My first thought was...how do you know people aren’t having ideas? Very few of my ideas are something I’ve thought enough about to write down or talk about in public, and many (most?) people do not have a great desire to write down or discuss their not-fully-fleshed-out ideas for public consumption anyway.
This comment is an idea of sorts, and I just happened to read it whilst at the right confluence of mood, energy, thoughtfulness, etc for me to put in the effort of making it. Another possible contributing explanation for the dearth of idea-having people?
how do you know people aren’t having ideas? Very few of my ideas are something I’ve thought enough about to write down or talk about in public, and many (most?) people do not have a great desire to write down or discuss their not-fully-fleshed-out ideas for public consumption anyway.
I suppose there are a lot of different lines we can draw.
Having ideas at all: almost literally everyone (although, I’m not sure what we should count here, exactly).
Having second thoughts; being dissatisfied with easy answers, and looking for better ones: lots of people, but, to greatly varying degrees.
Having an affordance to think new thoughts in an area of interest; not letting a vague notion of experts knowing better be a curiosity-stopper: somewhat rare? Particularly rare in combination with a moderately informed position? Maybe quite rare in combination with the “having second thoughts” attribute?
Building up an intellectual edifice (of whatever quality) around some topic of interest: fairly rare
Building up an intellectual edifice (of whatever quality) around some topic of interest: fairly rare
I definitely do this. I have half formed books that I might write one day on topics that interest me, and have sprawling Yed graphs in which I’m trying to make sense of confusions and conflicting evidence.
One thing of note is that I was introduced to explicit model building and theorizing a couple of years ago. Because of this had the mental handle of “building a model” as a thing that one could do, with a few role models of people doing it.
I was doing model building of some kind before then (I remember drawing out a graph of body language signals when I was about 21), but I think having the explicit handle helped a lot.
Yes, that is true. However, the thought I intended to convey when I started writing my comment was that it’s possible that many people have ideas that they just don’t write or talk about that much because of confidence or just not caring enough or whatever.
In other words, you might be asking “why don’t people want to share their ideas?” rather than “why don’t people have ideas?”.
Well, my original intention was definitely more like “why don’t more people keep developing their ideas further?” as opposed to “why don’t more people have ideas?”—but, I definitely grant that sharing ideas is what I actually am able to observe.
My first thought was...how do you know people aren’t having ideas? Very few of my ideas are something I’ve thought enough about to write down or talk about in public, and many (most?) people do not have a great desire to write down or discuss their not-fully-fleshed-out ideas for public consumption anyway.
This comment is an idea of sorts, and I just happened to read it whilst at the right confluence of mood, energy, thoughtfulness, etc for me to put in the effort of making it. Another possible contributing explanation for the dearth of idea-having people?
I suppose there are a lot of different lines we can draw.
Having ideas at all: almost literally everyone (although, I’m not sure what we should count here, exactly).
Having second thoughts; being dissatisfied with easy answers, and looking for better ones: lots of people, but, to greatly varying degrees.
Having an affordance to think new thoughts in an area of interest; not letting a vague notion of experts knowing better be a curiosity-stopper: somewhat rare? Particularly rare in combination with a moderately informed position? Maybe quite rare in combination with the “having second thoughts” attribute?
Building up an intellectual edifice (of whatever quality) around some topic of interest: fairly rare
I definitely do this. I have half formed books that I might write one day on topics that interest me, and have sprawling Yed graphs in which I’m trying to make sense of confusions and conflicting evidence.
One thing of note is that I was introduced to explicit model building and theorizing a couple of years ago. Because of this had the mental handle of “building a model” as a thing that one could do, with a few role models of people doing it.
I was doing model building of some kind before then (I remember drawing out a graph of body language signals when I was about 21), but I think having the explicit handle helped a lot.
Yes, that is true. However, the thought I intended to convey when I started writing my comment was that it’s possible that many people have ideas that they just don’t write or talk about that much because of confidence or just not caring enough or whatever.
In other words, you might be asking “why don’t people want to share their ideas?” rather than “why don’t people have ideas?”.
Well, my original intention was definitely more like “why don’t more people keep developing their ideas further?” as opposed to “why don’t more people have ideas?”—but, I definitely grant that sharing ideas is what I actually am able to observe.