What's a Mathematician to do?

The SE mods truly baffle me sometimes.

Organic discussion following a tangent that many readers and contributors found interesting and valuable as evidenced by their posts and upvotes? KILL THAT FILTH BEFORE IT SPREADS!

There's nothing so frustrating as getting an exact hit to your question only to find SE filled with "just google it" responses and "closed because duplicate" moderator actions, complete with a link to a vaguely similar post that usually differs in at least one subtle but critical or aggravatingly inconvenient way. Then you're left to hope that a generous contributor has managed to slip an answer in before the hammer fell, because despite the "assurances" from all the "google it" posters, the other google hits always seem to be composed primarily of completely irrelevant SE posts, out of date forum discussions from 2003, Expert Exchange paywalls, and answers.com galleryspam.

At least with the spam sites I can recognize that they will be useless from the URL alone :/

That's the generic label on the post, the real reason is usually it's "off topic".

The bigger problem is that moderators close questions that re ask 5 year old questions, irrespective of how much programming has changed. They built mechanisms to deal with this but the karma limits to use them are so high that no new user can so stack exchange are now suffering from the same kind of reverse feedback mechanism Wikipedia has.

New user arrives, asks simple question/fixes a typo, mods shut question down as dupe/bot reverts edit, user comments saying old question isn't accurate anymore because language X has change in way Y and he wants an answer for how it works in language X now/user fixes it again, mods don't care having moved on to other posts/bot reverts it again, user leaves in disgust.

It's unfortunate and very difficult, but it's worse for stack exchange because they want the selective pressure against "bad" questions but the community are currently suffocating the churn required to keep the questions relevant to current.

> how might you contribute to humanity, and even deeper, to the well-being of the world, by pursuing mathematics

I cannot begin to express how much I disagree with this. Mathematics should fight child abuse? And artists enlist in the military to fight despots overseas, by way of art??

Mathematics should be an end in itself. You should be a mathematician, or a stand-up comic, or a painter because it fulfills you, because it lets you express something about you and provides you with a deep sense of satisfaction. Because it helps you live, not because it helps "the world". The world is big and doesn't care about you; there is no way to know what helps the world and what doesn't, anyway.

If what fulfills you is healing people, or getting them out of poverty, then by all means go do that.

But don't pollute mathematics, or art, with morals.

> Organic discussion following a tangent that many readers and contributors found interesting and valuable as evidenced by their posts and upvotes? KILL THAT FILTH BEFORE IT SPREADS!

The issue is, the StackOverflow boards aren't discussion boards. It's a Q&A system. If your question doesn't have one (or a few) unambiguously correct answer(s), it's not a fit for the site.

IMO Bill Thurston is saying people are people first and mathematicians second. People often feel the need to contribute to the world and mathematicians often wonder how they can do it through mathematics. And of course he says it's not easy to answer that. There's nothing wrong in trying to pursue mathematics to improve some aspect of the world. There are millions of way in which pursuing mathematics can improve the world.