The work we now consider 'important' is the work that has, according to our best guess, the highest likelihood of solving important problems in future.

Our best guess may be wrong, as the future is hard to predict. But the future is not so unpredictable that we should stop thinking about where best to direct our efforts.

Maybe someone working on Farmville will cause an important advance, as an unpredictable side effect. We can't rule that out. Even a job that seems 'unimportant' can have beneficial and unpredictable windfalls, and that's wonderful.

But we should still try and direct our efforts as best we can, and work on problems that we think are important.

That seemingly trivial pursuits sometimes bear fruit, doesn't mean that all pursuits are equally worthwhile.

Agreed. However I would add one huge caveat.

The power of vast, organic, ecological systems like markets and large open source communities, is that we can work on all problems simultaneously. This is immensely powerful and it also allows network effects of problem solving, such as those side effects mentioned in the article. If nobody was working on the things that required big parallel clusters, then the advancements in GPU technologies would matter not a bit to solving these problems.

I don't think we need to worry about how important the problems we are trying to solve are. I think the best approach is to work on solving the problems that inspire us. I think, as the Spartan prince once said (according to Plutarch), "People raise positions, not the other way around."

But if important is hard and unimportant easy, than there might be better reward/work by working on unimportant stuff.

Difficulty can be a decent heuristic for novelty, though. There are obviously a great number of simple things that have never been tried (or even thought of), but certainly difficult things are less likely to be tested, all other things being equal. That said, small ideas and small changes can be surprisingly impactful.

I rather like the idea of small changes that result in cognitive shifts. An article I read a while ago said that Lisp programmers are often unimpressed with language features other people have because Lisp can easily emulate and subsume them, essentially dismissing the idea for its technical simplicity and not an actual lack of merit.

I'm not a big web guy, but a lot of web tools seem to work that way - easy to think up, easy to code up, but once they're actually available they change the game in subtle ways. There's a mindset where people (myself included) say "Well, that's easy enough to hack up using cron and ssh and..." and we fail to recognise that actually having it makes us use it, and actually using it improves our lives.

I'm a doc, teaching myself python specifically because it's painfully obvious that we (docs) need more and more programming skill to do real medical research. My current project is shaping up to be a multi-year effort to hunt cancer (tissue micro-arrays to assess novel antigens). So this article threw me for a loop in the first sentence.

The article is still relevant though, in my mind. There's no external motivation to write a parser. But how else could one reasonably build a research database? I suppose someone could manually go through the clinical database and transfer info into a research database for 500 patients. But what about the next 10 studies of 500 patients? It seems unimportant in the near term, but in the long-term having someone on the project who can talk to the computer is going to make or break it.

The author wonders what important came out of, say, Farmville, and I think the answer is something along the lines of the importance of business intelligence - the attention paid to user telemetry, A/B testing, and product iteration has grown based on this has grown by an order of magnitude since Zynga started bragging that they could determine the ideal size of e.g. a call-to-action button.

This makes it obvious there's an unstated assumption at work here, though, i.e. that the unimportant work plays a significant part in developing this technology. I don't think this is necessarily true: the opposite premise, that "it's GPUs time when it's GPUs time", seems equally plausible.

I have a deadly and incurable medical condition. A big part of getting myself well involved eating at restaurants and tipping the wait staff well in preference to spending time in doctor's offices. People react to the "news" that I got well with either treating me like some hugely inspiring figure or calling me a liar and charlatan to my face. It is very clear to me I know something of value to the world and have made a real difference in the lives of some people. Yet I cannot figure out how to monetize it and I have spent some years trying to figure out how to just talk about it without flame wars breaking out.

In my experience, the big problems need "small" solutions. I got well by gradually walking away from the hard hitting drugs whose overwhelming strength hit my body just as hard as it hit my medical problems. The pursuit of the hard hitting solutions strikes me as rooted in fear and reflective of inelegant mental models.

"I love Lucy" was the "Star Wars" of its day in terms of revolutionizing an industry. I suspect it also helped combat racism in this country. Lucille Ball was originally told they would not cast her Cuban husband in the role, that no one would believe that. I think they took the show on the road to build their case that audiences would accept it and she did eventually get her way.

