[hypewatch]

I’ve never heard of the phrase “problem taste” until this post, so if Sam just coined that phrase, well done!

This is such an important issue in the startup world. The most common mistake that founders I’ve worked with make is that they focus on the wrong problem or even worse focus on too many problems.

Having good “problem taste” is critical for anyone who wants to start a successful company or publish breakthrough research.

[wenc]

I'm not sure if the phrase itself is novel. The idea of having good taste in problems is certainly not; and is very useful -- Richard Hamming (cited by Sam Altman) spends a great deal of time talking about how to choose problems [1].

The basic idea is that you need to work on an important problem. But an important problem isn't what you think (e.g. time-travel, teleportation, antigravity, etc.) -- instead it is a problem for which there exists an "attack".

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

[pouta]

What does "attack" in this context supposed to mean?

[wsxcde]

An attack is a reason to believe that you can solve the problem. I have no idea how'd I go about solving P=NP, but I did have some thoughts on provable security against transient execution attacks. Which is why I work on the latter but not the former.

[wenc]

A potential approach for tackling the problem that may work.