The difficulty of a problem, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem or landing on the moon, is itself an attractor, making it almost paradoxically MORE likely to be solved
This argument feels overly clever.
If I give you ten randomly selected scientific problems, and rank it by difficulty, are you saying that difficulty positively correlates with probability of it being solved over the next time period?
I’m saying the opposite—you can’t rank the difficulty of unsolved problems if you don’t know what’s required to solve them. That’s what yet-to-be-discovered means, you don’t know the missing bit, so you can’t compare.
This argument feels overly clever.
If I give you ten randomly selected scientific problems, and rank it by difficulty, are you saying that difficulty positively correlates with probability of it being solved over the next time period?
It is trivially self-defeating.
I’m saying the opposite—you can’t rank the difficulty of unsolved problems if you don’t know what’s required to solve them. That’s what yet-to-be-discovered means, you don’t know the missing bit, so you can’t compare.