After the article, my opinion is going to be that people do this because they are politically privileged by a social relativistic argument. The professor in the interview is advantaged by the narrative that proofs are socially constructed.
Indeed, mathematics and any other STEM field is deeply political. People are politics. But to confuse that--that STEM as practiced is socially constructed and political--and to make a sloppy ontological conclusion about what STEM/math is, is a deeply neoliberalizing argument. So I'm inclined to make the argument that it is actually the neoliberal intellectuals who try to spin this as fundamentally only a human enterprise, because it privileges their social standing as the "correct" practitioners of this compact: capitalism requires that mathematicians be able to "sell" each other the truth of their proofs.
Indeed, the article mentions the Mochizuki controversy but I don't think they understood the social problem. See, it doesn't matter if Mochizuki is right or wrong, or if people understood his 500 pages or not. It is that in principle it could be shown that he is right or wrong. And that's unlike, say, the Bible, which is also a social compact. Reduction of STEM to social construct throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Indeed, mathematics and any other STEM field is deeply political. People are politics. But to confuse that--that STEM as practiced is socially constructed and political--and to make a sloppy ontological conclusion about what STEM/math is, is a deeply neoliberalizing argument. So I'm inclined to make the argument that it is actually the neoliberal intellectuals who try to spin this as fundamentally only a human enterprise, because it privileges their social standing as the "correct" practitioners of this compact: capitalism requires that mathematicians be able to "sell" each other the truth of their proofs.
Indeed, the article mentions the Mochizuki controversy but I don't think they understood the social problem. See, it doesn't matter if Mochizuki is right or wrong, or if people understood his 500 pages or not. It is that in principle it could be shown that he is right or wrong. And that's unlike, say, the Bible, which is also a social compact. Reduction of STEM to social construct throws the baby out with the bathwater.