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I wonder if there's a bigger trend here. What stood out for me was this response: I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I don’t care whether th
by read 13y ago
I wonder if there's a bigger trend here. What stood out for me was this response:
I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I
don’t care whether they’re important or not, and so I’m
definitely not obsessed with solving some big mystery.
It suggests working on interesting problems isn't only rewarding but almost a precondition for working on important problems. As if you should be actively trying not to pick important problems.
- rwallace 13y agoThat is something one would like to believe, but honestly I think it's only true if one's taste for interesting problems happens to be very well tuned for finding important problems. Dyson's is, but I think he's in a very small minority.
- read 13y agoIf that's true, it suggests taste for interesting problems might be a different kind of taste (is there a difference between taste for problems and taste for solutions?) Either way it begs the question: how do you cultivate taste for interesting problems? From his Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson His friend, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, said: "A favorite word of Freeman's about doing science and being creative is the word 'subversive'. He feels it's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he's done that all his life."
- rwallace 13y agoMaybe so, though I don't know how to cultivate taste for interesting problems or even whether it's possible per se. All I ever managed to do was train myself to explicitly focus on important problems.
- read 13y agoCan I ask you how you trained yourself to do this? Is there a trick that helps focus on important problems?
- rwallace 13y agoI find the key is, using the metaphor of the tech tree, to distinguish between branches (inventions which lead to other things) and leaves (which don't, at least not in a relevant timescale) and - this is the hard part - to ruthlessly apply the rule only work on branches. It's easy to see that things like video games, artificial life and fart "apps" are leaves and we shouldn't spend time working on them. It gets painful when we apply the rules to things we value more highly. Astronomy, particle physics, space flight, fusion power: these are all noble pursuits, at least the first two or three were branches in the past, by rights they should all be branches today. But they're not. They're leaves. That's the cold fact of the matter, and the world has to be dealt with as it is, not as it should be.