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I think this is, on the whole, probably false. There are a lot of things the smartest people do on the weekend which will never catch on, because there is not m

I think this is, on the whole, probably false. There are a lot of things the smartest people do on the weekend which will never catch on, because there is not much of a business case behind them. Not everything interesting is monetizable. One example: a lot of the smartest computer scientists of the 1960s were really into algorithmic art as a side-project hobby. Was algorithmic art mainstream in the 1970s? No. Hell, it isn't even mainstream today.

shurcooL 14y ago
What's interesting to one person may have value to just that person, or it might be applicable to wider audiences. Things that have value (to people in general) are monetizable. That would explain why not all interesting things are monetizable.
- _delirium 14y ago
  It's more than just having value— the key element of monetization is being able to capture that value. Some kinds of value tend to diffuse in a difficult-to-capture way, while others are easier to turn into cash that goes into your own pocket. The most valuable things I've done myself are probably things where I've captured very little of the value. I've written hundreds of Wikipedia articles that have been read by millions of people, and done a lot of work on open-source projects, but I have captured no dollars from those activities. There might be some theoretical way of capturing the value those activities have produced, but I didn't avail myself of it, and on the whole I think it's difficult. But there are other things I've done, with lower value, which have put more cash in my pocket.
iamwil 14y ago
The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech. Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends that do that", etc. Search was considered non-monetizable at first. That's why internet giants of the 90's, like Yahoo, were focused on being portals. PCs were considered too much of a toy to actually do any type of work. Back then, you did serious work on shared on on mainframes. Radios, when shown to initial investors had one quip, "Why would I want to send messages to nobody in particular?" When TV was shown to the same innovators in radio, they didn't think it would ever catch on. Whether large numbers are divisible by primes seems like a useless branch of mathematics called number theory, but we found it useful for encryption. Without it, we wouldn't have online commerce, for math started 2 or 3 centuries ago, when there was no online commerce. Point is, innovation happens when people try new and different things, even if they're weird. Even if they seem useless. Even if no one else is doing them. Even if people think it's stupid. Even if it doesn't make you money. Because there's something else that's motivating you to explore. You don't have to be smart to try new weird things, but smart people tend to not worry about what other people think and go ahead and try new things. Perhaps your quibble is the order of the statement. It's defn true that not all things that smart people do in their free time become something mainstream. But it's defn true that everything that we do nowadays, it was, at one time, something some smart person was already doing years ago. So if you ever spot someone doing something seemingly weird, strange, useless, non-montetizable, but defn new, then stop yourself from being a cynic because it might be something you end up doing yourself in 10 years, as improbable as that seems now.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I agree if the sentiment is just: everything which is today popular was once more of a niche, experimental activity. But that is not so exciting a claim, is it? The more difficult part is going in the other direction, and figuring out which of today's niche hobbies will be popular tomorrow. Taken at face value, the article is claiming that it will be all of them, at least if they were niche hobbies of the "smartest" people. I think that is clearly incorrect.
  - iamwil 14y ago
    Well, like pg said above, I wish the OP dove into the forces at hand. However, that doesn't mean that we can't. I don't know why cdixon wrote the article. But I suspect that it's only not an exciting claim to you because you're already at a certain place in your understanding of innovation. I think there are plenty of people that believe innovation happens when an inventor hides away in a basement and tinkers with stuff, and one day, he has a big reveal and the world says how awesome it is. That story's reinforced when you tell the story of successes looking backwards. In reality, early innovation doesn't look like that. It looks like people doing weird things you don't understand, or seems like they're wasting their time, doing things that seem to have nothing to do with the real world. The only thing in common is that they seem to be doing it for shits and giggles, while having lots of fun.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      If the idea is just that some things that now seem serious didn't seem serious in the past, sure, I buy that. But does anybody not buy that? I feel like that's the plotline of a dozen Discovery Channel shows. And it's also the justification behind many of the "why pure math/science should actually be funded" arguments, to take it in a different direction.
      - iamwil 14y ago
        People always buy that looking backwards, but almost never going forward. In fact, most people are outright dismissive of new ideas yet unproven. If you do a search on HN about the viability of the currently unproven techs, like google glasses, 3D printers, you'll see plenty of evidence of that. I'm not sure why this is, exactly. Perhaps it's just more fun to be cynical and shoot down the weird things that other people are doing. Or maybe people don't actually like change. Or maybe people don't like being wrong, and if you poo poo most everything, it's likely you'll be right, since most things aren't mainstream game changers. Or perhaps people don't like hyperbole. I know I have my bullshit flag raised when someone's raving about something.
maxerickson 14y ago
If you squint a little bit, video games are a bigger business than movies and such, and they went pretty mainstream circa 1980.

shurcooL 14y ago

What's interesting to one person may have value to just that person, or it might be applicable to wider audiences. Things that have value (to people in general) are monetizable. That would explain why not all interesting things are monetizable.

