Work on Unimportant Problems (2012)

I often take the perspective (with my loosely anti-capitalist sympathies, admittedly) that the mechanistic forces of capitalism aren't "bad", but simply aren't curious about certain things in the world. The system is just a bit incurious about some very human things, and just like an emotionally incurious person might ask less questions of a peer, so too does our dominant system act in some parts of human affairs.

I often tell friends that I enjoy working on neglected things that capitalism isn't curious about. This domain is a whole subset of reality, which has specific properties, especially in relation to network structure.

I would say that much of what's described in this post is to work on things that capitalism isn't _yet_ curious about.

While this is neat to suggest, I believe that maybe some things in the world (that are worth working on) might categorically be impossible for capitalism to become curious about -- capitalism is only eager to explore domains where value can [eventually] be skimmed by occupying a structural hole[1] (in other words, a choke point) in the social and/or information graph.

But some innovations are such that they only manifest and take form within resilient and redundant "clique"/"support" networks (in social capital theory parlance [2]). These networks by their very defintion lack a clear choke-point. To capture value there, someone must either (1) find the elusive but existing choke-points or (2) distort the whole system into produce a chokepoint. But this might be like capturing and compacting a cloud -- you force a phase transition and no longer have the thing you started with.

Anyhow, thanks for the chance to reflect :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network#Structural_hole... [2]: p. 408, fig 8 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.652...