I've heard many people quote Hamming about "work only on important problems," but fewer seem to notice the caveat he has in the talk: "We didn't work on (1) ti

I've heard many people quote Hamming about "work only on important problems," but fewer seem to notice the caveat he has in the talk: "We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack." This makes the notion of "important problem" specific to you. In other words, dependent on your particular skills and interests, not on some external measure of worth. So even if you are working on something more "modest," say, what scat tells us about migration patterns of bobcats, that still counts as an "important problem" since you have an attack and can solve it. Under this reading, Hamming's advice is close to the other famous nugget, "do only what only you can do" (Dijkstra). That is never the way I see it being used in conversation, however. Usually I see it in the context of encouraging people to work on some Big Problem that may not be a good fit for their skills and interest -- which is one of the quickest ways to encourage failure.