Did she set out to change an industry or combat racism? No. She wanted her husband on the show to try to save her marriage and finally have kids. This industry changing TV show was a lifestyle business. They did finally have kids but ultimately divorced.

Having "cured CF" (so to speak) and mostly gotten spat on by the world for trying to share such info, my hope is that I can eventually do a web comic. I think humor is a far more palatable means to share wisdom than trying to "help" people. Solving serious problems that run deep tends to be too threatening to people. Entertaining them, making them laugh and incidentally causing them to think seems to be a more powerful and effective means to really change minds.

I continue to wrestle with such questions. But I think the most elegant solutions make light of problems. I only hope I can resolve my problems well enough so I only need worry about "unimportant" problems. That would be a truly amazing accomplishment given my history (and genetic disorder).

I don't know who you are, and have never read anything you have written before.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to reply to my initial opinion of your message. Your problem is that your message reads a lot like "I cured a horrible disease (I don't know what you had), which modern medicine failed to cure, by eating at good restaurants".

Your problem is that this message sounds very close to the anti-modern medicine claims of groups like homeopaths. I do not know what your cure is, but trying to work with, rather than (apparently) against modern science-based medicine might help.

Apologises if this message just ends up telling you nothing, or something you have heard too many time before.

Thank you for replying.

I struggle with how to talk about what I have done. There is a substantial difference between my framing of the problem and the way others frame it. I did mention my condition but only in shorthand. I have CF -- cystic fibrosis -- a deadly genetic disorder which accounts for around a third of all adult lung transplants and half of all pediatric lung transplants in the US.

What I found is that life is chemistry. Everything we eat, drink, breathe or touch impacts our biochemistry and what germs we are exposed to and so on. Making many small choices throughout the day has a cumulative impact on body chemistry. I was able to reverse the pathology of my condition and make my body work closer to normal. Dietary changes were a big part of that but far from "everything".

Getting myself well took everything I had. I ended up deeply in debt because of it. I am currently homeless, trying to declare bankruptcy and trying to figure how to make money online so I can stay well. Having a desk job in an industrial park was part of what was keeping me ill.

Anyway, I hope that is a little clearer for you. My real message was intended to be that taking care of problems while they are small is more effective at really fixing things than hunting for big, dramatic ego boosting solutions. Doctors pay little attention to nutrition for people like me, though it makes a big difference in outcomes. Lung transplants grab more headlines and glory than trying to help people keep their own lungs functional and healthy.

Peace.

Thanks for your reply, I agree with, and am interested in, what you say. Just want comment:

"Doctors pay little attention to nutrition for people like me, though it makes a big difference in outcomes. Lung transplants grab more headlines and glory than trying to help people keep their own lungs functional and healthy.".

While I realise you might have had bad experiences, I know lots of medical researchers who are dedicating their lives to trying to cure disease, in any way possible. Many doctors would be very interested in proving how diet can help disease, and doing so.

> While I realise you might have had bad experiences,

Chiming in on bad experience: Thankfully, I don't have CF or anything of the sort; I just appear to be statistically improbable. On way too many medical diagnostics, I'm in the 1% of the scale -- though everything about me seems normal.

Except weight; I used to be 100kg (220 lbs) on a 5'11" (1.78m) frame. Full, but not overly obese or really fat. But I was on a 800-100 calorie diet for years at that point. (Not because of trying to lose weight; I just didn't have the appetite, and would go days, and in a few cases, weeks, without eating anything).

I had responses similar to those described by Mz from practitioners - I've paid good money to consult with many, supposedly expert and the best around -- disbelief and general disinterest.

And then I became (mostly) normal by cutting out wheat. This was met by "oh, that's interesting" and "oh, that's psychosomatic" (Because the standard wheat allergy test came up negative), and general disinterest. I'm eating a lot more now (wheat excluded), and am down to 80-85kg range.

There's still a lot about me that is statistically improbable, including body temperature. I'm sure it's all related, but I can't find a medical researcher who cares, so I have to do my own "research".

> Many doctors would be very interested in proving how diet can help disease, and doing so.

