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I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that.

by robg 18y ago

I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that. But, sure, working the lab equipment and running the tests is a waste if you're not testing good ideas. Problem is, I'm the worst judge of what's a good idea especially if it seems good to me. I'll venture so far to say that good ideas are the ones that work. The difficulty is predicting ahead of time whether they will.

Alex3917 18y ago
"I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that." Almost all of the most important intellectuals in the history of western civilization have had one thing in common: their ideas were wrong. Plato, Piaget, Copernicus, Einstein, Lamarck, Chomsky, Adam Smith, etc. If testing ideas for truth value were really the hard part then scientific experiments wouldn't be replicable and science would have no more weight than astrology. Furthermore, scientific beliefs wouldn't run in S-Curves and progress would be linear and continuous.
- robg 18y ago
  Replication is trivial once someone else has already shown you how to test the idea. But only if they're right will you be too.
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    Figuring out how to test an idea is a "tame" problem, in that the problem has a definitive formulation and stopping rule. Coming up with an entirely new paradigm is, if not exactly a "wicked" problem, some other type of complex problem so difficult and uncommon that we don't even have a vocabulary to describe it. So when I say that coming up with ideas is more difficult than testing them, what I mean is that coming up with an idea belongs to a more difficult class of problem, even if it is occasionally easier to create a specific idea than to test that specific idea.
    - robg 18y ago
      See, to me, an idea is a mere belief without some test to see it through. Like this argument, for instance...there's no logical conclusion one way or another. We're just stating beliefs back and forth.
      - Alex3917 18y ago
        Most people on Hacker News have this view of the role of science in epistemology. It seems to me that there is something wrong with this, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
pg 18y ago
I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Really? Would you say this is true for Newton's work, or Einstein's? I find that new ideas in the sense of new insights about how the world works are extremely rare, and that having them is much harder than testing them, because having them requires you to change the way you think. Perhaps you are influenced here by the situation with startups, where ideas are cheap and execution tends to count for more. But this is a different kind of idea. The reason startup ideas are cheap is that they tend not to be discoveries, but merely hunches about where to look for discoveries. E.g. the startup idea equivalent of Newton's work would be "Explain mathematically why planetary orbits have the shape they do."
- robg 18y ago
  Absolutely. Newton only became Newton when it was shown the ideas worked, and better than Leibniz, for instance. Same deal with Einstein. Their contemporaries knew they were onto something, but a healthy dose of skepticism was reserved until the ideas gained empirical weight. Still not all of their "good" ideas were validated. Testing ideas, to me, is the best way to change how we think, especially when we're proven wrong. If we know how the experiment will turn out, there's little point in actually running it. And there, I think the process you describe for startups isn't so different than the process for science. In each, the hunch points the direction but the apparatus must be built to verify or reject it. But it's hard for me to see one hunch, rather than a tested series, leading to a true discovery.
  - pg 18y ago
    If your ideas are only valuable when other people believe them, then if everyone else died of some plague that you happened to be immune to, it would suddenly be impossible to have good ideas. That doesn't seem right.
    - robg 18y ago
      If this happened to Newton or Einstein it wouldn't matter how good their ideas were. They'd starve because their ideas would be worthless. It takes a community to make use of good ideas, not just validate them. In the former you get the latter. Sure, sometimes a community has to be shaken free of their assumptions. But I'm not sure it's ever apparent by virtue of the strength of a lonely idea. It takes some powerful proof of concept. That's the apparatus. To put it another way, in merely writing an idea down it may exist all by itself in some Platonic ideal. Not surprisingly, the Greek philosophers often left it to others to validate (or invalidate) what they produced. Running tests wasn't truly valued. I'd argue those ideas that have stuck with us the longest are those that engendered the greatest utility. Then there's Heraclitus.

by robg 18y ago

Alex3917 18y ago

"I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that." Almost all of the most important intellectuals in the history of western civilization have had one thing in common: their ideas were wrong. Plato, Piaget, Copernicus, Einstein, Lamarck, Chomsky, Adam Smith, etc. If testing ideas for truth value were really the hard part then scientific experiments wouldn't be replicable and science would have no more weight than astrology. Furthermore, scientific beliefs wouldn't run in S-Curves and progress would be linear and continuous.

robg 18y ago
Replication is trivial once someone else has already shown you how to test the idea. But only if they're right will you be too.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  Figuring out how to test an idea is a "tame" problem, in that the problem has a definitive formulation and stopping rule. Coming up with an entirely new paradigm is, if not exactly a "wicked" problem, some other type of complex problem so difficult and uncommon that we don't even have a vocabulary to describe it. So when I say that coming up with ideas is more difficult than testing them, what I mean is that coming up with an idea belongs to a more difficult class of problem, even if it is occasionally easier to create a specific idea than to test that specific idea.
  - robg 18y ago
    See, to me, an idea is a mere belief without some test to see it through. Like this argument, for instance...there's no logical conclusion one way or another. We're just stating beliefs back and forth.
    - Alex3917 18y ago
      Most people on Hacker News have this view of the role of science in epistemology. It seems to me that there is something wrong with this, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

pg 18y ago

I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Really? Would you say this is true for Newton's work, or Einstein's? I find that new ideas in the sense of new insights about how the world works are extremely rare, and that having them is much harder than testing them, because having them requires you to change the way you think. Perhaps you are influenced here by the situation with startups, where ideas are cheap and execution tends to count for more. But this is a different kind of idea. The reason startup ideas are cheap is that they tend not to be discoveries, but merely hunches about where to look for discoveries. E.g. the startup idea equivalent of Newton's work would be "Explain mathematically why planetary orbits have the shape they do."

robg 18y ago
Absolutely. Newton only became Newton when it was shown the ideas worked, and better than Leibniz, for instance. Same deal with Einstein. Their contemporaries knew they were onto something, but a healthy dose of skepticism was reserved until the ideas gained empirical weight. Still not all of their "good" ideas were validated. Testing ideas, to me, is the best way to change how we think, especially when we're proven wrong. If we know how the experiment will turn out, there's little point in actually running it. And there, I think the process you describe for startups isn't so different than the process for science. In each, the hunch points the direction but the apparatus must be built to verify or reject it. But it's hard for me to see one hunch, rather than a tested series, leading to a true discovery.
- pg 18y ago
  If your ideas are only valuable when other people believe them, then if everyone else died of some plague that you happened to be immune to, it would suddenly be impossible to have good ideas. That doesn't seem right.
  - robg 18y ago
    If this happened to Newton or Einstein it wouldn't matter how good their ideas were. They'd starve because their ideas would be worthless. It takes a community to make use of good ideas, not just validate them. In the former you get the latter. Sure, sometimes a community has to be shaken free of their assumptions. But I'm not sure it's ever apparent by virtue of the strength of a lonely idea. It takes some powerful proof of concept. That's the apparatus. To put it another way, in merely writing an idea down it may exist all by itself in some Platonic ideal. Not surprisingly, the Greek philosophers often left it to others to validate (or invalidate) what they produced. Running tests wasn't truly valued. I'd argue those ideas that have stuck with us the longest are those that engendered the greatest utility. Then there's Heraclitus.