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JustinShovelain comments on Think Before You Speak (And Signal It) - Less Wrong
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Interesting idea.
I agree that trusting newly formed ideas is risky, but there are several reasons to convey them anyway (non-comprehensive listing):
To recruit assistance in developing and verifying them
To convey an idea that is obvious in retrospect, an idea you can be confident in immediately
To signal cleverness and ability to think on one's feet
To socially play with the ideas
What we are really after though is to asses how much weight to assign to an idea off the bat so we can calculate the opportunity costs of thinking about the idea in greater detail and asking for the idea to be fleshed out and conveyed fully. This overlaps somewhat with the confidence (context sensitive rules in determining) with which the speaker is conveying the idea. Also, how do you gauge how old an idea really is? Especially if it condenses gradually or is a simple combination out of very old parts? Still... some metric is better than no metric.
<Thought about for 1 minute. Written up in 5 minutes.>
Solutions to hard puzzles are good examples of these. NP-problems, where finding a solution is (believed to be) exponentially harder than checking the correctness of it, is the extreme case.
<Thought about 2 minutes, written up in 2.>
Such ideas are prone to being flawed because they fail to take into account relevant information that has been temporarily forgotten.