Interesting conclusion. It sounds like the bystander effect. I wonder how many big ideas don’t get the action they deserve because upon hearing it we assume it’s already getting the effort/energy it deserves and that there isn’t room for our contribution.
Another weird takeaway is the timeline. I think my intuition whenever I hear about a good idea currently happening is that because it’s happening right now, it’s probably too late for me to get in on it at all because everyone already knows about it. I think that intuition is overweighted. If there’s a spectrum from ideas being fully saturated to completely empty of people working on them, when good ideas break in the news they are probably closer to the latter than I give them credit for being. At least, I need to update in that direction.
I think this is caused by the fact that we lack tooling to adequately assess the amount of free-energy available in new markets sparked by new ideas. Currently it seems the only gauge we have is media attention and investment announcements.
Taking the time to assess an opportunity is operationally expensive and I think I’ve optimized to accept that there’s probably little opportunity given that everyone else is observing the same thing. However, I’m not sure that it makes sense to adjust my optimization without first increasing my efficiency in assessing opportunities.
Ya, it’s interesting because it was a “so clearly a good idea” idea. We tend to either dismiss ideas as bad because we found the fatal flaw or think “this idea is so flawless it must’ve been the lowest hanging fruit and thus have already been picked.”
Another example that comes to mind is checklists in surgery. Gawande wrote the book “checklist manifesto” with his findings that a simple checklist dramatically improved surgical outcomes back in 2009. I wonder if the “maybe we should try to make some kind of checklist-ish modification to how we approach everything else in medicine” thought needs similar action.
Interesting conclusion. It sounds like the bystander effect. I wonder how many big ideas don’t get the action they deserve because upon hearing it we assume it’s already getting the effort/energy it deserves and that there isn’t room for our contribution.
Another weird takeaway is the timeline. I think my intuition whenever I hear about a good idea currently happening is that because it’s happening right now, it’s probably too late for me to get in on it at all because everyone already knows about it. I think that intuition is overweighted. If there’s a spectrum from ideas being fully saturated to completely empty of people working on them, when good ideas break in the news they are probably closer to the latter than I give them credit for being. At least, I need to update in that direction.
I think this is caused by the fact that we lack tooling to adequately assess the amount of free-energy available in new markets sparked by new ideas. Currently it seems the only gauge we have is media attention and investment announcements.
Taking the time to assess an opportunity is operationally expensive and I think I’ve optimized to accept that there’s probably little opportunity given that everyone else is observing the same thing. However, I’m not sure that it makes sense to adjust my optimization without first increasing my efficiency in assessing opportunities.
Ya, it’s interesting because it was a “so clearly a good idea” idea. We tend to either dismiss ideas as bad because we found the fatal flaw or think “this idea is so flawless it must’ve been the lowest hanging fruit and thus have already been picked.”
Another example that comes to mind is checklists in surgery. Gawande wrote the book “checklist manifesto” with his findings that a simple checklist dramatically improved surgical outcomes back in 2009. I wonder if the “maybe we should try to make some kind of checklist-ish modification to how we approach everything else in medicine” thought needs similar action.