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If you think you've got a great idea, rest assured a thousand other people on this planet have the same idea. The difference is when one of them actually does i

• danieltillett 8y ago
  Not always. Once you get narrow enough in the required technical background knowledge you can reach a point where there are only a few people in the world that have it. At this point it won’t be surprising that only one person thought of this idea.
• Scarblac 8y ago
  A thousand people doing this on the planet seems far too few, actually. We could use some more.
• wenc 8y ago
  I think your point about execution is correct -- few people actually develop their ideas into something tangible. But I'm not sure that it is an inevitable fact that most people will end up having the same ideas. Someone once said that in humongous countries like China and India, it is statistically inevitable they have thought of most of the things the rest of the world have thought of. But why hasn't China come up with thoughts that German philosophers have come up with, or with specific ideas that have come out of the west? I think it's because there wasn't a focus on the things that mattered to Europeans at the time. Culture and environment matters, and dictates the ideas we are capable of having. Large populations are not made up of uncorrelated, independent individuals. Most of the those individuals have highly correlated thoughts, mostly driven by the culture at large.