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The Value of Ideas

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Re: The Value of Ideas

#61

Post by duhprey »

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…

Respectfully (very respectfully, because your book still haunts my shelf like a specter of how little I understood what was happening to my brain when I took Quantum Computation...) I disagree. At least in part.

The ideas you point out are not at all easy to have in the first place, they also, I think, required proper execution to bring them to fruition.

Now, Adams is speaking much more to, I think, artistic creativity than mathematical creativity, but that first blush of an idea which starts with "What if I..." is the same and requires a carefully executed (but wildly different) follow through.

Imagine the scenario where some guy, say Joe, said to Turing, "What if a machine did it?" to which Alan goes through the effort of building the formalization of the machine. But Joe comes back to say "Well, that was my idea."

To come back to my partial agreement. In retrospect, people looking back and may tend to think "well I could have thought of that." And yet the necessary background to effectively wade through the ideas that rage through ones head as he thinks about a problem is non-trivial.

Perhaps that's true of either process. When a writer takes what appears to be a really lame idea and says "I can make that work" he or she has probably already, automatically, in the back of his or her head taken a few steps imagining how it would execute.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#62

Post by [deleted] »

timf wrote: post #11

Saying ideas are "worthless" is a hyperbolic way to put things. Why can't people say "an idea's relative importance is not as big as many people think." I think Derek Sivers puts it nicely, it is a multiplier (but yes you need to execute in the first place): http://sivers.org/multiply

[deleted]

Re: The Value of Ideas

#63

Post by crystalis »

ajscherer wrote: post #26

"You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or bad idea if you don't understand what a movie is or what an idea is." This is ridiculous. Does he honestly believe that a movie about me eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about Batman? Why do some movies get made and others not if it is meaningless talk about the worth of an…

One of Warhol's films was a guy eating an apple and talking on the phone...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_Too_Fast

Re: The Value of Ideas

#65

Post by pwhelan »

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…

"Pure" mathematics sometimes has applications as well - number theory and cryptography, boolean algebra and circuits, etc. I do not think that Adams would argue that pure math is worthless, rather that it has applications that haven't shown how valuable it is or is not. Value is associated with utility as well. If Markov chains didn't help us describe things well, despite it seemingly being difficult to come up with, it would have little value. However, anything that stretches the limits of human understanding has value in that it increases our capacity reason and shows paths that do not bear much fruit.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#66

Post by kunjaan »

I feel the author did not do a good job in defending the thesis of "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything."

I do agree that relying on the first aha-moment,however grand it may be, to carry the entire weight of success is a bad investment. Similarly to throw away an insight without analyzing it is equally foolish. Of course, you can never predict if an idea will derive its entire value when thrown and mingled with other external factors. However that doesn't mean that the idea itself plays a small role in the success of any endeavor. Every execution step that the author talks about requires coming up or at least using the so called ideas. You need creative insights in every step of your project. This will require the same amount of diligence in defining the purpose, testing the hypothesis and maybe even jumping that leap of faith. The author needs to clear the distinction between a conceptual idea and the execution of it.

Lastly, he has to mention the metric required to judge the success of an idea. Since he envelopes every single Idea into one set, he has to have a parameter to at least attest the value of them. I personally feel ideas as diverse as Darwin's idea of evolution to an entrepreneur's idea of a company to an artist's idea of an art cannot be lumped into one category.

I do agree with the author that ideas when defined without any context or in isolation cannot be judged. But none of the arguments that he makes truly discounts the worth of it.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#67

Post by pwhelan »

ajscherer wrote: post #59
jasonlotito wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Does he honestly believe that a movie about Batman eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about me?" You're confusing execution with the idea. The idea of you sitting around eating a bowl of cereal might seem boring, until you look at other ideas. An author sitting around a hotel in the middle of winter. (The Shining) A mother and son sitting in a car. (…

"A good idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. A bad idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a bad idea." This is exactly what I meant when I said that the quality of an idea is a marginal factor in the success of an endeavor. I fully agree that execution should be the main focus. What I was trying to say is that not all ideas are equal. You can always make a worse movie with a better idea, or vice versa, but so…

I know "12 Angry Men" that might beg to differ about people just sitting around making a great film.

Regarding Hogan's Heroes -- some ideas might require better execution to succeed. Tablet computers, which have been around for a while, seem like a good example of this. Or a social networking site, or a stock trading algorithm, etc.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#69

Post by jrockway »

username3 wrote: post #64
jrockway wrote: post #45

It will be called XKCD and have no discernable characters. xkcd has characters. There is hat guy, Megan, Bobby Tables, Randal, and a few others.

Now it does.

Hat guy first occurred in comic #12, and then became a regular character in comic #29. xkcd is currently at #749.

Re: The Value of Ideas

#70

Post by pwhelan »

ccc3 wrote: post #57
jasonlotito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of your examples detracts from what he is saying. Your suggestion comes down to level of success. Your examples only work if Henry Ford would be considered a failure if painted rocks didn't lead to as much success as cars did, despite the evidence that rocks, painted and unpainted, are still a market.

He concludes his post by saying: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. The only way that's true is if you consider success to be binary. Either you succeed or you fail. But level of success is important in terms of economic value and it is demonstrable that the idea is a factor in level of success.

Hyperbole is a literary tool to emphasize a point and should be put in context knowing this.
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