I completely agree that this was a dumb thing for Bostrom to quote.

Mathematics research generates positive feedback with almost every other branch of science; obviously existential risk is no exception. It's clear that we shouldn't devote all of our resources to merely mathematics, but at the same time saying Fields-level research is flatly not important is going too far.

A longer quote, for context, with the relevant passage highlighted:

Crunch time

We find ourselves in a thicket of strategic complexity, surrounded by a dense mist of uncertainty. Though many considerations have been discerned, their details and interrelationships remain unclear and iffy—and there might be other factors we have not even thought of yet. What are we to do in this predicament?

Philosophy with a deadline

A colleague of mine likes to point out that a Fields Medal (the highest honor in mathematics) indicates two things about the recipient: that he was capable of accomplishing something important, and that he didn’t. Though harsh, the remark hints at a truth.

Think of a “discovery” as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery’s value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world. There are cases in which having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable, but this is most plausible when the solution is immediately put to use, either being deployed for some practical end or serving as a foundation to further theoretical work. And in the latter case, where a solution is immediately used only in the sense of serving as a building block for further theorizing, there is great value in obtaining a solution slightly sooner only if the further work it enables is itself both important and urgent.1

The question, then, is not whether the result discovered by the Fields Medalist is in itself “important” (whether instrumentally or for knowledge’s own sake). Rather, the question is whether it was important that the medalist enabled the publication of the result to occur at an earlier date. The value of this temporal transport should be compared to the value that a world-class mathematical mind could have generated by working on something else. At least in some cases, the Fields Medal might indicate a life spent solving the wrong problem—for instance, a problem whose allure consisted primarily in being famously difficult to solve.

Similar barbs could be directed at other fields, such as academic philosophy.

I agree that in this case Bostrom is at best misguided.

EDIT: he clarifies later:

We could postpone work on some of the eternal questions for a little while, delegating that task to our hopefully more competent successors—in order to focus our own attention on a more pressing challenge: increasing the chance that we will actually have competent successors. This would be high-impact philosophy and high-impact mathematics.

His error, in my view, is assuming the fungibility of the two.

Yeah. It's quite retarded in the context as well. Bostrom's basically going on and on of how it is crunch time for the philosophy to solve eternal questions of ethics and such, and how this specific philosophy is so much more important.

Let's say someone actually solved those eternal questions.

To be specific, let's say we understood suffering. We can look at a description of a physical system, and then tell how much suffering that system is experiencing.

What does he think such answer would even look like? Picture a piece of paper, it has the answer on it, what do you think it looks like?

(Same as every other hard answer ever encountered by mankind, which wasn't bullshit: Mathematical formulas, with derivations and proofs, in all likelihood involving objects and algebras we didn't even come up with yet. Answer that is literally unthinkable today)

edit: I think it'd be fair to say that answering a difficult question before there's even a language in which an answer could be expressed is probably one of the most counter productive efforts known to mankind.