performers.
> PS- I also don't think artists make things mostly to show off their abilities.
Does the peacock know why he has a fancy tail? He probably keeps it well-groomed for his own internal reasons. Ditto not all men will necessarily introspect their true motivations for buying a $20k Rolex watch or becoming a rock musician.
We have neglected the peacock's tail. But if we extend what we mean by "show off" to include completely unconscious, instinctive showing off, then we shouldn't even be having this discussion. Nearly all social behavior would then count as "showing off", it would be unsurprising and morally unobjectionable, and Robin would have no excuse for making an issue of it.
I have wondered about the exact same things.
I want my surgeons to practice on cadavers, I think I’ve said enough
I think about this question often. On the one hand, to justify society financially supporting a pursuit there should seemingly be a a clear and tangible service being provided.
On the other hand, less (non corporate) money is being poured into academia than into the entertainment industry. I mean, Hollywood can often spend more money on one movie than the worldwide Assyriology budget. While Hollywood is certainly pushed by economic incentives, can we really say that entertainment contains more cultural values than even abstract and impractical academic fields?
I'm also reminded about Abraham Flexners Hallmark 1939 essay on the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. He argues that only when pure theory is given space to flourish can true breakthroughs occur that transform society. Those who consider the driving forces of the Enlightenment to have been primarily intellectual (admittedly a contentious position) would consider this claim to have been empirically confirmed.
This was in fact the explicit goal of the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. This can be appreciated as both a cultural value and often practical as well.
But obviously, the biggest challenge of many academic fields is irrelevance. I aspire to be successful in the field of religous studies which is of particular irrelevance. Religous communities themselves tend to rely on their internal scholars and their own intertia, and non-religous communities tend to have little interest in the whole subject. Indeed, when speaking to scholars about their research choices, it's mostly about what interests them and their small circle of peers. Is that something in the interest of general society?
But then I think what academia's raison d'etre. If we as a society are only interested in pure material goods and the truths academia seeks to uncover are ignored out of industrial considerations, does that mean we are shallow and materialistic? Of course survival comes first, but can't we afford a bit of higher knowledge that is enlightening and cultured? Admittedly, we are no longer in a place where society assigns deep ontological value to pure knowledge, but is it not one valuable facet of culture as a whole?
The issue here is NOT deep important truths vs value to non-academics. BOTH of those are neglected by academic choices.
in that case, cutting funding to academia as an institution wholesale should reduce the effect of both of those things being neglected, if we assume current incentives in place are hard to change? I think we are on that path politically speaking.
"Important", like "interesting", is a 2-place predicate. Scholars tend to believe that what they study is important, even if laypeople or other scholars don't think so. And those scholars are right: the topic is important _to them_. Experience shows that this is better than trying to force them into topics important _to the laypeople_ (that's exactly the death-by-thousand-cuts grant system slowly causes).
You are always super on point when talking about academia, which is part of why I'm here. I like the observations you make. I wish it wasn't so, but on the other hand, I can pat myself on the back for at least trying to do better? I will say, in my corner of academia, which is not the same corner as Robin's, every thing he says is absolutely true, not that you could get many people to admit it! Showing off is huge. People like other people's work not because it's getting at anything truly important but because it sounds sufficiently important, is complex, is trendy, is similar to their own work.
I would have thought philosophers would be especially good at responding to challenging observations like these, but I have been consistently unimpressed with their responses.
Philosophers are the worst show offs of all. I studied philosophy with the intention of pursuing it at the graduate level but was very turned off by the way argumentation was used to show cleverness and not getting at the truth. The students were obnoxious (elite public school in Canada) and the papers not much less so (Daniel Dennet comes to mind).
Dennett had gotten at more truth than any other philosopher of his generation. Maybe you don’t like truth.
I like to criticize analytic philosophy but Dennett was one of the best of his generation. Dennett was also my professor at Tufts and I interacted with him many times in person. He was a great professor. I'm disappointed to find that someone was not fond of his work, but I do encounter that sentiment a lot.
I don't doubt Dennett is brilliant and original, but his solution to the hard problem in philosophy of mind was not a solution at all. In fact I do like truth and that's part of the problem. Dennett getting more at truth than others of his generation doesn't actually say much, though I personally much prefer Nagel and Strawson. Staunch physicalists who denied the problem of mind never appealed to me. To each their own! I'm sure he was lots of fun to have as a professor.
What's wrong with rejecting the hard problem? I agree with those who reject the hard problem. If anything, I think Dennett doesn't go far enough. Not only do I deny that there's a hard problem of consciousness, it doesn't seem to me that there is one, nor do I think the hard problem is "intuitive" or common among laypeople.
I think it's a philosopher's fancy, a philosophical confusion invented by philosophers, and ultimately a pseudoproblem. So I don't think phenomenal consciousness is an illusion; I don't even think there is a meaningful notion of phenomenal consciousness at all. I don't think Nagel and Strawson provide any compelling insights into consciousness at all.
Depends on the area? Am pretty sure most mathematicians could respond (and truthfully so) they *are* trying to answer deep, important questions.
Could they name the deep important question they hope to answer?
I imagine most would. I mean, only crazy ambitious teams are trying to do things like solve the Riemann hypothesis, but I am pretty sure they could explain their work as in 'there's this problem x in this area that is important for such and such reasons and because it's a stepping-stone to answering an important question'. And they wouldn't be lying. Of course, I imagine most people wouldn't consider most deep, important questions in math 'important'.
I am very skeptical of this but would love to see Robin tear into this counterexample. He's talked about physics previously, where you might think the usual shenanigans don't apply. Unfortunately that's not the case. I am going to guess that many (most?) mathematicians spend their time showing off to other mathematicians and it's sufficient to justify their work with the work of others without a broader reference to the importance of the question.
I doubt you can "show off" to other mathematicians. Either you have problems you've solved (or interesting hypotheses worth testing) or you don't. No glib talk is going to cover up for the lack of anything to show for it.
That's interesting speculation though I'd like to hear what actual mathematicians think about this. If philosophers show off, surely mathematicians can and do as well.