[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?

[edw]

Meaning and purpose are not things that you find in work; they are things that you make. As a CTO in a small adtech company, my standard pitch to hungry young talent went something like this: You're not going to be curing cancer or putting people on Mars, and we don't have daily catered lunches or a foosball table, but I will give you A) more responsibility than you would have elsewhere, B) more opportunity to make an out-size contribution to the company, C) more freedom to choose the tools and methods you want to use, and D) lots of data to play with. And then I would point out people who honed their crafts and made money in adtech and then went on to work on curing cancer, sending people to Mars, etc.

I am reminded of a story about a janitor. Being a janitor doesn't seem like an obviously meaningful and fulfilling job, but if you work as a janitor to provide for your daughter so she can go to college, then that job indeed can be profoundly meaningful.

[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.