"What I wanted to know is who are these experts, why are they giving their expertise away for Internet Points (tm) and is this detracting from their actual work."
While I don't know about this exact post, for most academics, such theoretical exercises are their work. 'Projects' like this are nice and small and contained. They also give you the opportunity to get 'real' questions from people who aren't as close to the material as you are, almost like 'customers', so if you use a question like this in a lecture, it's almost sure to capture the interest of students better than other textbook examples. While I don't teach many courses, I've used examples derived from hybrid 'real world' / theoretical questions as examples to explain our products.
That said, I've surely spend time on questions that will never pay themselves back in such a way. You never know up front which ones will, so it's like playing the VC game - you 'invest' in 10 questions, with the knowledge that 7 will be duds, 2 will break even and the last one will (hopefully) be a home run.
While I don't know about this exact post, for most academics, such theoretical exercises are their work. 'Projects' like this are nice and small and contained. They also give you the opportunity to get 'real' questions from people who aren't as close to the material as you are, almost like 'customers', so if you use a question like this in a lecture, it's almost sure to capture the interest of students better than other textbook examples. While I don't teach many courses, I've used examples derived from hybrid 'real world' / theoretical questions as examples to explain our products.
That said, I've surely spend time on questions that will never pay themselves back in such a way. You never know up front which ones will, so it's like playing the VC game - you 'invest' in 10 questions, with the knowledge that 7 will be duds, 2 will break even and the last one will (hopefully) be a home run.