I would be happy to meet those doctors. In my experience, however, they turn into your standard everyday doctor somewhere between the 3rd year of med school and the end of their internship.

Stupidly tossing out a couple of thoughts, in spite of long experience telling me it will most likely not be appreciated. But I am having one of those days and bad habits die hard. Apologies in advance.

Celiac causes wheat and dairy intolerance. People with my disorder are at higher than normal risk for also having Celiac. An alternative med group I know of suggests that Celiac has a genetic component but is triggered by metal poisoning -- I mean having active symptoms is triggered by metal poisoning. Chelation makes some sufferers of Celiac asymptomatic. I have not done a formal chelation protocol but I have reason to believe I have reduced the metal load on my system. I tolerate wheat and dairy better than I used to, have improved appetite, and have shrunk dramatically. My hypothesis is that my genetic disorder involves misprocessing metals and thus involves increased vulnerability to metal poisoning.

FWIW: People with CF tend to run warm. I do not. I have a long history of being cold natured (including an abnormally low temp when not feverish), something which has improved somewhat with getting healthier. Given that CF is a salt wasting condition and salt changes the boiling and freezing points of water, it kind of makes sense to me that it appears to typically alter normal body temperature. If you wanted my advice, which you most likely don't, I would suggest you get tested for Atypical CF if you haven't been previously and look into the possibility of metal poisoning as a factor.

Congrats on your improved health. Best of luck. Apologies for my compulsive helpful streak. I am working on it. I'm just extremely stressed out today.

Peace. And thanks for contributing to the conversation.

> in spite of long experience telling me it will most likely not be appreciated.

Much appreciated. My approach to conversations is "hurt me with the truth, never comfort me with lies; tell me all you can, I'll filter it myself".

> I have a long history of being cold natured (including an abnormally low temp when not feverish),

I do too, actually - that's another thing no "expert" I consulted had anything to comment on (or has even shown interest in), even though this is surely an important marker.

> If you wanted my advice, which you most likely don't, I would suggest you get tested for Atypical CF if you haven't been previously and look into the possibility of metal poisoning as a factor.

I do want your advice. A quick google, however, did not find a reasonable reference for atypical CF, and since I don't have a sufficiently open minded doctor, I don't think that would work -- could you give more references about the definitions, what tests are involved, and if one can do them privately?

> Peace. And thanks for contributing to the conversation.

Thank you. And good luck!

You might try searching for the term "variant cystic fibrosis" as well. There is no hard and firm definition. It is a newish diagnosis which basically recognizes that some people suffer the same issues as classical CF but to a less severe degree, kind of like Asperger's and several other forms of "autism spectrum disorder" get recognized as a milder form of the problem known as classic Kanner's Syndrome (aka severe autism).

The most common test is a sweat chloride, which basically measures the saltiness of your sweat. Historically, a result below 40 was considered normal, above 80 was CF and the range in between was an undefined grey zone which is now recognized as a milder form of CF. My son and I both tested consistently at 41. Though I have heard some different number ranges discussed on some lists, so there may be some variables I am unaware of.

I am not sure how you can get one. Mine required referral but my ex was career military and the referral was necessary so insurance would pay a civilian facility for the services. It simply isn't done just anywhere. There are several techniques, all noninvasive.

Some nonscientific "tests" or indicators: Does your skin/sweat taste saltier than average? Do you get worse aquagenic wrinkling than most people (in other words, do you prune up badly in the bath)? Do you seem more prone than average to suffer shocks from static electricity? Those are all typical for CF.

Best of luck.

I did run into someone once on HN whose SO was doing nutritional research on my condition. So I hope it gets better. Unfortunately, the current state of the art for CF treatment in the US suggests a "high fat, high salt, high calorie" diet. This results in medical teams actively encouraging a junk food diet.

My oldest son also has CF. When he lost five pounds, his clinic treated it like a crisis and at their encouragement I put a big bowl of chocolates and other crap on the coffee table and encouraged him to snack. After he gained back about 2.5 pounds and his clinic got off our backs and quit sounding like they might report me to social services if he didn't gain weight to their satisfaction, we returned home and he promptly handed me the bowl and announced "We are never doing this again. I feel like crap."

