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Comment by samsquire | Hacker News Reader

I am a serial idea writer and I have to agree with the author.

Ideas are inherently valuable, maybe not financially, but they're valuable to have and valuable to society to share.

It makes me angry that people actually believe ideas are inherently worthless. Or that without any code or implementation they're worthless. It's a meme that needs to die. It's like having your cake and eating it too. Here's a free idea for you to think about and contribute to but it's not enough, you want the outcome without any effort too. So you say my idea is worthless.

Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs and any thing that humanity has ever accomplished. And ideas are meant to be shared.

People that think ideas are worthless are shutting down conversations about good ideas because of this obsession with the idea that execution is all that matters. And so many ideas die on the grape vine because of this poor attitude.

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I don't think you're wrong. Great ideas are extremely valuable. But I think the disconnect comes from the fact that it's very easy to mistake mediocre ideas for great ones.

Most times when I hear someone's self-described great idea it seems impressive at first, but then fails to hold up to scrutiny. Among other reasons that an idea may not be as valuable as it appears:

* It's not actually original. Even if not widespread, one or more other parties is already working on it.

* "And then a miracle happens..." Some aspect of the idea assumes magic technology or dependencies that don't exist.

* The low-level details are not elucidated and have just been hand-waved away.

* It's solving a problem that not many people actually have.

* It's not economical or practical.

* It requires mass widespread adoption or buy-in from powerful interests before being able to actually have value. There's no gentle gradient to product organic growth.

The contrast, is that it's much harder to be deluded about the value of execution. Great execution is obvious when it happens. Ask people for their great ideas, and you'll often get something half-baked. Ask people for a demonstrated history of execution, and that's pretty hard to fake.

Ideas tend not be valued, not because they're valueless, but because they're hard to value.

Thank you for your comment.

I would hope that people share their ideas anyway, so at least it can be discussed. And not get shut down. It's usually obvious if an idea has prior art or if it's not really good.

> * "And then a miracle happens..." Some aspect of the idea assumes magic technology or dependencies that don't exist.

Except someone else managed to get funding for such a magic idea and you are pretending to work on a solution to it. Self driving cars, AI startups as an example.

The miracle part is extremely valuable so. Because if you are able to pull that miracle you have an incredible USP and competitive advantage. A big if, so. But if...

I think the ideas being worthless meme is an over-correction of the person that thinks the idea is all of the value and wants to hire an engineer to 'just do the implementation' for little reward.

Ideas have value, and someone who can unite people with a clear vision can do incredible things but the implementation is a big part of the actual difficulty and usually you have to update the idea as you learn more from the implementation.

In general I suspect the implementation is usually harder than coming up with the idea in most cases and fewer people can do it. (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper).

Still, obvious value in trying to come up with things from first principles.

I don't argue that ideas are the hardest part or that ideas are harder than implementation.

I just reject that ideas are worthless. I share all my ideas online because I think they have value. I want people to steal them because I want the outcome of the idea: I want the idea's implementation to exist in the world for me to use. Some credit would be nice too of course.

> (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper)

If we look at this in a strict sense then those are implementations as well, just theoretical ones.

I consider a scientific pager, a thorough technical specification or a rich, well-structured design document not 'just' ideas anymore. So in a sense those examples actually don't relativize your point, but strengthen it.

Ideas are usually much more vague, they point in a general direction. Another interesting fact about them is that they are often incremental, small and pragmatic, but they are just as much ideas as the big, exciting ones.

Smaller, more practical ideas are my personal bread and butter. They also need to be taken apart, composed into a sound plan and implemented, but they don't ask for much.

Yep, it’s because of all the obnoxious “idea men” out there that try to treat technically skilled makers like ditch diggers who just need to be told where to dig the hole and how big.

Yeah, this is the reason right here. There are thousands of people on internet forums, social media sites and subreddits who want to start projects with themselves as the 'idea man', assuming other people will join and do all the actual implementation work. You see it a lot in game design/development communities, where these people talk about how they'll make the next mega 3D MMORPG where you can go anywhere and do anything, and assume they can just come up with the ideas while their team does all the building work.

The idea might potentially be interesting in itself, but without the implementation it won't be all that useful.

Yep - people like this generally set off alarms for me because ideas are cheap and it’s easy to sit around “thinking of things” and trick yourself into thinking you’re making some sort of progress.

Mainly though it’s through the act of attempting implementation and interacting with the world that you learn the most. Someone who refuses to try to do this to get better probably just isn’t very capable and their ideas probably aren’t very good.

Even if you do come up with an idea that is viable most of the time so have others and it’s the successful execution that sets you apart.

I’ve met people that sit around patting themselves on the back for having the same idea that someone else used to actually build something.

While having the insight is critical, it’s a lot smaller part (also usually their idea was a vague generalization of whatever ended up existing).

Kind of reminds me of how the Winklevoss twins were portrayed in the social network, no idea how true to life that is - but that sense of ownership they had when they didn’t really do anything of value.

I don't think I've ever heard people say that ideas are entirely worthless. Good ideas have enormous potential value.

The argument is that, in general, unlocking this potential requires great execution. You can't (in general) make a good idea successful without it. You can, on the other hand, take bad or boring or tired ideas and make them successful with great execution.

So, great execution (in general) matters more than great ideas.

I've had bad experiences trying to share ideas with people online.

Sorry to hear that. I know how it feels -- anytime I share anything online (my blog posts, my open source projects, etc.), I get beaten up by a vocal subset of readers. Sometimes they're well meaning, and sometimes they're just jerks (and sometimes both.)

I've learned over the decades that any feedback is good feedback, and it helps to stay optimistic, and keep trying anyway.

Good luck to you!

That's not unique to sharing ideas, unfortunately. Lots of people actually share their implementations, and also get beaten over the head with a stick...

"worthless" is too strong, but I meet so many people that overvalue them that my language has become more about devaluing ideas than valuing them.

Look I'm not going to sign an NDA for something with no work done on it yet. If you want to share an idea and enrich the world sure that's fine. But most of the time while executing an idea, changes have to be made, assumptions weren't quite right, edge cases show up, the world was more complex than expected.

Conversations don't shut down because ideas are worthless. When discussing or evaluating ideas, especially bussiness idea that involve social aspect, the main challenge is to select right assumptions and projections. Modeling future social behaviour is extremely hard and error prone. So it's not that ideas are worthless, but discussions about ideas and possible realizations are worthless until you start working on them.

> Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs I disagree. Practice and experience are precursor of RFCs and ISOs.

The great example is HTML, HTTP protocol or even OAuth2. All the related RFC are there to standardize and unify existing and document evolution. They all started with ideas, but the actual adopted standards are results of working groups, that had a lot of experience. And the deficiencies of HTTP1.1 shows it very well, as authors of the original ideas could not potentially know where it would lead eventually.

Thank you for your comment.

> but the actual adopted standards are results of working groups, that had a lot of experience

Talking about ideas (and applying experience) is some thing we should be doing.

Not true. Ideas are always great when they stay in your head. If you have a big ego and low self esteem they might even be the best thing since sliced bread. Without execution however, they are useless and not proofed to be even average. Everyone has ideas, because they don’t require hard work or thought

The problem with ideas is that they start of as perfect in our heads. But the more they touch reality, the more they crumble. They become messy, they start to incorporate tradeoffs.

It takes a lot of perseverance to further shape your idea to match reality.

So I agree that they shouldn't die too fast. An idea is always the starting point, but never the end.

It might be more accurate to say that ideas are plentiful.

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