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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

And if you see $100 on the road, leave it there, it's fake or someone would have picked it up first.

For those that don't get the reference, it is to this joke about 2 economists:

Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.

All the times I have seen $100 on the road, it has turned out to be an advertisement i.e. fake. 50% of the time I have found money on the road, it has been my own.

I put coins on the road for people to find, because I remember the joy of discovering a coin as a child.

Overall it works as a joke, but fails as a metaphor for me!

This is an excellent comment, it should be noted given the thread.

Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not.

The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?

FWIW, the quote about money on the ground initially comes from a critique on the efficient market hypothesis, not commentary on the nature of ideas. So it's expected for there to be analogical disconnect here.

For it to work as intended, you'd have to construct (or buy into) some framework for an "efficient marketplace of ideas."

Absolutely and I am aware of its origins, but I've seen the analogy brought out at least a few times here on HN when discussing the merits and potential of an idea that seems obvious but has gone unexplored or uncommercialized. I get the sense that there may be some beliefs around the evaluating of ideas, at least in this crowd, that lead some to see it as being comparable to noticing a sum of money on the ground. I'd love to understand that.

Furthermore, I've seen it used in the context of hidden transaction costs in the markets. For example, you see security A trading at $100 on exchange X but $105 on exchange Y. You think "free money!" but on closer examination exchange Y charges $5.01 to transact. These are totally nonsensical numbers, but they do extend to the analogy on ideas.

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