Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Value of Ideas

dilbert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: The Value of Ideas

#81

Post by Torotopo »

Is Hamlet an idea? It has certainly been executed famously in a number of different ways. Does a play not exist until it's produced?

What's the idea behind the Mona Lisa?

Of course, there's that whole sticky wicket of Platonic forms , in which the object (the execution of the idea) is just a flawed imitation of the true idea.

(But I hate to sidetrack the thread into a debate over materialism -- although I think the mathematics point was spot on...)

Of course, in reality, Scott was probably a little frustrated that some fans were shooting down a movie before they had ANY IDEA whatsoever about it -- and here the rest of us spend our time debating his idea about their lack of an idea. If ideas are worthless, what are ideas about ideas?

Re: The Value of Ideas

#82

Post by michael_nielsen »

jacobolus wrote: post #73
michael_nielsen wrote: post #42

What a curious post. Pure mathematics is nothing but ideas - often very deep ones that very few people are capable of originating. If you take Adams literally, then mathematics is worthless. Is the idea of the Ricci flow, which Perelman used to prove the Poincare conjecture, really useless? The problem Adams is addressing, so far as I can see, is that many people think trivial, easy-to-have ideas are somehow valuable…

That’s an absurd comparison. Generating mathematical conjectures and then proving them takes decades of preparation and careful study and analysis of a difficult problem. Generating a movie plot idea at the level Adams is talking about takes, with no preparation, a few minutes and a dinner napkin. The equivalent kind of “idea” in mathematics might be “I’m going to understand and model heat dispersion in a block of me…

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the idea for Ricci flow or PageRank was generated with a dinner napkin. Quite literally, I once used a napkin to explain the Ricci flow to a mathematician, and I've seen dozens of papers start that way, including a few of my own. Such ideas gain value from their scarcity, not from some immense complexity.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#83

Post by blizkreeg »

mynameishere wrote: post #28

Here's the world's worst opinion on movie making: here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic. Can anybody name even a single, solitary reason--even one --why the story of the Titanic could be considered anything other than a fantastic idea for a movie? The only thing I can come up with is "It's been done (successfully) too many times already", but that actually disproves the general assertion. I mean--it's up…

I loved the movie but I'll take a shot. Some possible reasons:

1. A story about a sinking ship could be a rather bleak, depressing watch. 2. So, the maiden voyage of a ship turned out bad because it hit an iceberg. There was no war element, nothing. Have ships sunk due to icebergs before? Sure. 3. A movie about Titanic could be a better candidate for a documentary, not a hollywood drama.

I could pass.

It was James Cameron's execution (including the Jack/Rose love angle, the human emotion, the SFX) that made the movie into the gigantic hit it turned out to become. The idea was alright, at best.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#84

Post by jacobolus »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #82
jacobolus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an absurd comparison. Generating mathematical conjectures and then proving them takes decades of preparation and careful study and analysis of a difficult problem. Generating a movie plot idea at the level Adams is talking about takes, with no preparation, a few minutes and a dinner napkin. The equivalent kind of “idea” in mathematics might be “I’m going to understand and model heat dispersion in a block of me…

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the idea for Ricci flow or PageRank was generated with a dinner napkin. Quite literally, I once used a napkin to explain the Ricci flow to a mathematician, and I've seen dozens of papers start that way, including a few of my own. Such ideas gain value from their scarcity, not from some immense complexity.

Okay, but you wouldn’t come up with PageRank until you’d thought about searching and sorting big quantities of data for some time. If you were just trying to sort 10 numbers, you wouldn’t come up with PageRank. It took a “search the whole web” scale problem for the ideas about how to accomplish it to start bubbling up to the surface. (Probably a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.)

Ricci flow isn’t even meaningful until you’ve developed up differential geometry – not exactly an afternoon stroll for a layman.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#85

Post by pigbucket »

statictype wrote: post #25

On a tangent: Is XKCD really the most-viewed comic on the internet? I wonder what people like Scott Adams thinks of it or whether they even get it. He understands technology but XKCD is geeky beyond that.

