Epistemic status: Draft Amnesty Week. This was an original note in its raw, unedited form. I can't finish it now, as I am writing a post for the fast-approaching "Essays on Longtermism" competition. It came out not-too-shabby, so I don't feel too bad about it. But I really wish I had time to finish it. Perhaps I will at some point.
Some entrepreneurial-type people say “ideas are shit”, because execution is what really matters. But the truth is, not all ideas are equally good. Ideas are different and some dramatically different. Most ideas are average, but some are really good and some are really really really really good and there are like a few levels above that.
So it’s not just all about execution even though it’s true execution matters an incredible amount. Yes, a pretty good idea executed incredibly well beats out the best idea in the world executed extremely poorly. BUT, Amazon is a better idea than Uber, and Uber is a better idea than Groupon. No matter how well you execute on Groupon it’s probably not gonna be as good as Uber, no matter how well you execute on Uber it’s probably not gonna well as as good as Amazon.
It’s not just about how simple or complex an idea is, some complex ideas are terrible and some simple ideas are extremely good, and vice versa. What I’m saying is that if you think of one idea, on average it’s going to be average. If you think of 100 ideas and pick out the best one as effectively as you can, You might get a quite good idea. If you think of 1 million ideas and pick out the best one you’ll probably get an extremely good idea and if you pick out the best idea out of billions or trillions of ideas you’ll probably get one of the best ideas you can find.
It’s possible you could become a A millionaire on a mediocre idea, a billionaire on a good idea, but if you want to become a trillionaire, you probably have to have one of the best ideas that has ever been effectively put into practice.
Everybody has a lot of ideas in their own life, most of those ideas are pretty average, a few of them are good, a very few of them are extremely good, and a tiny number of them are life transforming. You can probably think of some of those ideas in your life that have completely changed your trajectory and made you a better person different than you otherwise would have ever been. The right piece of advice, the right learning experience, the right insight at the right time can totally change a person, sometimes in extremely good ways. Not every idea can do that, but once in a while, you are coming across an idea that does just this.
So I think people who say “ideas are shit“ just don’t have very many good ideas, and maybe they don’t have enough ideas at all. The problem is, everyone thinks they have good ideas, and everyone has some good ideas, but to have some of the best ideas in the world is actually pretty damn hard, and there aren’t very many people who have thought of the best ideas in the world.
It’s not common to be a top-notch ideas-person, it’s actually an extremely, extremely rare trait, similar to being a top-notch entrepreneur or top-notch CEO. There may be some correlation but it’s not necessarily a big one, some of the people who have the best ideas in the world aren’t that good at executing, and some of the people who are best at executing in the world don’t have that good of ideas.
Everyone thinks they have good ideas, but the fact Is most people have average ideas and when people have bad ideas it’s a lot of work and not rewarding to try to debate them, and the person gets very attached to their ideas and defensive when you try to disprove them and so most people go on thinking their ideas are great even when they’re not, because no one wants to do the thankless work of antagonizing them and wasting their own time and energy debunking them, and besides if they are superb at executing they can make mediocre ideas seem like they were actually pretty good..
But you can learn to be better at generating good ideas, and just as importantly you can get good at throwing out bad ideas. If you have 1 million ideas and try to execute every single one of them, it doesn’t matter that one or two of the ideas are extremely good, you’re not going to succeed at even the mediocre ideas.
But if you can get rid of all the ideas except The absolute best ones that transform your life and transform the world, you can have a really big impact, I think it’s really important to learn to get good at generating good ideas and learning to sift through and pick out the gold, develop it, refine it, develop it into something extremely powerful and actionable with a step-wise map and plan, and integrate it into yourself or the world
Note to self:
I should add some parts about how I do this and processes that you could use to do this for an individual or an organization, basically two separate posts in one, or just separate posts “ how to find, develop, and implement the best ideas in the world” or something catchy, feels like that could be more impactful.
This would also be a good thing to research in detail, again this is one reason for studying Charity Entrepreneurship in profound detail, could also read Holden Karnofsky stuff again, and other posts in the community about how to do research effectively
Also, note that ideas here could be defined very broadly, you can also do this with decisions, finding people or things in the world you like, figuring out what you want to say in a given moment or who you want to be as a person on a micro and macro scale, what values you want to hold, etc., etc., etc., in many areas of life you can find what is really important and focus on that, and I think doing this can lead to really, really good results.
The forum is the main place that I publish my content. If you want to get my second post when I publish it, feel free to subscribe. I am also designing a Charity Entrepreneurship-style Better Futures Incubator, will be posting about this soon as well.
Also, to get a discussion going, I'd love to hear what your absolute very best idea you've ever had is, and/or the best idea you've ever heard? Or if you really want to get carried away, your best three ideas? I would love for the comments section to be a huge public good of all of the best ideas that could benefit anyone who reads them. Maybe if your idea is long, post a short summary of it at the beginning so we can efficiently evaluate it.
