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ChristianKl comments on In praise of gullibility? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I would have it, and I don't find it great. Why should baking be an individual effort? Teamwork is better. It should be seen as "here, if you like it, help me bake it". That is why it is Discussion, not Main. I think a good way to use this site setup would be to throw half-baked things into Discussion, if it sounds interesting cooperate on baking it, then when done promote to Main. Really, why don't we do this?
All the great articles in the past, LW 2007-2010 look a lot like individual effort. Why should it be so?
Is this a bit Silicon Valley Culture? Because those guys do the same - they have a software idea and work on it individually or with 1-2 co-founders. Why? Why not start an open source project and invite contributors from Step 1? Why not throw half-made ideas out in the wild and encourage others to work on them to finish them? Assuming you are not after the money but after a solution you yourself would use, of course - "scratch your own itch" is a good idea in open source.
This kind of individual-effort culture sounds a lot like a culture where insights are in abundance but working on them is scarce, so people don't value much insights from others as long as they are not properly worked out. Well, I should say I am pretty much used to the opposite, most folks I know just work routine and hardly any reflection at all...
Because ideas are cheap. There an abundance of ideas but not enough people to execute ideas well. Executing ideas well needs focused effort which is easier when you have a company that can pay developers.
That doesn't mean that there aren't cases where the open source model makes sense, but quite often it's easier with a different model.
Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Good ideas are precious and rare.
The problem is that you don't know whether an idea is good if you don't try to execute on it. The way you show that an idea is good is to actually execute on it.
I don't think it's true. Take the reverse case: can you tell that an idea is bad without executing it? Yes, most of the times you can. Obviously, there is uncertainty, but usually you can get a decent estimate of the "quality" of an idea before you start to act on it. There are, of course, nuances and exceptions.
I agree that there are idea for which there are obvious reasons that the idea is bad but most of the time there isn't that certainty.
Many successful companies such as AirBnB or PInterest had a hard time raising money because investors thought those were bad ideas.
On element of a good startup idea is that there's little direct competition. If the idea is obvious there's usually competition.
But are you sure in this? I for example have zero even remotely actionable startup ideas right now. By actionable I mean something looking very simple on the outside, such as hipmunk or reddit, is also a huge amount of work. So all the ideas I would have already look complex on the outside, that is impossibly much work probably :) So what I would call actionable startup idea is something that does not look more complex than hipmunk.
If you look at Reddit, Reddit wasn't the first idea of the guys. The got to Y Combinator and Paul Graham basically said that their original idea was crap but that Paul Graham really liked the guys so they should still enter Y Combinator. Then the come up with Reddit.
The kind of people who have good startup ideas usually can come up with more than one idea.