I do have a PhD and agree much more with the parent comment than yours. Granted, my PhD was in math, not CS, so I'm sure the experience was different. For instance:
> there are no problems like this in academia (at least not CS) because it's absolutely impractical (re graduation, tenure, etc.) to set out tackling problems which are intractable.
There's a difference between problems that are intractable and problems that require "grinding and radical unproductivity when the problem really is that hard". Maybe the problems in CS are easier. In math, many of the problems are very much of this flavor, and the point often isn't to solve the original problem but rather to use your investigation into that problem to discover new techniques or more tractable problems that you can solve. Of course, the pace of publication is far slower in math, so I'm sure this is a factor in the choice of problems.
On the other hand, I do mostly agree with this:
> are you also one of those people who takes cold plunges every morning? this myth is what perpetuates the same horrible relationships with shit advisors. it's not supposed to be suffering. it's supposed to be challenging. there's an enormous difference.
Agreed, there should be a difference. Unfortunately, in many modern PhD programs I'm not sure there is much of one....
Don't really know what point you're trying to make here. Maybe Garnett is more westernized, but that doesn't make it more readable. IMO Garnett's not great (at least for Anna Karenina, which is all I've read by her); from what I've read P&V is more readable than Garnett.
I wouldn't consider the Hodge diamond the "crucial idea from string theory." It's a pretty basic/fundamental concept in geometry and really doesn't a priori have much to do with string theory. The decomposition they give on page 6 probably predates most of the development of string theory.
My academic work was very close to June Huh's; my Ph.D. thesis was directly inspired by his Fields Medal winning work. His accomplishments have undoubtedly moved the field forward and connected various ostensibly disparate areas of math, not to mention he is one of the clearest writers and speakers in all of mathematics.
There are very few people in pure math that care about transformers; they have had practically zero impact on the sort of research mathematics that the Fields Medal is concerned with.
I'm assuming you don't have a Ph.D. if it sounds generic to you. I think it's really impossible to explain to somebody who hasn't gone through it how much a Ph.D. changes the way you think.
Whether it's worth the time investment is another matter, however, which I'll leave alone.
I have not been paid because my salary is funded by an NSF grant and they've shut down the payment system and cancelled payments. (It is still down.) I'm not in the social sciences, I'm in mathematics.
The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.
As a professional mathematician, I strongly disagree with the claim that "higher math" abandons worked examples. Any course or book that does not devote a significant amount of time to examples is a bad course or book.
Even Grothendieck, who was famously known for thinking very abstractly and avoiding examples, was motivated by concrete questions (e.g., the Weil conjectures) coming from concrete examples. To me, and most other mathematicians, the whole point of mathematics is to do examples, and theory building or any other abstract nonsense should be motivated by the desire to better understand or unify examples.