[[6 Ideas]] - At their essence, an idea lies along the space between good and bad ideas, i.e., their quality of an idea is not binary. Rather, it slides along a spectrum going from 'good' to 'less good' into the territory of 'more bad' to, eventually, just plain 'bad'. - But what makes an idea good? It’s potential utility or value- this could be robustly quantified (economic value, improvement in efficiency) v/s qualitative (societal impact, quality of life improvement, improved mental health). Assuming the good ideas are lasting lends a Lindyness to them- they’re net positive value. - Within the space of good ideas there are either useful or useless ideas. The more useless an idea, the closer it should tend to a bad idea but that is not so. - The scale of a useless idea (FIFA World Cup ex) vs a useful idea (Google) shows us that both attract a large global population. - The same idea can be compared to WhatsApp, which is a basic need today. It seemed like a useless idea possibly as people would have said there is SMS. So why that? Today, if you try to build a variant to whatsapp, you get something like oh but there's whatsapp. i think threre's always room for soemthing new- spend time building an identical thing and then start making it different in some way that makes sense- which is what I am doing with Howler. - A side note: people often complain about space research's expenses, often asking researchers to cut working in this area. Why doesn't anyone cut the Fifa WC instead, which is far more useless and costs an insanely larger amount of money to the funder. (and I like football!) - Only some ideas become products quickly whereas others are systematically productised. Both can have scale but it’s the underlying infrastructure that makes rapid realisation possible- software is particularly good in rapidness but manufacturing is also getting there.