Fashionable Problems - Moving Beyond the Trend of Focusing on Fashionable Problems

Описание: "This article written by Paul Graham in 2019 discusses a pattern where many people are working on similar problems, leading to very few possibilities being discovered in various fields. It suggests that people who are drawn to working on fashionable problems could actually focus on less popular but valuable topics. It points out that even if a field is thought to be fully explored, finding a new approach will increase the value of what is discovered.

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Fashionable Problems (Moving Beyond the Trend of Focusing on Fashionable Problems)

December 2019

I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things.

Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.

If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is in fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding you may notice a pattern here. If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area.

The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same things as everyone else may be to genuinely love what you're doing. Then you'll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter.

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Relevant Keywords: exploring unfashionable problems, innovation in fully explored fields, value of unique approaches, passion in work, avoiding fashionable problems, creativity in explored fields, new approaches in old fields, importance of genuine interest in work, working on marginal problems."

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Episode 47
November 12, 2023

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