4 ms·

I don't understand this quote, could you explain it?

by jokoon 6y ago

DoreenMichele 6y ago
People worry a lot about having their ideas stolen. In reality, most new ideas get enormous push back. Not only are they not stolen, but people will call you a loon for voicing them. See Semmelweis, Galileo, et al.
- sitkack 6y ago
  As an aside, that Aiken quote is brought up by people trying to get you to tell you your ideas. Or that ideas themselves don't have much value because if they were "new" ones, you would have to shove them down their throats. I am not Galileo when I argue that our linear pricing model is an active blocker to product adoption and that we need to move to sublinear one asap in a bullshit corp meeting. I wish I was. Lots of good ideas get lifted all the time, in the context of the Aiken quote, new is outside of the overton window, it flips problems on their heads. Some of the new ideas actually do have to get shoved, because also in this definition of new, it isn't really about quality. It is about newness. We should solve the metaproblem of people not accepting the Scientific Method. It ultimately comes down to proof, verifiability, falsifiability and the techniques we choose to get there. Ridicule and rejection of concepts because they are new, I think are wholly human social traits. How do we get answers to questions we can't even think of asking? And how do we expand the ways in which we ask questions?
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I've had some of my ideas "stolen." I was doing volunteer work and happy to share my ideas but on the expectation that it would help me make business connections, network, establish a reputation as someone who is smart and knows things. The individual "stealing" them did their best to make sure no one knew where he was getting his ideas, which robbed me of the benefits of sharing those ideas as volunteer. He also badly botched them all. This is in line with the meme that "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." Me saying "You should do X!" utterly failed to result in X actually happening by someone not who was not me. That pithy one-liner failed to convey sufficient information to result in the production of the X I was envisioning when I said it. The example I typically give is the word "chair." If I say "chair," what kind of chair do I mean? Am I thinking of a wooden kitchen chair while you are thinking of an overstuffed living room wing chair? I had a similar thing happen at my corporate job where a new manager met very privately with me, implemented my proposal without giving me credit and bastardized it so badly that I wouldn't have wanted my name associated with her terrible, terrible program that completely missed the point of what I had proposed. Years ago, I started a project to try to develop language for talking about ideas themselves and to make the kinds of distinctions you are talking about. We use the same word -- "idea" -- to talk about radical new theories and to talk about more prosaic details of how to get things done, business-wise: "It was my idea to paint it blue, not green." I think we really need better ways to make such distinctions. As an aside....etc etc As an aside, I generally bring up Semmelweis and the like because I'm one of those unfortunate souls the world has decided is a loon. I don't have any answers for you because my methods for discovery and proof of concept fall outside of accepted scientific methods. Silly me: I wasn't trying to make a scientific discovery backed up by evidence. I was just trying to not die and to be less tortured by my defective body. People can basically take my word for that or not. Most people choose "not." I don't have a ready solution for that.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      > I started a project to try to develop language for talking about ideas themselves and to make the kinds of distinctions you are talking about. Sounds wonderful! An IDE for concepts and definitions. Now it would have to have a visualizer and a bunch of NLP. And when I say, "the colorless green ideas sleep furiously" it could synthesize an abstract picture of ideas (shapes) being various shades of grey, the ideas a new (green) and growing but the pace at which they stir starts to grow. A colorless idea is one which describes a technique or a capability but without a goal or context. To hammer, a hammer, a specific hammer, a specific hammer to build a house ... join, flatten, temporary, permanent, to move. I could see a system like this being used in very delicate negotiations. It never occurred to me how difficult bidirectional translation could be with all the semantic nuance, history, idioms, etc. And then have personalities and intellects involved. The translators are the true heros of non-war. Always enjoy your take.
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        I am pretty sure I made up the word memome a bit over 5 years ago, but now when I google I get hits for it other than my site. I did a bit of work on the project back in November and since talking with you I have done some updates and made it public. There isn't much there at the moment but I think I know what I am doing now, which I didn't know five years or so ago. https://memomeproject.blogspot.com/ https://memomeproject.blogspot.com/
- chiph 6y ago
  Also Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was attacked for suggesting that doctors wash and change clothes between doing postmortem exams and new births. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675443/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675443/
