Your premises seem strange to me – questions are either important and already worked on, or not important? Already-worked-on-questions don’t need answers? Both of these seem false.
If an expert somewhere knows the answer to something, I still often need to know the answer myself (because it’s a piece of a broader puzzle that I care about, which the expert doesn’t necessarily care about). I still need someone to go find the answer, distill it, and to help put it into a new context.
The LW community historically has tackled questions that were important, and that few other people were working on (in particular related to human rationality, AI alignment and effective altruism)
Your premises seem strange to me – questions are either important and already worked on, or not important? Already-worked-on-questions don’t need answers? Both of these seem false.
If an expert somewhere knows the answer to something, I still often need to know the answer myself (because it’s a piece of a broader puzzle that I care about, which the expert doesn’t necessarily care about). I still need someone to go find the answer, distill it, and to help put it into a new context.
The LW community historically has tackled questions that were important, and that few other people were working on (in particular related to human rationality, AI alignment and effective altruism)