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Thank you for this essay. I understand that it's not, as some have already pointed out, particularly disinterested, but it set me to thinking, which is enough for me. This essay calls for a return to hard problems. The "problem" with hard problems isn't that they're hard. That's actually exactly what we need about them. It the unyielding character of hard problems which makes them worth dedicating ourselves to. The greatest difficulty is not solving the problem (which isn't even strictly necessary to benefit from the investigation), but rather, in giving ourselves to the problem in the first place. How can we choose a problem when there are so many possibilities and we have so little foresight? If we lived in a vacuum, the choice would be impossible or arbitrary. Luckily, our lives are not vacuums. The "real problems" (the things that matter to us, which come into our lives whether we like it or not, and generate actual experiences of significance) provide a point of departure. Real problems aren't technological in nature, but that doesn't mean they don't lead the way towards challenging technical projects. The space race didn't start as an engineering problem. It was the result of the longing of a people, of their hope and anxiety for the future. But as a result of that longing, of that fear and excitement, a lot of smart people dedicated themselves to hard technical problems and produced a huge array of breakthroughs. The trick, then, is to remain attentive to the problems around us, rather than giving into the temptation to ignore or adapt to them. In order to refocus ourselves on the hard problems, it helps to acknowledge that they are what we want -- that we aren't really satisfied with a day's salary and that we want to push forward towards a life's work. Wouldn't everyone prefer to work on something substantial, on a 'hard problem' for the sake of a 'real problem'? I think so, but we often don't know where to start. Can technology help us get started? I don't think "a Facebook" or "a Wikipedia" for hard problems is the answer, although either might help. In order to maintain the kind of excitement and reciprocal encouragement necessary to sustain a culture of hard-problem-solving, you need to put smart people who respect each other into the same physical space. You need to make hard- and real-problem-solving a lifestyle in order to overcome the creeping inertia of the trivial. This is why universities retain their relevance. They're a concentrated mix of intelligence, experience, and youthful idealism. They contain lots of people who think about "hard problems" (science, engineering) and "real problems" (philosophy, history, social thought). Universities have their own issues, of course. They suffer from institutional pressures that have more in common with the banalities of commerce and politics than with any dedicated enthusiasm. Historically they have been very successful, but it may be that the next wave of innovation will come from a less traditional source, perhaps from the real-life communities that sprout up around virtual groups like this one. |