
Work on Unimportant Problems (2012) - luu
http://yosefk.com/blog/work-on-unimportant-problems.html
======
d_burfoot
Important problem: you have to raise lots of money, work with a huge team,
become a manager, fight with government regulators, do lots of marketing.

Unimportant problem: you spend your days coding, you work alone or with a
small team, you stay lean and don't worry too much about money, nobody can
override your architectural decisions, the government has never heard of you,
your product spreads via word-of-mouth from excited users.

~~~
aeternum
If your product is able to spread by word of mouth, then I'd argue you were
working on an important problem. People generally don't recommend things that
are not 'important' to them in some way.

~~~
ooobit2
Eric Barone's success with _Stardew Valley_ won this debate. Hell, Eric won
this debate by virtue. He didn't have to do _everything_ himself, but the very
fact he's limited anyone else working on the game has played a huge role in
every port of it continuing to sit in the top 10 for sales nearly four years
on from its release.

I love Eric. Like, _love_ him. He did something unimportant, but it meant
something to him. And over time, it began to mean something to other people.
Harvest Moon is not a massive selling franchise, so Stardew Valley was more
likely to flop on that basis alone. Then you add in that indie devs get little
exposure, no advertising, none of the connections that AAA companies have
access to. And then there's the fact the game wasn't broadly tested before
release. Eric had weeks of major bugs to patch right after release, and the
pressure of hundreds of thousands of people who'd just spent $15 on his game.
But maybe, just _maybe_ , the patience and gratitude he received for his
unimportant game was all the product of what he did and how he did it.

Any of the people could've said, "Just sell this to Valve. They'll fix it.
You're in over your head, dude." But instead, he got a lot of, "Saves still
corrupt. But make sure you get some sleep!" and a whole lot of "Can't get X to
work, so I'm going to do Y." People could've abandoned the game. They didn't.

I like this idea of unimportant things. I can't be the only person thinking
it's both absurd to spend time inventing a new way to keep shoes on our feet,
but also thinking it's absurd we're using a piece of string still but sending
billion-dollar machines to collect soil from nearby planets.

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ssalazar
Theres a decent point in here, but the examples given are far less convincing
than the author seems to think.

> C/Unix

developed to improve global telephony (important)

> the world of businessy/officy/enterprisey software (Windows, VB, Java, C#,
> ASP)

Perhaps "unimportant" to the author but most of these were aimed at
multimillionaire sales contracts or major consumer sales (important). Its a
categorical difference from a "small side project" (e.g. Python, Linux, etc.)
of a solo author, and not really beneficial to his point.

~~~
chubot
No, C and Unix were not developed to improve global telephony.

Part of the story is that Ken Thompson wanted to play a video game. This is
documented in a number of places

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_\(video_game\))

 _As a part of porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed his own
operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system._

Multics was closer to something "important", while Unix was something
unimportant and a great example of the principle laid out in the article.

Also, the first application of Unix beyond Bell Labs was typesetting. They
were using it to produce patent applications, saving the labor of many
secretaries. It was not used for telephony.

C was co-evolved with Unix as portable language to write an OS in.

\---

edit: For some color on how Bell Labs related to the rest of the org, I
recommend "The Idea Factory" by Gertner and Brian Kernighan's recent memoir on
Unix.

~~~
ssalazar
Gotcha, that’s an interesting history and the additional context definitely
illustrates the authors point.

------
parsoj
I think this is a basic tenant of research - you can't always expect a
specific outcome, sometimes you just have to explore curiosity and see what
turns up.

However the contrarian in me wants to call out a counter-point:

> Working on unimportant problems can create important side-effects.

If over-applied - this logic can essentially become the tech-investor
equivalent of trickle-down economics.

Who is to say that those areas that benefited from the side-effects of other
work wouldn't have benefitted even more from direct investment?

~~~
selectionbias
FYI, the word is 'tenet', a tenant is a person who lives in a particular
residence.

~~~
auonckl7384
This sounds a bit odd, but I've found your comment strangely informative and
made an account just to say so. Thank you.

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hinkley
> For instance, GPU hardware was developed to run first-person shooters with
> increasingly fancier graphics. Today, it powers some of the largest high-
> performance computing clusters where "important" science is done.

When graphics hardware was relatively new, a better graphics card could make
business applications like spreadsheets faster. It was practically a joke that
people who wanted a video card to play games would rationalize their purchase
by saying that they needed it for office applications.

The 'important work' surely benefited from the frivolous work that the
hardware was purchased to run, but it was funded for a very long time under
the guise of the important work.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I also think the GPU example is really flawed because ultimately it required
other people who were working on “important” problems to execute the work of
adapting GPU programming to their domains.

While “unimportant” work might lead to important developments, that only
happens because other people were doing the important work, and saw the
opportunity.

So at the end of the day if you still want these societal gains, you must be
advocating for working on “important” problems.

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jkhdigital
Nice article, but I got sidetracked by this line near the beginning:

> Office software arguably solves no important problem: as Berglas
> convincingly argues, office automation results not in increased
> productivity, but in increased complexity of rules and regulations.

I’ve observed this phenomenon in my personal life, where I use automation and
productivity tools to make my life more complex instead of reducing stress
(especially my finances).

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michaelbrave
I'm reminded of how the Inca had wheels on their toys but never put them into
practical use.

I kind of believe that similar things are happening now with video game tech,
GPU mostly happened due to gaming and now benefits a lot of other fields, game
engines are now being used in architectural, automotive and video production
pipelines. I think there is a lot more to come.

~~~
anateus
Useful to keep in mind that wheels confined to toys was due some combination
of a lack of animals that are good at pulling (llamas aren't great as that)
and metal use being primarily confined to decorative purposes (so durable
axles unlikely) :)

------
patcon
I often take the perspective (with my loosely anti-capitalist sympathies,
admittedly) that the mechanistic forces of capitalism aren't "bad", but simply
aren't curious about certain things in the world. The system is just a bit
incurious about some very human things, and just like an emotionally incurious
person might ask less questions of a peer, so too does our dominant system act
in some parts of human affairs.

I often tell friends that I enjoy working on neglected things that capitalism
isn't curious about. This domain is a whole subset of reality, which has
specific properties, especially in relation to network structure.

I would say that much of what's described in this post is to work on things
that capitalism isn't _yet_ curious about.

While this is neat to suggest, I believe that maybe some things in the world
(that are worth working on) might categorically be impossible for capitalism
to become curious about -- capitalism is only eager to explore domains where
value can [eventually] be skimmed by occupying a structural hole[1] (in other
words, a choke point) in the social and/or information graph.

But some innovations are such that they only manifest and take form within
resilient and redundant "clique"/"support" networks (in social capital theory
parlance [2]). These networks by their very defintion lack a clear choke-
point. To capture value there, someone must either (1) find the elusive but
existing choke-points or (2) distort the whole system into produce a
chokepoint. But this might be like capturing and compacting a cloud -- you
force a phase transition and no longer have the thing you started with.

Anyhow, thanks for the chance to reflect :)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network#Structural_hole...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network#Structural_holes)
[2]: p. 408, fig 8
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.652...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.652.5296&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

~~~
kanjus
This is an interesting hypothesis about capitalism (also seems to go against
“capitalist realism” theory). Can you give a few examples of what the areas
that capitalism cannot get curious about are? What would be the common
characteristics?

------
dang
They had them back then, too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088214)

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GoodD0ctor
Love it!

