[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.