Lock oneself in a broom closet and devote every ounce of your energy towards proving results at the absolute fringes of modern math (with the very real prospect of a nothingburger result for 4+ years of work) and suddenly one starts to crave the simplicity of manual labor with immediately tangible results. I knew an ecology grad student whose thesis involved manually tagging hundreds of hours of video of worms moving around on leaves and after she handed in her thesis she walked into the Canadian wilderness and basically dropped off the grid.

Pure speculation but what if it has to do with dopamine sources? Solving problems and the certainty of math is addictive to some of us and dealing with people may not be. If you ride up the ladder of solving problems until you reach the ceiling of having to deal with people (especially academia politics), a farm where there is certainty and sunshine and where you can still solve problems as you like without having to depend on people, may be attractive.

Ted Kaczynski, AKA the Unabomber was also the youngest math professor at Berkley. But shortly after he said he hated it and went to live in a shack in Montana.

Is there a Kaczynski equivalent to Godwin's Law? HN likes to reference him a lot.

as industrial society grows longer, the likelihood of disastrous consequences increases?

Good luck getting off this earth without industry. Earth won't last forever. It's a degenerate mindset that thinks we should just rot here on Earth without advancing.

Is humanity currently rotting to you?

Yes. Humans, just like information, are prone to bitrot. Every day your data is rotting, there's no stopping the entropy train, so most anyone who cares about it takes preventative measures by increasing redundancy. Man does this via procreation and perpetuating, hopefully, to other planets while Earth is habitable. Extreme stagnation is a form of degeneration as well as extreme change for change's sake.

They are very clever

That's all you need to know. "Why are all these very clever people doing X when they could be doing Y instead??" has a very simple answer: they've used their big brains to figure out that X is, in fact, a better and more sensible thing to do than Y. That's all. The powers that shape public perception of what constitutes meaningful work might not agree.

> Or, is there a farm in Oregon that specializes in hiring people with PhDs in Math?

There is, it's next to the one with spherical cows.