I am planning to make a list of my best ideas and start posting them soon, would love for this to be a norm that people take on, always recording and sharing your absolute best ideas. Then we could compile all of the ideas together in one master list and vote on the very best ones to get a ranked list of all time best/most useful ideas.
Some musings:
What counts as an idea? Is an entire book an idea, or does it have to be tweet-length? What about a whole EA Forum post, is that one idea or a collection of ideas? E =MC^2 is an idea... but it takes a lot of background knowledge to understand it. One should probably understand Newton's Laws first. So which idea is more important, relativity or the precursor? What about the idea of numbers?
Context seems really important. An idea without the resources to execute it is basically useless. There could be ecosystems where there are ideators and executors, but it takes a lot of coordination between those people.
There definitely seems to be a power law to ideas. But it's also not necessarily easy for people to identify how good an idea is in advance.
Often we need to build up the dependencies to effectuate a good idea or even recognize it in the first place. Maybe even just recognizing all the good ideas we already have laying around, and wiring them together appropriately. Maybe normal people are already good at acting on most of the goodness of ideas. Maybe even people in dire states, say a homeless drug addict, could already be tapping most of the good ideas that are already laying around just by the sheer fact of being a biological organism existing! You didn't specify whether the capability to have vision counts as an idea. I didn't expect to be making this point but I could argue we're already surfing some pretty damn good ideas like "seeing things" and on the margin the multipliers we can get from the additional stuff we call "ideating" isn't worth that much extra.
I would be hesitant to discount the accumulated wisdom of entrepreneurs on this question. One thing they're reacting to is that for every executor there's 10 idea people, or some ratio like that. "Talk is cheap". Having many ideas likely indicates some level of overthinking and paralysis. Success requires not just picking the right idea but sticking to it, and if one is trying to optimize for the best idea then something else more shiny may come along and derail the work that was built up, turning it into an unfinished bridge. Maybe it's good to have more discourse where people share their ideas, but also it makes sense why doing that too much would be penalized as it's a tax on bullshit.
Also, the best ideas often have something antimemetic about them that means they weren't picked before. This means it's hard to tell what's the best idea; it requires discernment, taste, and building up a solid worldview. Also, the idea's probably high variance and therefore risks negative externalities that could be bigger than the expected positive externalities. There's an optimizer's curse.
The world is often chaotic and the end result can only come from many iterations until the system is far from the initial conditions.
The goodness of ideas seems more easily evaluable in retrospect. Maybe the best result from this line of thinking is to do retroactive funding of the best ideas already out there. Speaking from tons of experience, I really doubt the best idea can come from sitting down afresh with a piece of paper and thinking "hmm what ideas can I list down" and then picking the best one.
OTOH, let me explore this idea more favorably, but with a different frame.
The world is a giant map. We need to get to X. It's somewhere but we don't know where. I like thinking in terms of navigation, at least because it befits my mind well. We don't have a map before us, so we start heading anywhere (since we don't know where we're going). This is foolish, except insofar as we have never navigated before and need to calibrate how it even works to traverse the territory before we try to do it for real. If you're going the wrong way you'll need to turn around. It's good to save tons of energy by getting your route right first. If you're leading a party of people it is especially important you have good discourse about where X is, especially if there are disagreements you should try to resolve them first. Unless you intentionally plan to split up and cover more ground! There should be some Xploration, but also groups should stick together in order to survive.
It is very important to discern between information saying to go in opposite directions and figure out what is true before heading there, or maintaining an average between those epistemic states until you learn more (e.g. AI doom vs optimism).
But I think most of the navigation is pretty straightforward. Eat and sleep well, have friends, save the world, don't hurt others. You can probably figure out you need to "head north" to get to X, in the analogy. Even if X ends up being in Norway instead of Sweden, it probably didn't change your instrumentally convergent trajectory that much, assuming the best ideas are near each other. But if there are wild swings between where X is, then one should stop moving and resolve those cruxes. It's about the journey though, and one should probably keep moving and doing various sidequests in the local city, checking the tavern's bounty board, while you debate which way to go next. This means building up convergent resources, with the Slack to keep exploring indefinitely.
People who play various games probably have something to say about ideal strategy. I worry I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur as much as I'd like, I'm not that good at real-time strategy with fast decisionmaking under VUCA like Starcraft, or RPGs with complex decisionmaking on loadouts and inventory.
As a human with a tendency towards perfectionism, it's probably a bad idea for me to try to evaluate the bestness of ideas with too much granularity. Better for AI agents to pick up the work. Maybe we need to just generate more ideas and put them out there in the marketplace for them to be evaluated at all.
I talked to Claude a bit about this and slightly want to walk something back; I think idea generation and listmaking can be great if done structuredly and probably collectively. Charity Entrepreneurship goes through hundreds of ideas before picking the best one; this is a lot more structured and systematic than when I list things out on my notebok. That said I am also skeptical their approach scales that well, it feels high modernist and I'm more of the school that thinks founders should be the ones coming up with the ideas out of a personal Weltaanschaung, out of deep personal engagement with the world building up tons of context about how things work.