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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

The value of any given idea is really low

I would agree if you mean average idea. Really great ideas are rare, difficult, and can change the world. The people who come up with those are rather special.

And, unfortunately, rare, and almost never (in my somewhat limited experience) think of themselves as 'idea guys.'

But this hivemind (nicely crurated by VCs- think that through) that ideas are worthless is very wrong. Unfortunately, discussions about it tend to start conflating ideas and execution- as, indeed, it is hard to separate them when you get down to it.

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Yeah I mean "If I am operating a business and someone brings an idea for something we should do inside that business, the expected value of that idea is close to 0, and for some business it may be negative".

That doesnt say that all ideas are useless. Huge businesses are built off of ideas all the time. Whether it be by accidental timing, cutting edge research, new synergy opportunities or actively spotting a hole that can be filled, the businesses start with an idea and they are not useless for sure.

Once you are up and operating a business however, if an idea is not about something you can trivially do as part of daily operations (continuous improvement has amazing value) but rather is something you need to divert significant resources or attention to in order to potentially realize some other values, then the value of the idea itself, on average, is low, because you will have a lot of these ideas, and you will not be able to dedicate your resources and attention to more than a few of them at a time.

It is far more valuable (on average) to be able to effectively choose WHICH of the already existing ideas have the best return than being able to add another idea to the pile.

Agreed.

Really great ideas also have low value. Even the most brilliant idea will have been had by countless people before it is known to the world.

The truly rare, difficult and world-changing is the realization (production, enactment, what have you) of a really great idea, and the luck of that realization occurring in the right context.

> The truly rare, difficult and world-changing is the realization (production, enactment, what have you) of a really great idea, and the luck of that realization occurring in the right context.

Nonetheless that doesn't make the idea itself worth little (let alone nothing). By analogy, land is normally little use unless you put a building or infrastructure on it or start farming or mining it. And it's seriously expensive and difficult to do those things. But that doesn't make the value of land low. Land isn't just valuable, it's expensive in the most literal and straightforward you-pay-money-for-it sense, sometimes staggeringly so.

Land is sort of a good example (there is scarcity involved, which makes it not a perfect analogy).

Land doesn't have any intrinsic value. There are two reasons (unused) land has value:

1) Someone expects to be able to use it to create value 2) Someone expects that someone else will want to use it to create value in the future and they expect that scarcity will come into play allowing them to charge more for it in the future than it currently costs to buy.

Land is only staggeringly expensive if either the value expected to be generated from 1) is exceptionally high or the expected value someone else will generate from it in 2) is exceptionally high.

If those aren't in play, you can get land very cheaply, or even for free, or in extreme cases be paid to take over land (that usually only applies for contaminated land etc).

To a first approximation, the good ideas are precisely those which can be used to create a lot of value: they're the land in Shanghai. It's not clear to me in what sense of 'intrinsic value' such land or ideas would lack it while (say) a pile of high-quality bricks would not. Conversely, if ideas are worthless only in the sense that building materials or pig-iron are worthless then in any ordinary sense they are not worthless at all.

Obviously ideas are less reliably scarce than land, because a number of people can have the same idea independently, and also because once another person hears your idea they can steal your fire without paying you, so it's difficult to trade an idea in a way that doesn't remove your ability to capture the value from it. But a high-quality and unobvious idea tends to occur to only a few people at any time, and the awkwardness of trying to do deals with them is far from rendering them valueless either. It's certainly not the case that good ideas are plentiful in the sense that if there one specific good idea to solve your problem but you don't think of or hear of it, then don't worry, there are lots of similarly good and suitable ideas lying around and one is almost certain to come to your attention soon.

A different, and notable distinction between land and ideas is that people are usually better at recognising valuable land than good ideas, as Frank Aiken observed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken . This is one reason why some ability to "finish" (in terms of external circumstances as well as internal factors like temperament and character) is such a valuable accompaniment to having a good idea: it helps to have something relatively tangible (be it only a prototype) to force down others' throats.

>Even the most brilliant idea will have been had by countless people

It wasn't very brilliant then, was it?

Most ideas aren't that brilliant. If it occurred to you, it likely occurred to somebody else. Ideas are a product of your environment. While we pretend to be unique a lot of what we do is pretty common to dozens, if not hundreds, or thousands of people.

Even ideas as earth shaking and complex as Infinitesimal Calculus and Quantum Mechanics were developed in parallel initial by people with little to no communication between each other.

That's the point, isn't it? Truly good ideas are rare.

We're treading dangerously close to "no true Scotsman" territory here.

No True Scotsman's ideas are unique. /sarcasm

Only in that some intrinsically good ideas are fairly obvious. Others are not.

(a-priori: for some reason I can't reply directly to you)

It's not quite a "no true Scotsman" since great ideas do happen and happen fairly often, in the grand scheme of things (there are over 100 Nobel prize nominees every year). The oft-repeated argument about ideas versus execution is that ideas are a dime a dozen, which is true, but most of them are not really all that great or original. The same can be said for any resource.

Broad elevator-pitch-level ideas may well be of little value, but specific ideas about strategy for a given organization at a given time are hugely valuable. There is a significant difference betwen the ideas person who just spouts out 'x for y' type product ideas, and the ideas person who is always coming up more effective processes for getting work done and achieving goals.

Even those specific ideas have value only speculatively; specific case hypotheses are more easily testable, but they only have value, only provide benefit, when results of execution are realized.

brilliant != unique

> as, indeed, it is hard to separate them when you get down to it

Indeed. For one thing, probably nearly anyone who has successfully had good ideas is a "finisher" to some extent (though to very varying extents). Isaac Newton certainly thought hard and persevered in his researches, but as soon as you're bringing him in as an example of a "finisher" as opposed to an "ideas man" you've pretty badly undermined any distinction you were building between the two.

http://sivers.org/multiply

And execution is (therefore) "just" a multiplier of ideas.

You definitely need both.

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