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Dr_Manhattan comments on Are Interesting Problems Useful? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Two properties of interesting problems seemingly overlooked by the above:
1) Interesting problems are Fun
2) Interesting problems motivate, which is closer to the topic of this post. I would not underestimate this motivation, after reading one of the participants on the Manhattan project say something to the extent that "we had to work on the bomb because it was so cool"
I am responding to the particular claim that interesting problems are important because they are likely to be useful in unpredictable ways.
It seems plausible to me that funness could be a mechanism driving usefulness, simply because it would be more motivating and hence would simply be more likely to cause things to get done well.
Yes, I was thinking the same. In cases where there is no order-of-magnitude differences in utility funness might be a good heuristic, since the fun things are more likely to get done.
I think in reality the difference in utility ranges across many orders of magnitude, whereas funness does not change nearly as much. I used to be convinced that research outside of pure math/CS would be incredibly boring, but it turns out that work in basically any field that is trying to solve problems we don't know how to solve is quite fun. Do I think that machine learning is more interesting than synthetic biology? Yes, but not enough that if Paul convinced me that synthetic biology research was more useful at the margins I wouldn't switch.