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Wei_Dai comments on Are Interesting Problems Useful? - Less Wrong Discussion
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My hypothesis is that what we find interesting is largely the result of subconscious, heuristic (i.e., intuitive) optimization for status, and so interesting problems are useful to the extent that such intuitions are accurate, and the extent that we as a society reward the discoverers of useful ideas with status.
From an individual perspective, part of this problem is an instance of the more general problem of how to improve our intuitions and when to override (or combine) them with explicit reasoning, which I think is a very interesting (and useful!) one. (The post takes a more social perspective, which of course is also very interesting.)
However, one way of getting status is by proving that one has enough to spare to put resources into apparently useless activities.
I don't have a good theory for why some types of uselessness are more likely to lead to status than others, though perhaps it has something to do with the production of supernormal stimuli.