Comment by pavlov
10 years ago
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.
An anecdotal counterpoint would be that Einstein was working as a patent examiner in 1905, his "annus mirabilis"... (Of course it's not very useful to generalise Einstein's career.)
Be careful to differentiate working on important problems and being paid to work on important problems. I've heard (though I can't find any sources) that one of the reasons Einstein took the job at the patent office was because it was such a low effort job that he had time to work on his more important ideas.
Also note that some of the major breakthroughs in the past decade or two have been by mathematicians and scientists that are outside of the "system" (Grigori Perelman, Yitang Zhang (though maybe he's not as much of an outsider)). Maybe a bit outdated but Riemann and Galois also fall into that category.
Yes, I was basically trying to say the same thing as you.
The quote mentioned Bell Labs, but you don't have to be at a high-end research lab to work on important problems.
I thought that the point the grandparent is highlighting is that "important work" is not defined by what other people think is important, but by the fact that you have a unique angle of attack that suddenly makes a previously-unsolved problem tractable. Einstein had a unique angle of attack for all 4 of his annus mirabilis papers, and the photoelectric effect, Michelson-Morley, and Brownian motion were all known to be important unsolved paradoxes in the physics of the day.
> An anecdotal counterpoint would be that Einstein was working as a patent examiner in 1905, his "annus mirabilis"...
Presumably he worked on big physics problems while also performing his job as patent examiner.