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I think the quality of guesses is affected by prior experience. This seems obvious, but it means that hunches won't help a new grad find interesting problems. It also means that a lifelong mathematician has a lot of failed and successful attack vectors for problems of a certain class. Not only by virtue of experience, but also because the field and competition to publish and produce results makes it necessary to cultivate a sharp instinct for viable solutions to avoid wasting significant time ... and it weeds out those that do not cultivate this skill. (Note, weeding out includes making 7 figures in industry so dont consider that a dig).

You can call this survivorship bias, and it may be that successful mathematicians are being weeded out by factors other than their ability to quickly solve problems.




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