Richard Hamming was a researcher at Bell Labs who went around asking other researchers “What is the most important problem in your field?” and then “Why aren’t you working on it?” (this made him surprisingly unpopular).
I wonder what would be his reaction to an answer like this: “The most important problem is X. It is quite difficult problem, because the easier important problems are already solved. The reason I am not working on it is because there is a chance I wouldn’t make any visible progress in the following months, and then I could get fired. In which case I would need to find another job, and probably wouldn’t be able to work on important problems at all.”
I wonder what would be his reaction to an answer like this: “The most important problem is X. It is quite difficult problem, because the easier important problems are already solved. The reason I am not working on it is because there is a chance I wouldn’t make any visible progress in the following months, and then I could get fired. In which case I would need to find another job, and probably wouldn’t be able to work on important problems at all.”