[asdf_snar]

It's interesting to complement the last point, "Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems", with two of Hamming's [0] points:

> When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go.

but also

> If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

[0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf

[eli_gottlieb]

>And another thing: Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems. You should multiply the importance of the problem by the probability that you’ll solve it and maximize that product.

In my experience, there's actually a neat little trick for doing this: be interdisciplinary. What one discipline considers a grand and fundamental problem may be, from the perspective of another discipline, much more narrowly-defined and tractable. Attempting to accommodate many disciplinary points of view on a problem gives you more independent experimental evidence to draw on, narrowing down the range of possible models or theories you need to investigate in depth.

[Fomite]

I'd suggest that "grandest and most fundamental" and "important", while correlated, are not the same thing.

[rsfern]

Hamming specifically defines important as both high impact and high tractability in this essay, so I generally think he would have agreed with you