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Except that these ideas aren't worth anything on their own. The sequence of words "Matter is made of atoms of about 100 different kinds" is not something I can

Except that these ideas aren't worth anything on their own. The sequence of words "Matter is made of atoms of about 100 different kinds" is not something I can sell, any more than I can sell the words "Matter is the physical incarnation of the spirits of my ancestors." They only start to have value attached to them once they've been proven - or, to put it another way, once they've been executed on. Even then I'm still not done, because just knowing that these specific statements happen to be true is probably not something I can sell, and certainly not something I can sell more than once in the absence of a patent. I need to wrap up that knowledge into something which has scarcity in my favour, via further execution.

kragen 16y ago
Most valuable things can't be sold, regularfry. Edit: I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me. The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible --- if someone with the money to build and debug the equipment believed it, of course. That would have revolutionized both agriculture and warfare in much the same way that the Haber-Bosch process eventually did. That would have been very valuable. "Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it. It's true that valuable ideas stop being valuable if nobody believes them, just as valuable machinery stops being valuable if nobody uses it, and disciplined execution stops being valuable if it's executing a stupid idea. That doesn't mean any of those things are valueless. It just means their value is contingent.
- regularfry 16y ago
  It seems relevant when the context is valuing contributions to a startup, specifically in the eyes of VCs. If you're going to extend the concepts of "value" and "worth" to include non-economic factors, you're diluting them beyond the point where they have any useful meaning in context.
- regularfry 16y ago
  > I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me. There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept. > The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible ...if it were known to be true. In this case, the idea's not valuable. If there's value anywhere here, it's determined by how much the problem you end up solving matters, not the process itself, much less the description of the process. The problem that matters isn't "how do I make ammonia?" It's "how do I make artificial fertilisers cheaply?" or "what do I do when I can't make enough gunpowder?" > "Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it. No, setting up a situation where there is "scarcity in my favour" is arranging for there to be demand for something which I can supply such that the market value makes it worth my while to do so. "Value" itself doesn't exist without demand, which is why scarcity is important.
  - kragen 16y ago
    > There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale [of kragen's marriage or breathing] from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept. I think you just failed the Turing Test. No actual human could seriously think that a marriage or breathing could be transferred intact from one person to another. Still, you're clearly an impressive feat of engineering!
    - regularfry 16y ago
      If I pay for you to no longer have something, that's still a sale in that you've sold it. What I've bought is your no longer having it, I don't necessarily have to take possession. You said that these things were valuable. By definition that means that they have a value, which is something which you'd agree to exchange them for. That's what the word means. Possibly you actually meant "invaluable?"

kragen 16y ago

Most valuable things can't be sold, regularfry. Edit: I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me. The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible --- if someone with the money to build and debug the equipment believed it, of course. That would have revolutionized both agriculture and warfare in much the same way that the Haber-Bosch process eventually did. That would have been very valuable. "Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it. It's true that valuable ideas stop being valuable if nobody believes them, just as valuable machinery stops being valuable if nobody uses it, and disciplined execution stops being valuable if it's executing a stupid idea. That doesn't mean any of those things are valueless. It just means their value is contingent.

regularfry 16y ago
It seems relevant when the context is valuing contributions to a startup, specifically in the eyes of VCs. If you're going to extend the concepts of "value" and "worth" to include non-economic factors, you're diluting them beyond the point where they have any useful meaning in context.
regularfry 16y ago
> I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me. There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept. > The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible ...if it were known to be true. In this case, the idea's not valuable. If there's value anywhere here, it's determined by how much the problem you end up solving matters, not the process itself, much less the description of the process. The problem that matters isn't "how do I make ammonia?" It's "how do I make artificial fertilisers cheaply?" or "what do I do when I can't make enough gunpowder?" > "Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it. No, setting up a situation where there is "scarcity in my favour" is arranging for there to be demand for something which I can supply such that the market value makes it worth my while to do so. "Value" itself doesn't exist without demand, which is why scarcity is important.
- kragen 16y ago
  > There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale [of kragen's marriage or breathing] from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept. I think you just failed the Turing Test. No actual human could seriously think that a marriage or breathing could be transferred intact from one person to another. Still, you're clearly an impressive feat of engineering!
  - regularfry 16y ago
    If I pay for you to no longer have something, that's still a sale in that you've sold it. What I've bought is your no longer having it, I don't necessarily have to take possession. You said that these things were valuable. By definition that means that they have a value, which is something which you'd agree to exchange them for. That's what the word means. Possibly you actually meant "invaluable?"