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 no

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.