We have since worked on "eating right", largely the opposite of the junk food diet currently advocated by CF teams. Ten years later, we are both drug free and the healthiest we have ever been. The hole in my left lung is gone. And so forth.

This article didn't say what I thought it would.

I thought it would be that most people have preconceived notions of what problems are important. But these notions don't necessarily correspond to reality. By definition, when you are trying to break new ground, you don't know what's important because no one has thought about it before.

In academia, and big companies, you see this a lot. The difficulty or impressiveness of a problem gets mistaken for its importance.

His example is that games like Doom led to higher power computing. I guess that's true, but I don't think we should have to justify things like making video games in terms of the benefit they'll bring to "noble pursuits" like curing cancer. Sometimes people just want to have fun and waste time.

But all in all I agree that people shouldn't prejudge what is important or not. This is often driven by fads. Doing random things is important because they lead you to unexpected places.

The importance of problems I work on, is an issue that hits over and over again while I work. I can't help but thinking of cures for cancer and heart diseases, while the product I work relates to entertainment. All the energy I invest could have been used for extending human life-time. I really like to imagine I can indirectly cure cancer with some nice methodology I invented, or a productivity tool I made. But its just seem to be better if humanity stop worrying about user experience, wearing ties and talking professional jargon; and start focusing on curing cancer and heart diseases.

What point would there be in living when everybody works on extending life and noone works on making life enjoyable?

I'm sorry, but I really find this detail particularly intriguing: "extending human life-time". Indeed. But what for, exactly?

I can't help but look at elder people and think it's a disservice to wire them to those machines, fix their hearts with what I'd call batteries and generally go to any extent as long as it "extends" life at any cost.

Perhaps it's simply related to the way I lead my life and the choices I make but I'd rather live 50 freaking years than a freaking 100.

Well, but isn't it hardwired in the nature of each living organism to survive at any cost and live as long as possible? Each creature, even the tiniest bug has some sort of defense mechanism built in, not to welcome others to kill it or eat it, but specifically to defend against such a behavior.

The difference between us and any other animals is that we use our brains in extremely wise way. We colonized the world and technically are standing on the top of animal tree. It would be only logical to use that brain to solve human's nature biggest issue: how to live longer, or forever.

I want me and my family to live forever, because that's how much I love them and love my life. I am not certain whats after death. If you don't believe in existence of any nonphysical creations like spirits, soul, hell or heaven, then nothing exist after death, nothing. Your brain falls apart into dust and since your brain is you and your world, your world ends.

Another reason to keep people living longer is because medicine is constantly pushing the envelope. There are TEDs videos of scientists literally printing human liver and other elements of body. Truly science-fiction stuff, yet real.

I think in 100 years from now, we will be immortal. Of course that causes the biggest challenges ever, like how to feed everyone, how to accommodate people, etc, but there is tremendous improvement in those sectors happening as well, so most likely we will be ready.

I understand your reasoning yet it doesn't make any sense to me. I hope I can live correctly and die before your hopes come true. Good luck though.

The article is built on the distinction between unimporant and important problems and yet it goes out of its way to avoid stating his opinion on what makes a problem important. He keeps putting the words important and unimportant in quotes.

Something may be important to someone but completely unimportant to someone else. Importance is subjective, so there's no such thing as important and unimportant problems. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill "everything is relative" statement (which are usually not very constructive) but I think that this is pertinent here, because nothing is important on its own, but it may be important to a person or a group of people, so talking about the importance of things without taking into account who they're important to doesn't make much sense.

He means important in the cultural sense. Someone defending, say anything in the bill of rights is likely doing something culturally important. Killing prostitutes was important to Jack the Ripper, but it's detrimental to civilization.

Is there anything in the article that leads you to believe he meant important in that sense? Cause I don't see it. He constantly puts important in quotation marks and really doesn't specify what he means by important. Take this paragraph:

For instance, GPU hardware was developed to run first-person shooters with increasingly fancier graphics. Today, it powers some of the largest high-performance computing clusters where “important” science is done.

Would you say that science aided by high-performance computing is automatically important in a cultural sense? What if that science is actually military research? Because I see developing weapons and other means of violence to be detrimental to civilization.