- bobthechef 6y ago
  Ah, there's Galileo, again. A lot of that stuff is mostly myth. If you actually read about what happened instead of the bigoted Enlightment-era pamphlet pulp that's been absorbed by our textbook writers (horrifying to ask how much of that stuff is actually credible), you'll find that, first, he was a promoter of heliocentrism, a view that did not originate with him but one which he embraced following Copernicus and which goes back to at least Aristarchus. Second, at the time, heliocentrism was not better supported than geocentrism or one for which there was extraordinary incentive or pressure to adopt or address, nor was it some idea people (typically supposed to be Church prelates) were somehow afraid of, though FWIW, Copernicus was afraid of academic opinion, not the reaction of the Church (he himself was a member of the clergy and had corresponded with one or two popes, bishops, etc, about his work). The so-called Galileo affair spanned decades during which Galileo insulted and harassed political and Church authorities which, frankly, give the impression of being rather slow to anger. One contention that Galileo (who died a Catholic, btw) had concerned the language in the Bible that spoke of the rising or setting Sun. If heliocentrism is correct, then why is the Bible speaking of the rising and setting Sun? I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a pretty stupid question. To this day, we speak of the rising and setting of the Sun. It's descriptive language, not a scientific description, and the Bible is no scientific textbook. Maybe monomania is to blame for thinking that it is. W.r.t. Semmelweis, I don't know how this played out, so you'll have to fill me in. I would make an initial distinction, though. The first is that once a theory achieves widespread acceptance, it's not surprising that honest people will be slow to absorb something that they can't account for. It takes time to process evidence. Think how absurd it would be to just throw away something that's made sense up until now. You have to reconcile new observations and do the work of accounting for everything accounted for by the previous theory plus the new thing. Throwing it away just like that leaves you with nothing to work with. The second distinction is that a lot of people build their egos out of knowing something and the feeling of dominance they get from it. "I'm hot shit and superior to you because I know X." Then you get these little cliques and cults of affirmation which adds another barrier because now you face the Lomanesque risk of no longer being liked.The coward cannot bear that possibility so he "defends" his tribe to protect himself. Of course, he isn't really acting for his own good or the good of others, just his own comfort. But in general, yes, academic fads and prejudices do exist. Try being a conservative at a major university today, especially in a humanities department.
mayankkaizen 6y ago
It probably means that false ideas spread quickly but you have to work hard to make people accept original ideas.
- Griffinsauce 6y ago
  The first part is not included. That's just our current context adding some extra sauce :D
Viliam1234 6y ago
Sometimes the reason you invent something original is because you noticed something that no one else has noticed before. In that case, your idea could be "stolen" by someone noticing what you noticed, and publishing it first. But sometimes (and the quote suggests that this happens way more frequently) the reason is that other people noticed that before you, and for some reason they all concluded "this is not going to work", and went looking elsewhere. You were "merely" the first person who continued searching in the same direction, and succeeded to finally find something useful. In the latter case, when you announce your invention, the people who previously looked in the same direction and gave up, are likely to reiterate their reasons for giving up. Sometimes they genuinely believe that what you did is impossible, i.e. that your results are wrong, and you only made some mistake or fraud that makes it seem to work. (In their defense, people make mistakes and frauds all the time, so it makes sense to assume that you most likely are another one.) Sometimes it's that they backed "this is not possible" with their professional prestige, so accepting your invention would mean lessening their prestige. (This is a wrong reason to oppose you, but people who will oppose you for this reason will often be very powerful.) Plus there is the usual resistance of people against trying to do new things, when the old things seem to work okay, and the new things seem like a lot of work or learning.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- auggierose 6y ago
  That explanation is way too complicated. People start taking stuff serious when a) they see the immediate benefit b) it fits into their belief system c) it is socially validated Original stuff usually violates all three points.
  - initramfs 6y ago
    They take it seriously, whether they like it or not: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -Ghandi
jonplackett 6y ago
My take on it is that he means really new / radical ideas are very uncomfortable for most people. They will reject them and you’ll have to work really hard to show them why it will be worth the pain and good for them in the end. So don’t worry about someone pinching that idea - the hard work is not the idea, it’s the convincing.

