Insider optimization vs. outsider invention, and questions to ask of new ideas
I don’t care about extending someone else’s views by an incremental amount. If an area appears to be sufficiently explored, I want to explore somewhere else. I don’t want to be a burden on anyone. I don’t want to create derivative work.
For some people, it seems that meeting people who like the same things as them actually encourages them. That’s not the effect It has for me.
I want us to explore as much of the surface area of potential human knowledge as we possibly can. This means putting preference to crazy ideas precisely because they are crazy.
Facebook noticed this thing internally. The same people who come up with insights and new ideas are hardly the same people you want scaling these ideas. The idea people build a prototype that dramatically changed things, and once that’s out they go looking for the next high. So they need to be reminded to tend to their success, or taken off that project altogether.
Peter Thiel says great founders are simultaneously deep insiders and outsiders. Without being both, you might get bored of your groundbreaking idea too quickly, or you might keep optimizing some existing solution to death. The insider tends toward optimization. The outsider, towards invention.
The real question that should be asked of new ideas:
Is there a bridge to it from what we already know?
How fruitful could this idea be if it did take off?
Where is this idea on the board of existing ideas that are currently in play? Is this new idea in a quickly populating area? Is it the first idea in a long time to come into a dead zone? Do people keep reinventing this thing every X years because we forget? Alfred Korzybski and Big Yud come to mind. Same with reinventing god as the Other, the Aristotelian view, coldness be my god, god of irony, etc
Do tools exist to evaluate the idea, or is it totally off the map?
If it’s difficult to map, maybe this is good? Ideas that are easily placed are likely not interesting enough