Overlooked elephant

Idea from this post by Eliezer Yudkowsky, from the Sequences which I’m currently flicking through in slightly disorderly fashion.

why?

(See original post for context, click image for larger version.)

For myself, the usual curiosity-stopper is not so much “somebody else already knows”, as “somebody else already knows, and it involves hardcore mathematics”…

EDIT: I work in scientific research, and I recently solved a problem which I don’t think anyone’s solved before. It took me ages and the principal motivation was to prove a BIG IMPORTANT THEOREM.  After solving the problem, I found said theorem had been proven before I was born. D’oh. If I’d known the BIG IMPORTANT THEOREM had been proven, I don’t think I’d have bothered proving it; but I didn’t know, and my new proof has generated an interesting research project.

(But there’s an additional wrinkle here. In science there is a strong drive to find new stuff, as this is how science advances. The incentives –  status, grants, job security – depend on it, and no scientist likes the prospect of looking for new stuff and failing to find it… or of finding it, and then learning that, actually, this green elephant has been explained already, and (from the point of view of your job) you’ve been wasting your time. “Have the poets left in the garment a place for a patch, to be patched by me?” asked Antarah ibn Shaddad, speaking for many a researcher keeping a keen eye out for Interesting Problems accessible to their skill level.)

(Hello, Bonjour, grüß Gott, Здравствуйте etc. to all the peeps visiting from LW! This is primarily a sketch-blog; feel free to click around but I’m afraid there’s little cognitively-engaging fare here.)