It worked for me. I've been blogging since 1999 (when it wasn't even called blogging) and even in the mid 2000s people asked me why I bothered. I wasn't really sure why at the time either..

.. but blogging led to me being discovered by an editor at Apress who asked me to write a book about Ruby (which I'd been blogging about). That led to a blog I created to promote the book that then became the most popular Ruby blog and was my main source of income for several years. I won't give the rest of the life story but it went on to getting funding for a startup, selling that startup, being invited to chair an O'Reilly conference, and more. All from that "unimportant" personal blog. So I totally buy into this idea!

Work on problems that are problems. Picking important problems misses the trees for the forest; picking unimportant problems misses the forest for the trees. Some people are more effective tackling larger issues like racism. Some people are more effective tackling interesting questions like, "How do we scale a microtransaction payment system for a social game?" Some people are more effective at what they enjoy doing. Some people are more effective when doing something that feels meaningful.

Work on a problem that (1) you feel you can solve, (2) you think is worth solving, and (3) will challenge you. That's important enough.

Working on unimportant things often leads to overlooked things, and that's gold. "the future" is more or less defined by its disagreements with the past about what is and is not important.

Hrmf. The second half is complaining about FAA regulations of avionics, which annoys me.

About a decade ago, I remember reading a fiction book about a pilot, who, among other things was unhappy that TCAS (radar system on a plane to keep it from flying into other planes) didn't communicate with the GPWS (radar system on a plane to keep it from flying into the ground) when telling the pilot how to avoid a mid-air collision.

The consequence is that TCAS could possibly tell a pilot to run right into a mountain, while trying to not run into another plane. This is, of course, bad.

The book harped on this at great length, and one of the many bad things it had to say about the FAA is that suffocatingly heavy regulation prevented manufacturers from making changes that could save lives.

I finish the book, all fired up, get on the internet, and discover that, hey, TCAS II does exactly what it should, and doesn't tell the pilot to fly into the ground. The problem was fixed, by the FAA, without needing to abolish the FAA. There was never any controlled flight into terrain crashes as a result of bad TCAS directives. I got needlessly angry for no reason at all.

Surely, you'll be more likely to solve big problems if you come in with the intent/desire to solve them, no? such as building the Atom Bomb, or sending a man to the Moon. We did those things deliberately.

This advice could be analogous to applying randomization to optimization problems.

Randomization can get you unstuck from the locally optimal trough you've found yourself in.

Every problem is important, if you care about it. Too often we make a distinction between "important" work like curing diseases and "unimportant" work like making games.

But people like games, both making them and playing them. You might not enjoy solving "important" problems, you might just want to make games and have fun. Focus on what interests you, not what society deems "important," and you'll be much happier.

Yep. So I think the more general advice is also simpler: work on problems you find interesting.

Sometimes the ones that seem small lead to big things (I got an IPO out of one such). Often - ouch! - the ones that initially seem like they will be Important turn out to be ho-hum. But regardless of ultimate Importance (however you choose to measure that), it is a RUSH every time you find an elegant solution.

That's why even as an 'old guy' I still love developing so much... even a relatively modest app provides daily doses of interesting sub-problems to crack.

Is the main point of this article, to work on unimportant problems as you can never know how important they may actually become, essentially the same as that of Steve Jobs in the Stanford commencement speech? E.g. at the time of of taking calligraphy classes, he could not know that this would majorly impact OS font handling? [www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA]

It seems the relevant quantity is whether

P(important outcome | work on unimportant project) > P(important outcome | work on important project)

I doubt it.

i wanna add to this: most startups that work are iterative. revolutionary ideas take too much to be accepted by consumers, only through iterative steps, could startups like dropbox, facebook, esp google, be where they are today. by being the next step up, and more. i'm working on this myself, on the failures that foursquare and other location based startups have failed. i hope this to be true :)

All those problems were considered important by somebody.

Good motivator.

The way you work is more important that what you work on. One can work on either important or unimportant problems and end up in the same place, if the motives and methods are good.