I don't understand this quote, could you explain it?

by jokoon 6y ago

I don't understand this quote, could you explain it?

People worry a lot about having their ideas stolen. In reality, most new ideas get enormous push back. Not only are they not stolen, but people will call you a loon for voicing them. See Semmelweis, Galileo, et al.

sitkack 6y ago
As an aside, that Aiken quote is brought up by people trying to get you to tell you your ideas. Or that ideas themselves don't have much value because if they were "new" ones, you would have to shove them down their throats. I am not Galileo when I argue that our linear pricing model is an active blocker to product adoption and that we need to move to sublinear one asap in a bullshit corp meeting. I wish I was. Lots of good ideas get lifted all the time, in the context of the Aiken quote, new is outside of the overton window, it flips problems on their heads. Some of the new ideas actually do have to get shoved, because also in this definition of new, it isn't really about quality. It is about newness. We should solve the metaproblem of people not accepting the Scientific Method. It ultimately comes down to proof, verifiability, falsifiability and the techniques we choose to get there. Ridicule and rejection of concepts because they are new, I think are wholly human social traits. How do we get answers to questions we can't even think of asking? And how do we expand the ways in which we ask questions?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I've had some of my ideas "stolen." I was doing volunteer work and happy to share my ideas but on the expectation that it would help me make business connections, network, establish a reputation as someone who is smart and knows things. The individual "stealing" them did their best to make sure no one knew where he was getting his ideas, which robbed me of the benefits of sharing those ideas as volunteer. He also badly botched them all. This is in line with the meme that "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." Me saying "You should do X!" utterly failed to result in X actually happening by someone not who was not me. That pithy one-liner failed to convey sufficient information to result in the production of the X I was envisioning when I said it. The example I typically give is the word "chair." If I say "chair," what kind of chair do I mean? Am I thinking of a wooden kitchen chair while you are thinking of an overstuffed living room wing chair? I had a similar thing happen at my corporate job where a new manager met very privately with me, implemented my proposal without giving me credit and bastardized it so badly that I wouldn't have wanted my name associated with her terrible, terrible program that completely missed the point of what I had proposed. Years ago, I started a project to try to develop language for talking about ideas themselves and to make the kinds of distinctions you are talking about. We use the same word -- "idea" -- to talk about radical new theories and to talk about more prosaic details of how to get things done, business-wise: "It was my idea to paint it blue, not green." I think we really need better ways to make such distinctions. As an aside....etc etc As an aside, I generally bring up Semmelweis and the like because I'm one of those unfortunate souls the world has decided is a loon. I don't have any answers for you because my methods for discovery and proof of concept fall outside of accepted scientific methods. Silly me: I wasn't trying to make a scientific discovery backed up by evidence. I was just trying to not die and to be less tortured by my defective body. People can basically take my word for that or not. Most people choose "not." I don't have a ready solution for that.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    > I started a project to try to develop language for talking about ideas themselves and to make the kinds of distinctions you are talking about. Sounds wonderful! An IDE for concepts and definitions. Now it would have to have a visualizer and a bunch of NLP. And when I say, "the colorless green ideas sleep furiously" it could synthesize an abstract picture of ideas (shapes) being various shades of grey, the ideas a new (green) and growing but the pace at which they stir starts to grow. A colorless idea is one which describes a technique or a capability but without a goal or context. To hammer, a hammer, a specific hammer, a specific hammer to build a house ... join, flatten, temporary, permanent, to move. I could see a system like this being used in very delicate negotiations. It never occurred to me how difficult bidirectional translation could be with all the semantic nuance, history, idioms, etc. And then have personalities and intellects involved. The translators are the true heros of non-war. Always enjoy your take.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      I am pretty sure I made up the word memome a bit over 5 years ago, but now when I google I get hits for it other than my site. I did a bit of work on the project back in November and since talking with you I have done some updates and made it public. There isn't much there at the moment but I think I know what I am doing now, which I didn't know five years or so ago. https://memomeproject.blogspot.com/ https://memomeproject.blogspot.com/
chiph 6y ago
Also Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was attacked for suggesting that doctors wash and change clothes between doing postmortem exams and new births. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675443/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675443/
bobthechef 6y ago
Ah, there's Galileo, again. A lot of that stuff is mostly myth. If you actually read about what happened instead of the bigoted Enlightment-era pamphlet pulp that's been absorbed by our textbook writers (horrifying to ask how much of that stuff is actually credible), you'll find that, first, he was a promoter of heliocentrism, a view that did not originate with him but one which he embraced following Copernicus and which goes back to at least Aristarchus. Second, at the time, heliocentrism was not better supported than geocentrism or one for which there was extraordinary incentive or pressure to adopt or address, nor was it some idea people (typically supposed to be Church prelates) were somehow afraid of, though FWIW, Copernicus was afraid of academic opinion, not the reaction of the Church (he himself was a member of the clergy and had corresponded with one or two popes, bishops, etc, about his work). The so-called Galileo affair spanned decades during which Galileo insulted and harassed political and Church authorities which, frankly, give the impression of being rather slow to anger. One contention that Galileo (who died a Catholic, btw) had concerned the language in the Bible that spoke of the rising or setting Sun. If heliocentrism is correct, then why is the Bible speaking of the rising and setting Sun? I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a pretty stupid question. To this day, we speak of the rising and setting of the Sun. It's descriptive language, not a scientific description, and the Bible is no scientific textbook. Maybe monomania is to blame for thinking that it is. W.r.t. Semmelweis, I don't know how this played out, so you'll have to fill me in. I would make an initial distinction, though. The first is that once a theory achieves widespread acceptance, it's not surprising that honest people will be slow to absorb something that they can't account for. It takes time to process evidence. Think how absurd it would be to just throw away something that's made sense up until now. You have to reconcile new observations and do the work of accounting for everything accounted for by the previous theory plus the new thing. Throwing it away just like that leaves you with nothing to work with. The second distinction is that a lot of people build their egos out of knowing something and the feeling of dominance they get from it. "I'm hot shit and superior to you because I know X." Then you get these little cliques and cults of affirmation which adds another barrier because now you face the Lomanesque risk of no longer being liked.The coward cannot bear that possibility so he "defends" his tribe to protect himself. Of course, he isn't really acting for his own good or the good of others, just his own comfort. But in general, yes, academic fads and prejudices do exist. Try being a conservative at a major university today, especially in a humanities department.

