And a response that brings up another important point is simply that everyday language is said without precision. When someone claims that their problem isn't important, they don't mean that it has zero importance, and when they say it's not going to lead to something important, they aren't really claiming that it has a zero chance of leading to anything important. Indeed, they aren't even claiming aht the expected value of it is low--imagine they are working on something which, by contributing to general knowledge, increases the odds of solving each of 2000 problems by 0.1% each, Nobody in their right mind would claim that that is an important problem, yet it increases the expected number of important problems that are solved by more than 1.