4 ms·

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

pjc50 1mo ago
Possibly "bad ideas are cheap". A lot of people got tired of "ideas guys" who never build anything themselves. The best case of a raw idea is an uncut diamond, it will inevitably require work.
- snek_case 1mo ago
  Most people (and most companies) can't tell bad ideas from good ideas. This is also true of LLMs to some degree. They need post-training in specific domains (e.g. coding) to become competent in that specific area.
jasode 1mo ago
The other half of the one-liner is "Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything." - E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing." - Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.) - "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader." Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".
- robocat 1mo ago
  "Execution is everything" is unfortunately tautological in that it implies you first reach success, then you measure the execution and idea. It leaves no escape-hatch to judge that an idea is bad. And bad execution can only be spotted if somebody else does good execution. Similar to saying a startup needs to get product-market-fit to get success. Success defines that you have product-market-fit. We are all horrifically bad at thinking about cause and effect, or talking about it. But yes, I've slowly learnt that doing anything often matters more than a grand idea.
tripledry 1mo ago
I still think it's correct. Execution is the part that matters. Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence. Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.
- ontouchstart 1mo ago
  Ideas are seeds. Seeds can be cheap or expensive, but perhaps what we want to talk about is not the _cost_ of ideas but the _value_ of ideas. The correlation between cost and value can be very complicated, especially in the chaotic world (or chaotic situation).
- munksbeer 1mo ago
  In university in 1995/96 I remember having to put my bank card details into a website to pay for something. I hated the idea that some third party would probably be storing these details and could in theory abuse them or leak them. I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.
robocat 1mo ago
> psyop Who's pushing an agenda and why?
- AuthAuth 1mo ago
  big idea wants to keep all the ideas to itself

pjc50 1mo ago

Possibly "bad ideas are cheap". A lot of people got tired of "ideas guys" who never build anything themselves. The best case of a raw idea is an uncut diamond, it will inevitably require work.

snek_case 1mo ago
Most people (and most companies) can't tell bad ideas from good ideas. This is also true of LLMs to some degree. They need post-training in specific domains (e.g. coding) to become competent in that specific area.

jasode 1mo ago

The other half of the one-liner is "Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything." - E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing." - Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.) - "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader." Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".

robocat 1mo ago
"Execution is everything" is unfortunately tautological in that it implies you first reach success, then you measure the execution and idea. It leaves no escape-hatch to judge that an idea is bad. And bad execution can only be spotted if somebody else does good execution. Similar to saying a startup needs to get product-market-fit to get success. Success defines that you have product-market-fit. We are all horrifically bad at thinking about cause and effect, or talking about it. But yes, I've slowly learnt that doing anything often matters more than a grand idea.

tripledry 1mo ago

I still think it's correct. Execution is the part that matters. Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence. Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.

ontouchstart 1mo ago
Ideas are seeds. Seeds can be cheap or expensive, but perhaps what we want to talk about is not the _cost_ of ideas but the _value_ of ideas. The correlation between cost and value can be very complicated, especially in the chaotic world (or chaotic situation).
munksbeer 1mo ago
In university in 1995/96 I remember having to put my bank card details into a website to pay for something. I hated the idea that some third party would probably be storing these details and could in theory abuse them or leak them. I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.

robocat 1mo ago

> psyop Who's pushing an agenda and why?

AuthAuth 1mo ago
big idea wants to keep all the ideas to itself