There are many types of academics - does your argument extend to french literature experts?

Well, if MIRI happened to know of technical problems they thought were relevant for AI safety and which they thought French literature experts could usefully contribute to, sure.

I'm not suggesting that they would have taken otherwise uninteresting problems and written those up simply because they might be of interest to mathematicians. Rather my understanding is that they had a set of problems that seemed about equally important, and then from that set, used "which ones could we best recruit outsiders to help with" as an additional criteria. (Though I wasn't there, so anything I say about this is at best a combination of hearsay and informed speculation.)