<story><title>Work on unimportant problems</title><url>http://www.yosefk.com/blog/work-on-unimportant-problems.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>feral</author><text>The work we now consider &apos;important&apos; is the work that has, according to our best guess, the highest likelihood of solving important problems in future.&lt;p&gt;Our best guess may be wrong, as the future is hard to predict. But the future is not so unpredictable that we should stop thinking about where best to direct our efforts.&lt;p&gt;Maybe someone working on Farmville will cause an important advance, as an unpredictable side effect. We can&apos;t rule that out. Even a job that seems &apos;unimportant&apos; can have beneficial and unpredictable windfalls, and that&apos;s wonderful.&lt;p&gt;But we should still try and direct our efforts as best we can, and work on problems that we think are important.&lt;p&gt;That seemingly trivial pursuits sometimes bear fruit, doesn&apos;t mean that all pursuits are equally worthwhile.</text></comment>
<story><title>Work on unimportant problems</title><url>http://www.yosefk.com/blog/work-on-unimportant-problems.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>niels_olson</author><text>I&apos;m a doc, teaching myself python specifically because it&apos;s painfully obvious that we (docs) need more and more programming skill to do real medical research. My current project is shaping up to be a multi-year effort to hunt cancer (tissue micro-arrays to assess novel antigens). So this article threw me for a loop in the first sentence.&lt;p&gt;The article is still relevant though, in my mind. There&apos;s no external motivation to write a parser. But how else could one reasonably build a research database? I suppose someone could manually go through the clinical database and transfer info into a research database for 500 patients. But what about the next 10 studies of 500 patients? It seems unimportant in the near term, but in the long-term having someone on the project who can talk to the computer is going to make or break it.</text></comment>