http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/01/Do-You-Have-a-WorldChanging-Idea?WT.mc_id=1_11_2012_studentannualletter_fb&WT.tsrc=Facebook

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What is the point of this?

People can submit their world-changing ideas and possibly have them implemented by a powerful organization? Potentially make a hugely influential and technically knowledgeable person aware of some of the issues people here are interested/concerned with?

The comments on that site are not inspiring.

[-][anonymous]00

By Sturgeon's law that's hardly surprising and not a reason to get dispirited. What I'm curious about is how are they planning to filter through all that crap.

What I'm curious about is how are they planning to filter through all that crap.

That's a large part of what I meant.

They can probably easily filter out responses shorter than a paragraph, and there may be some way to filter for grammatical correctness (which I suspect correlates at least loosely with having a well formed idea).

Because HS students know these kind of things.

Heh. Well, asking them "Of the choices the world faces, which ones seem most important to HS students?" would probably have sounded condescending.

Heh. Well, asking them "Of the choices the world faces, which ones seem most important to HS students?" would probably have sounded condescending.

Not to mention eliminating most of whatever potential benefit there was to asking the group. The extra layer of indirection ensures that the particularly insightful will be having insights into the thinking of their less astute peers rather than the topic itself.

Do you think this is his real motivation? I can't imagine what he expects to learn.

Well, knowing what adolescents think is important is useful if you intend to market important-seeming things to adolescents.

Or any other demographic whose primary defining characteristic is their age group, really.

[-]Shmi30

typo: word/world

Thanks. I'll probably just submit a modified version of my Thiel application.