[thanatropism]

> papers with truly novel results will suddenly be hundreds of pages and tens of pages of setup.

We're already there with Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...), the entire mathematical field singlehandedly created by Mochizuki to prove the ABC Conjecture. Mochizuki worked in isolation and astounded the world by revealing all of this at once.

Now, the world's top mathematicians have been so impressed with whatever they've managed to understand from Mochizuki's papers that big efforts are being made to unravel it, getting Mochizuki to teach lectures, etc. As best as I know it, the entire thing hasn't been independently verified -- it's such a tall stack of novel mathematics.

Now: we can chastise Mochizuki for not playing within the ordinary rules of math research (publish ongoing research, etc.), or acclaim him as a genius having produced fundamental, discontinuous advances in his field... or we can do both.

I wouldn't blame people for holding off on "using" Mochizuki's results (they're too abstract for that, but anyway) because the whole thing is so obscure still. What's more: I wouldn't hold skepticism on Mochizuki as an example of academia being too self-referential. The academic rat race is supposed to keep these things from happening by imposing some structure on the production of knowledge.