One can think of many better ways to harness human intelligence than work on an arbitrary puzzle... unless this is an interview for something much bigger.
Are you going around saying "why don't these rich people stop buying yachts!".
At least this guy did something that wasn't entirely selfish. Which is more than can be said about most people in the world.
What about all of those highly skilled technicians and engineers who dedicate years to building said yacht who aren't building rockets or faster trains for us all or designing better schools? Etc, etc...
Any argument rooted in "these other people should do X instead of Y because I think X is more important and want to see them do it" fails from inherent selfishness.
Whether X is indeed better than Y is moot.
Actually it's probably one of the most worthwhile questions, philosophically and practically. If this question doesn't get properly considered, we end up with blind glorification of activities whose main selling point is revenue generation and shitty feedback loops in society over generations.
Not inherently. Only in the cases where it's a true choice between something revenue generating, and something people are doing for social good.
Your perception of social good (people dedicating their time to intellectual puzzles you deem worthy vs people wasting their time on these meaningless displays of skill), is different to someone else's.
My point was perhaps too broad - but deigning to tell someone their pursuit isn't as worthy as one you think they should be pursuing is, frankly, pointless.
That seems to assume immutable human values, and/or a postmodern view of the world. Promoting thoughtfulness about the meaning of human activity seems pretty valuable, regardless of the conclusion.
Perhaps it's the medium of this discussion, but the reason your comment was downvoted was because it came across as judgemental and dismissive.
I've been CMO of a startup, and could spend my free time developing marketing plans for NGOs looking after sick kids to get them more donations, but I spend my talents and time watching arbitrary funny cat videos.
I know it's not the highest order use of abilities, but assuming people should only pursue what you deem to be the most worthy, and dismissing other pursuits, is a thought process so academic it's almost pointless to real-world discourse.
Cogently dismissing other pursuits is an incredibly effective form of recruitment, so there's nothing inherently academic about it.
"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
The ancient Greeks developed a ton of geometry. I'm not sure how we could ever know for sure why they did it, but a clue might be in the name of the field: geo-metria, earth-measurement. (And it's known that some of them made use of geometry for practical purposes, or at least proposed doing so.)
Newton (so far as I can tell) developed calculus in order to do physics. Neither arbitrary puzzle-solving nor religion (though I'm sure Newton enjoyed solving puzzles and he was a religious believer).
Cantor certainly had some peculiar religious ideas that may have motivated his work on the beginnings of set theory. On the other hand, his first publication on the subject looks as if its goal is to provide a beautiful short proof of a theorem already proved by Liouville (on the existence of transcendental numbers); I suppose you could call that a "puzzle" on the grounds that everything in pure mathematics is puzzles, but I think Cantor would have viewed it as a practical application -- in the sense that it's useful for something else in mathematics. Puzzle-solving, perhaps, but not arbitrary puzzle-solving.