What Are the Important Problems?
Richard Hamming had a habit, recounted in Vivek’s essay How to Be Good at Research, that made him unpopular at lunch. He would ask colleagues what the important problems in their field were — and then ask why they were not working on them. It is an uncomfortable question precisely because it is a good one.
Most of us never really choose our problems; we absorb them. From an advisor, from the lab’s last big announcement, from the week’s most quote-tweeted paper. The trouble with an absorbed problem, the essay notes, is that you hold the conclusion without the reasoning. You know a group cares about a direction, but not why, not what they expect to find, not what would make them abandon it. So when they pivot, you find out a year too late. And a fashionable problem comes with a second tax: you are racing a thousand people who started earlier with more compute.
There is a better-feeling alternative the essay credits to John Schulman: instead of mining the literature for an improvement, pick an outcome you want to exist and reason backward to the experiments that would create it. The claim is that working backward “manufactures originality” — a goal you genuinely care about drags you into territory no survey has mapped.
Edsger Dijkstra arrived at the same place from the other direction. One of his three golden rules of research: never tackle a problem you can be fairly sure will be solved anyway by others at least as well-equipped as you. Don’t compete; when in doubt, abstain.
Hamming, Schulman, Dijkstra — three temperaments, one instruction. Spend less effort answering questions and more choosing which to ask. The cost of a wrong answer is a few weeks. The cost of the wrong question is a career running in place.
References
- Vivek (@itsreallyvivek). How to Be Good at Research. X — for the Hamming and Schulman anecdotes.
- Dijkstra, E. W. EWD637: The three golden rules for successful scientific research.