_delirium 14y ago
It's more than just having value— the key element of monetization is being able to capture that value. Some kinds of value tend to diffuse in a difficult-to-capture way, while others are easier to turn into cash that goes into your own pocket. The most valuable things I've done myself are probably things where I've captured very little of the value. I've written hundreds of Wikipedia articles that have been read by millions of people, and done a lot of work on open-source projects, but I have captured no dollars from those activities. There might be some theoretical way of capturing the value those activities have produced, but I didn't avail myself of it, and on the whole I think it's difficult. But there are other things I've done, with lower value, which have put more cash in my pocket.

iamwil 14y ago

The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech. Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends that do that", etc. Search was considered non-monetizable at first. That's why internet giants of the 90's, like Yahoo, were focused on being portals. PCs were considered too much of a toy to actually do any type of work. Back then, you did serious work on shared on on mainframes. Radios, when shown to initial investors had one quip, "Why would I want to send messages to nobody in particular?" When TV was shown to the same innovators in radio, they didn't think it would ever catch on. Whether large numbers are divisible by primes seems like a useless branch of mathematics called number theory, but we found it useful for encryption. Without it, we wouldn't have online commerce, for math started 2 or 3 centuries ago, when there was no online commerce. Point is, innovation happens when people try new and different things, even if they're weird. Even if they seem useless. Even if no one else is doing them. Even if people think it's stupid. Even if it doesn't make you money. Because there's something else that's motivating you to explore. You don't have to be smart to try new weird things, but smart people tend to not worry about what other people think and go ahead and try new things. Perhaps your quibble is the order of the statement. It's defn true that not all things that smart people do in their free time become something mainstream. But it's defn true that everything that we do nowadays, it was, at one time, something some smart person was already doing years ago. So if you ever spot someone doing something seemingly weird, strange, useless, non-montetizable, but defn new, then stop yourself from being a cynic because it might be something you end up doing yourself in 10 years, as improbable as that seems now.

_delirium 14y ago
I agree if the sentiment is just: everything which is today popular was once more of a niche, experimental activity. But that is not so exciting a claim, is it? The more difficult part is going in the other direction, and figuring out which of today's niche hobbies will be popular tomorrow. Taken at face value, the article is claiming that it will be all of them, at least if they were niche hobbies of the "smartest" people. I think that is clearly incorrect.
- iamwil 14y ago
  Well, like pg said above, I wish the OP dove into the forces at hand. However, that doesn't mean that we can't. I don't know why cdixon wrote the article. But I suspect that it's only not an exciting claim to you because you're already at a certain place in your understanding of innovation. I think there are plenty of people that believe innovation happens when an inventor hides away in a basement and tinkers with stuff, and one day, he has a big reveal and the world says how awesome it is. That story's reinforced when you tell the story of successes looking backwards. In reality, early innovation doesn't look like that. It looks like people doing weird things you don't understand, or seems like they're wasting their time, doing things that seem to have nothing to do with the real world. The only thing in common is that they seem to be doing it for shits and giggles, while having lots of fun.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    If the idea is just that some things that now seem serious didn't seem serious in the past, sure, I buy that. But does anybody not buy that? I feel like that's the plotline of a dozen Discovery Channel shows. And it's also the justification behind many of the "why pure math/science should actually be funded" arguments, to take it in a different direction.
    - iamwil 14y ago
      People always buy that looking backwards, but almost never going forward. In fact, most people are outright dismissive of new ideas yet unproven. If you do a search on HN about the viability of the currently unproven techs, like google glasses, 3D printers, you'll see plenty of evidence of that. I'm not sure why this is, exactly. Perhaps it's just more fun to be cynical and shoot down the weird things that other people are doing. Or maybe people don't actually like change. Or maybe people don't like being wrong, and if you poo poo most everything, it's likely you'll be right, since most things aren't mainstream game changers. Or perhaps people don't like hyperbole. I know I have my bullshit flag raised when someone's raving about something.

maxerickson 14y ago

If you squint a little bit, video games are a bigger business than movies and such, and they went pretty mainstream circa 1980.