Comment by grabbalacious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grabbalacious | Hacker News Reader

>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.

A note here: when it comes to discovery, motivation is vastly more important than competence and every disciplined effort will lead to greater understanding or a serendipitous result of some kind.

On the other hand, nobody can know the probability that he'll solve a problem.

Yet important problems can be reliably identified. What I'm trying to point out is that there's nothing wrong with going after the big ones.

>But I’m hopeful this log-jam will be temporary, and that new opportunities are opening up for aspiring scientists.

To put this in context he has also stated he thinks that civilisation has only a 50% chance of surviving this century. Another reason for tackling big problems IMO.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/185583.Our_Final_Hour

>he has also stated he thinks that civilisation has only a 50% chance of surviving this century.

I can't understand this line of thinking.

Human civilization has been around for ~10,000 years, and in the past two centuries nearly every metric related to human well-being has improved (see The Rational Optimist or Enlightenment Now).

And this isn't coming at the expense of the natural world, which is better protected as the world gets more technologically advanced and wealthier (More From Less by Andrew McAfee and numerous other sources).

Why would all of this reverse so rapidly in the next 80 years?

> Human civilization has been around for ~10,000 years

There have been many civilisations in that time period, almost all of which have vanished. Why should this one be different?

It takes a very small number of people willing to use nuclear weapons for the bad side of the prediction to come true

And 80 years is a long time for mad people to come to power - if our current worldwide political landscape is any indication, democracy may be a trigger rather than a deterrent for nuclear destruction, in the sense that it may select for progressively more extremist leaders

Even if we can derive 'more from less', the massive absolute amount that we are deriving is large enough to have significant negative ramifications, such as global heating and all that implies.

On top of that, the number of nations armed with nuclear weapons capable of igniting a conflict that could wipe out the majority of civilization in weeks continues to grow. That's certainly not a context that has been present for thousands of years; rather less than 80.

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