[drek]

The article is built on the distinction between unimporant and important problems and yet it goes out of its way to avoid stating his opinion on what makes a problem important. He keeps putting the words important and unimportant in quotes.

Something may be important to someone but completely unimportant to someone else. Importance is subjective, so there's no such thing as important and unimportant problems. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill "everything is relative" statement (which are usually not very constructive) but I think that this is pertinent here, because nothing is important on its own, but it may be important to a person or a group of people, so talking about the importance of things without taking into account who they're important to doesn't make much sense.

[jfoutz]

He means important in the cultural sense. Someone defending, say anything in the bill of rights is likely doing something culturally important. Killing prostitutes was important to Jack the Ripper, but it's detrimental to civilization.

[drek]

Is there anything in the article that leads you to believe he meant important in that sense? Cause I don't see it. He constantly puts important in quotation marks and really doesn't specify what he means by important. Take this paragraph:

For instance, GPU hardware was developed to run first-person shooters with increasingly fancier graphics. Today, it powers some of the largest high-performance computing clusters where “important” science is done.

Would you say that science aided by high-performance computing is automatically important in a cultural sense? What if that science is actually military research? Because I see developing weapons and other means of violence to be detrimental to civilization.