mayankkaizen 6y ago

It probably means that false ideas spread quickly but you have to work hard to make people accept original ideas.

Griffinsauce 6y ago
The first part is not included. That's just our current context adding some extra sauce :D

Viliam1234 6y ago

Sometimes the reason you invent something original is because you noticed something that no one else has noticed before. In that case, your idea could be "stolen" by someone noticing what you noticed, and publishing it first. But sometimes (and the quote suggests that this happens way more frequently) the reason is that other people noticed that before you, and for some reason they all concluded "this is not going to work", and went looking elsewhere. You were "merely" the first person who continued searching in the same direction, and succeeded to finally find something useful. In the latter case, when you announce your invention, the people who previously looked in the same direction and gave up, are likely to reiterate their reasons for giving up. Sometimes they genuinely believe that what you did is impossible, i.e. that your results are wrong, and you only made some mistake or fraud that makes it seem to work. (In their defense, people make mistakes and frauds all the time, so it makes sense to assume that you most likely are another one.) Sometimes it's that they backed "this is not possible" with their professional prestige, so accepting your invention would mean lessening their prestige. (This is a wrong reason to oppose you, but people who will oppose you for this reason will often be very powerful.) Plus there is the usual resistance of people against trying to do new things, when the old things seem to work okay, and the new things seem like a lot of work or learning.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
auggierose 6y ago
That explanation is way too complicated. People start taking stuff serious when a) they see the immediate benefit b) it fits into their belief system c) it is socially validated Original stuff usually violates all three points.
- initramfs 6y ago
  They take it seriously, whether they like it or not: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -Ghandi

jonplackett 6y ago

My take on it is that he means really new / radical ideas are very uncomfortable for most people. They will reject them and you’ll have to work really hard to show them why it will be worth the pain and good for them in the end. So don’t worry about someone pinching that idea - the hard work is not the idea, it’s the convincing.