> People generally like socializing If people don't like socializing then your argument not only falls apart, but actually leads us to something like the oppos

> People generally like socializing If people don't like socializing then your argument not only falls apart, but actually leads us to something like the opposite of the conclusion you found. And people definitely don't like socializing! Because we're not talking about "socializing" in the sense of parties or even water cooler conversations. We're talking about socializing in the context of a group of professionals working together on under-specified problems/solutions. The English word for that type of socializing is: Meetings. Saying that "people like socializing" in the context of professional knowledge work is like saying "people like woodworking" in the context of stick framing cookie cutter developments in Georgia in the summer. I don't think I've ever worked with a productive scientist or mathematician who didn't loathe meetings. In fact, I think I can probably count on one hand the number of people I've met who seem to not loathe meetings. Also: there are pretty powerful social/professional forces -- in Mathematics and related disciplines in particular -- which incentivize people to play into the perception that they are a "lone genius" or at least the "main character". So the group of people we're talking about both hate meetings and have a strong incentive to be perceived as an independent genius/main contributor. And yet the vast majority of good science and mathematics involves large groups of people (who mostly complain about the resulting necessity of meetings, lol). I'll also submit that most of the "lone genius" instances are confounded by the strong social incentive to be perceived as either a lone genius or at least the main contributor. There are at least a few prominent historical examples of math/math-adjacent giants who "worked alone" but were in fact in deep conversation with both the literature and their peers. But, again, there's a lot of gray area, and that's what I meant in my original post when I said "This isn't exactly what I actually think". Two examples of gray area: 1. I'll certainly concede that there are some types of work that do not require that sort of social process to happen. That's the sort of work you seem to be pointing toward here. But opportunity to do that type of work is rare in general, and those opportunities are far more scarce today than it was in 1690 or even 1990. 2. There are also some types of work where the corresponding sociological process is pretty simple and is probably sufficiently captured. So I'm not bearish about what's possible, at least per se. But technology executives and analysts in particular have some really fundamental misunderstandings about how this type of labor works in most cases, and I see some of those same misunderstandings among lots of professional mathematicians.