Scott could be a Supergeek for all I know, but XKCD is typically aimed at the lower rungs of the geek ladder. Even so I think it comes up with brilliant ideas all the time, and succeeds despite the relatively mediocre execution. (You have to use the words 'idea' and 'execution' differently from Scott to see it that way, but that's part of the problem with an ill-defined opposition like idea/execution)

Re: The Value of Ideas

#86

Post by smithbits »

There seems to be a bit of a strawman argument going on here. When people share "their opinions on whether it was a good idea to create a Dilbert movie" there's a fair number of assumptions tied up in there. It sounds the same as the question "Can Hollywood make a successful movie out of the characters created by Scott Adams?" Could the Hollywood studio system of the 1950's have made Easy Rider? No, of course not. Adams makes some interesting and fairly uncontroversial points about execution, but seems to do so on the back of a misunderstanding. There aren't that many movies that Hollywood can make with Dilbert, and most of them aren't worth watching.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#87

Post by michael_nielsen »

jacobolus wrote: post #84
michael_nielsen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the idea for Ricci flow or PageRank was generated with a dinner napkin. Quite literally, I once used a napkin to explain the Ricci flow to a mathematician, and I've seen dozens of papers start that way, including a few of my own. Such ideas gain value from their scarcity, not from some immense complexity.

Okay, but you wouldn’t come up with PageRank until you’d thought about searching and sorting big quantities of data for some time. If you were just trying to sort 10 numbers, you wouldn’t come up with PageRank. It took a “search the whole web” scale problem for the ideas about how to accomplish it to start bubbling up to the surface. (Probably a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.) Ricci flow isn’t ev…

I completely agree. My original point was that valuable ideas are very difficult to have, and thus scarce. That's why Ricci flow and PageRank are valuable, while "let's build a social network to do X", for some choice of X, is not. Difficult-to-have and can-write-on-a-napkin are not mutually exclusive, of course!

Re: The Value of Ideas

#88

Post by jacobolus »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #87
jacobolus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but you wouldn’t come up with PageRank until you’d thought about searching and sorting big quantities of data for some time. If you were just trying to sort 10 numbers, you wouldn’t come up with PageRank. It took a “search the whole web” scale problem for the ideas about how to accomplish it to start bubbling up to the surface. (Probably a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.) Ricci flow isn’t ev…

I completely agree. My original point was that valuable ideas are very difficult to have, and thus scarce. That's why Ricci flow and PageRank are valuable, while "let's build a social network to do X", for some choice of X, is not. Difficult-to-have and can-write-on-a-napkin are not mutually exclusive, of course!

You’re right. The difference is just one of definitions. What you call “valuable ideas” are what I call “solutions to really hard problems, developed after years, decades, or sometimes centuries of dedicated work.” What Adams calls “ideas” (e.g. for movie plots) are a completely different animal.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#89

Post by philwelch »

jamesbritt wrote: post #56

"For example, here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic." Hmm, expect that doesn't strike me as an idea for a movie so much as an idea for an idea for a movie. An idea may be worthless if it is little more than a potential trigger word or some vague imagery. It can be valuable if it in turn prompts a better, more substantial idea. It seems that when people say that execution is everything, part of "execution…

This is a Hollywood/James Cameron extravaganza--the mediocre love story and CGI are just assumed. "Titanic" is, in fact, the complete and full idea behind that movie.

Michael Bay tried the same thing with Pearl Harbor, but his execution was very sub-Cameron. Also, there's nothing romantic about the Japanese bombing a fleet in port. The Titanic is probably the best disaster you could do this with. There's still the Hindenberg, but the target audience for these types of movies would get distracted and confused by all the swastikas. So "Titanic" wasn't that bad an idea after all.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#90

Post by infinite8s »

timwiseman wrote: post #77
gsk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. An idea must still have some sort of execution, no? In mathematics, I would have thought that proof is the execution of a purely mathematical idea. Obviously, I do agree with you that some ideas are precious (to take a non-mathematical example, the idea of Freedom). Adams seems to have only had utilitarian ideas in mind. His post didn't strike me as curious, however. I did not expect him to discuss pure…

You bring up an interesting topic. Is the idea of Freedom valuable with no execution? Freedom itself is almost priceless. I am well aware that the freedoms I enjoy now was bought with the blood of many who went before me. But that was the very costly execution that made freedom a reality. Is the idea, without tht execution to create freedome itself, of great value?

I believe it has great value if it inspires people to execute it.
Post reply on HN