Richard Feynman explains:

"In his eccentric collection of autobiographical stories (see reference), Richard Feynman recounts: "I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! I went on to work out equations for wobbles. Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it… the whole business that I got the Nobel prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate." A replica of the Cornell plate is now part of an exhibit marking the centennial of the Nobel Prize."

Feynman didn't have a policy "work on unimportant problems" or "work on important problems." Rather, he worked on problems that interested him.

And if I recall, Feynman at this point was burnt out on the important problems. Thinking about unimportant problems, where he was essentially playing, is what finally led to the breakthrough. It's like me going for a walk to clear my head, except with him it's complex motion equations.

Surely here the issue is not "importance" but "interesting"?

I think the issue is not confusing importnant and interesting: it's hacking the relationship between your rain and your world. Important in this sense involves timelines, budgets, and the needs of others. Unimportant is whatever other people don't are about right now. It's a bit like the advice to grad students to work on what's unfashionable, unattractive, forgotten.

>he worked on problems that interested him

Yes, one can only engage with a problem that has personal relevance. Mostly people aren't engaged. They are notionally working on 'important problem X', but their real problem is how to please an authority figure or how to further a career. Which aren't interesting.

A study of history shows that objective progress is possible, so it follows that it must come about by lots of Feynman-like people working on their own apparently unimportant problems.

This can be explained by the way reality and our knowledge of it are structured. Solutions to problems typically have 'reach'. Thus in order to solve parochial problems people typically create fundamental theories which automatically apply to all sorts of other problems, including important ones.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch is a fascinating read which has a lot to say about this sort of thing.

Some of the best book recommendations I have ever gotten have come from random comments in HN. I will be adding this one to the queue.

Thanks.

"My most important advice here is stark and politically very incorrect: Don't give too much weight to the social importance of the issue; instead, do what captures your intellectual interest and creative imagination. This is not to deny the importance of paying attention to the real world. Nor is it to say that abstract theory is necessarily more valuable than applied work. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But I do believe that mere relevance of an issue will not guarantee good research unless you have a genuine drive to work on it. If not, leave it to someone else. Good work on an apparently unimportant problem will have more long-run value than mediocre work on one of greater intrinsic importance. And one's judgment of importance can always be wrong; concepts of relevance can change over time." - Feynman

The author really hasn't thought this through.

Here's an example of something unimportant: maybe Microsoft C, version 7, which was released in 1992, has a typo in a menu item that was never fixed. (The next version of the software was Microsoft Visual C++ version 1.0). True, nobody has used Microsoft C version 7 to compile a program in many years now, but - there you go. An unimportant problem.

That would be an example of an unimportant problem. Releasing a patch to fix the menu typo right in the binary would be an unimportant solution to an unimportant problem. Maybe if you take the time to release it, literally 0 people ever apply that patch from now until the end of time.

If you want to work on an "unimportant problem" fix bugs in software versions that were discontinued and which nobody used because of a quick migration to the next branch. Work on fixing Windows 2, maybe.

No, what the author really means is work on something very important, that doesn't evaluate as such to everyone, (or to the people you normally pay attention to). That, I can agree with.

You are arguing semantics. You say exactly the same thing as the author, but define "unimportant" differently. While it is important to be on the same page regarding to what we mean by the words we use if we want to have meaningful discussion, I think it's pretty obvious what the author meant by "unimportant". And it clearly isn't "absolutely meaningless", as you seem to imply.

He isn't implying "absolutely meaningless". That would be something like rewriting the entirety of Windows 7 in Brainfuck.

Which someone should totally do, just so that I can laugh once.

On the other hand, the author does not have to define "unimportant" that way.

Step 1: Define "unimportant" as "actually important"

Step 2: Write catchy title based on new definition, making it sounds controversial.

Step 3: Profit?

It is obvious what the author means by "unimportant" and they're very important things. Pure clickbait. It's like me writing an article, "work on the worst ideas you have". Care to click to find out what I mean by "worst"? Of course you do.

there's an argument to be made that if one does not have FU money in the bank, then one should work on whatever is most likely to end up with you reaching FU money, whether it's working on an important problem or an unimportant one. then, once you have FU money, and/or are otherwise financially "secure" (as you define it personaly), then, go take the big risks or tackle the harder things.