Fashionable Problems
Paul Graham observes that even the smartest people tend to work on fashionable problems, leaving much of the possibility space unexplored. He suggests looking at fields thought to be fully explored (essays, Lisp, venture funding) and finding new approaches. The best protection is genuinely loving what you do, so you'll persist even if you mistakenly think it's too marginal.
December 2019
I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things.
Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.
2019年12月
我在许多不同领域都观察到同一种模式：尽管有很多人在某个领域辛勤耕耘，但真正被探索的可能性空间只占很小一部分，因为他们全都集中在相似的问题上。
就连最聪明、最具想象力的人，在决定研究什么时也出奇地保守。那些在其他方面绝不追求时髦的人，也会被卷入对流行问题的研究。
If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is in fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding — you may notice a pattern here. If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area.
如果你想尝试研究非时尚问题，最好的去处之一就是那些人们认为已被彻底探索过的领域：随笔、Lisp、风险投资——你可能会注意到其中的规律。如果你能在一个庞大但看似饱和的领域找到新切入点，那么你发现的任何价值，都会因其巨大的覆盖面而被放大。
The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same things as everyone else may be to genuinely love what you're doing. Then you'll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter.
防止自己陷入与他人研究相同问题的最佳保护，可能就是真心热爱你正在做的事。这样，即使你犯了和别人同样的错误——认为它太边缘、不值得关注——你也会继续研究下去。