It’s not about choosing ‘important’ problem, it’s about choosing solvable important problem, and a method of solving it, and intelligence helps, while unintelligent people just pick some idea out of science fiction or something, and can’t imagine that some people can do better.
Thanks. He says it much more better than I could. He speaks of importance of small problems.
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go.
Speaking of which, one thing geniuses do is generate the right problems for themselves, not just choose from already formulated.
Science fiction is full of artificial minds, good and evil. It has minds improving themselves, and a plenty of Frankensteins of all kinds. It doesn’t have things like ‘a very efficient universal algorithm that given mathematical description of a system and constraints finds values for free parameters that meet constraints’, because it is not a plot device. Fiction does not have wolfram alpha in 2010. It has Hal in 2000 . Fiction shuns merely useful in favor of interesting. I would be very surprised if the solution would be among the fictional set. The fictional set is as good place to look in as any, yes, but it is small. edit: On second thought, what I mean is that it would be very bad to be either inspired or ‘de-spired’ by fiction to any significant extent.
Richard Hamming also makes this point.
Thanks. He says it much more better than I could. He speaks of importance of small problems.
Speaking of which, one thing geniuses do is generate the right problems for themselves, not just choose from already formulated.
Science fiction is full of artificial minds, good and evil. It has minds improving themselves, and a plenty of Frankensteins of all kinds. It doesn’t have things like ‘a very efficient universal algorithm that given mathematical description of a system and constraints finds values for free parameters that meet constraints’, because it is not a plot device. Fiction does not have wolfram alpha in 2010. It has Hal in 2000 . Fiction shuns merely useful in favor of interesting. I would be very surprised if the solution would be among the fictional set. The fictional set is as good place to look in as any, yes, but it is small. edit: On second thought, what I mean is that it would be very bad to be either inspired or ‘de-spired’ by fiction to any significant extent.
Yes: Humans think in stories but there are far far more concepts that do not make good story than do make it.