Confirmation bias causes us to assume our best known etymology is the etymology.
But what is the actual bad thing that happens if this happens?
Previous performance predicts future performance, and places where one good idea originated probably have others you could use.
This is not as true as it sounds if you’re selecting on previous performance as opposed to observing it; said another way, you aren’t accounting for regression to the mean.
In a model where people have some hidden “propensity to have good ideas” stat and your probability of generating a good idea at any time is some function of this stat + noise, for many plausible distributions of this stat and the noise, most good ideas will have been had by a person who has one or two good ideas, simply because there are many more people who are okay at having good ideas + get lucky than there are people who are extremely good at having good ideas.
In any case, searching for people with good ideas is only one of many things that people might want to do and I don’t see the hurry in wanting everyone to have gone through the first step or two of this process if they have other things to do.
But what is the actual bad thing that happens if this happens?
This is not as true as it sounds if you’re selecting on previous performance as opposed to observing it; said another way, you aren’t accounting for regression to the mean.
In a model where people have some hidden “propensity to have good ideas” stat and your probability of generating a good idea at any time is some function of this stat + noise, for many plausible distributions of this stat and the noise, most good ideas will have been had by a person who has one or two good ideas, simply because there are many more people who are okay at having good ideas + get lucky than there are people who are extremely good at having good ideas.
In any case, searching for people with good ideas is only one of many things that people might want to do and I don’t see the hurry in wanting everyone to have gone through the first step or two of this process if they have other things to do.