[Cryptography] "Public Accountability vs. Secret Laws: Can They Coexist?"

[R0b0t1]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 12:02 AM, Peter Gutmann
<pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> Ryan Carboni <ryacko at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>It is disappointing that papers exist where the authors lack common sense
>
> It's not a lack of common sense, it's what you need to do to get a paper
> published.  If you have a neat idea you can't just publish it because it's
> a neat idea, you have to have some problem for it to solve.  So you invent
> a problem and then publish your idea as the solution to it [0]
>

I've not generally seen this be the case in mathematics. A lot of
subfields do not have any direct application. You can formulate
solutions like "find X in Y better than Z" but maybe X and Y haven't
been linked to any physical phenomena.

It's better if you *can* get someone to care by proposing it is useful
for something, but I can understand parent's desire to avoid frivolous
justification.