

Malcolm Gladwell: Who says big ideas are rare? - danohuiginn
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

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KrisJordan
My key take away from this article is that, for the most part, good ideas are
a commodity and _great_ ideas are rarely uniquely arrived at. This is one of
the reasons VCs will never sign NDAs, because if they haven't already seen the
same idea you're pitching from someone else, they most likely will soon. Just
about every source I've read says that success is rarely the idea and most
often the people behind it. Ideas are a commodity.

It's a lot like playing billiards. Given the same set of circumstances on a
table and a number of players pondering the same problem, _"where should I hit
the cue ball?"_ , it is very likely that two players come to derive the same
idea. Whether or not the player can make the shot, that's a matter of talent,
practice, and a little bit of luck. Until you've reached a certain level it's
your ability to make the shots you dream up, not your ability to dream up
shots, that will determine whether you win or lose.

~~~
pchristensen
"where should I hit the cue ball?"

Immediate entry into my book of useful analogies! Thanks!

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rml
Was anyone else slightly perturbed by this article? The existence of well-
funded and -connected companies like Intellectual Ventures, and their obvious
influence over the authors such as Mr. Gladwell that serve to glorify them to
the reading public, is rather frightening to me. As far as I can tell, they do
not make a single product, nor do they provide a single service. Instead, they
charge others for the right to use "their" ideas.

It sends a bit of a chill down my spine -- I'm trying to imagine what my copy
of Kleppner & Ramsey's 'Quick Calculus' (about a $20 book) would have cost if
Newton had 'patented' Calculus, and if his (hypothetical, avaricious)
descendants and their attorneys had insisted on their 'right' to a cut of the
profits.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Remember that, unlike modern copyright and all trademarks, patents still
expire. You get 17 to 20 years. If Newton had patented calculus... the patent
would have expired centuries ago.

So let's try an alternative view of Intellectual Ventures: They perform the
valuable service of donating piles and piles of inventions to the world's
stock of prior art. Each donation takes twenty years to mature, of course, but
after that it's available to be developed into a product without any patent
worries, because the patent will have already been filed and allowed to
expire. If one of their ideas looks particularly great and you don't want to
have to wait twenty years, you can get an early start just by paying them a
royalty.

This, of course, is _the original purpose and spirit_ of the patent laws. And,
though patents are broken in various ways right now, that purpose is still
alive -- especially relative to the terrible situation with copyright law,
which is nigh-100% broken thanks to the Disney Corporation and its pet
lawmakers.

~~~
dissenter
There are two common ways to justify patents:

1\. They help the public by encouraging inventors to publicly document their
inventions

2\. They protect and encourage inventors by giving them control over
intellectual property

You've taken Position 1, which I find to be a very weak argument in favor of
patents.

The world owes a great debt to Einstein and Godel, for relativity and
incompleteness, but it is widely recognized that without them the same results
would still have been achieved only a few years later. That's the way science
works. It progresses along a linear track, and the best minds are only a few
years, and more often a few months, ahead of the pack. The literature is rife
with examples, but here are a few more good ones to chew on: Newton-Leibniz,
Cook-Levin, Knuth–Morris–Pratt, Williamson-Diffie-Hellman, and Cocks-Rivest-
Shamir-Adleman.

Though Williamson and Cocks are special cases because of the secrecy granted
to government institutions, the point is clear: it is almost certain _someone
else_ would've arrived at the same ideas around the same time. Ideas are
precipitated by conditions. These citations make this explicit with
conflicting dates. You usually don't get this type of evidence because you
usually don't get to publish the same idea twice.

For Position 1 to make any sense, it would have to take me longer than 20
years to reverse engineer your idea. Most patentable ideas could be reverse
engineered in a day, and more to the point, most patentable 'flashes of
genius' are repeated by other people in a vacuum, that is, without any
knowledge of the original. Conditions are such that nowadays most people have
the same idea within weeks of each other.

With an environment like that, patents are not working to bring new ideas to
the public. The public is already having these ideas. What the patent is doing
is preventing competitors from entering the market, when competition is almost
universally good for the public. You can make the argument that the patent
serves the interest of the patenter, and that would be true, but any argument
that makes the claim that patents support the public---except in the
circuitous way that they help inventors---is specious at best.

I know a lot of people who've dealt with the patent system (software). I'm in
the process of filing two myself. I don't know anyone who looks at the patent
database as a 'treasure trove' of ideas they can put to use. Most people think
of it as a 'minefield' of ideas that are already taken. The patent database is
boring, and all of its contents are written specifically to hold up in court
battles, not to explain ideas to people who might put them to use. That's a
pretty good empirical argument that the patent system is not working according
to the guidelines in Position 1.

You take a very sympathetic view of Intellectual Ventures, but to me they
don't look like a particularly benevolent company. If they're so intent on
licensing new inventions to the public, why isn't there any link to their
inventions on their website? Why aren't they pushing a product? There isn't
even a basic search link to the USPTO that fills in their name in the assignee
field.

The fact that this company raised "hundreds of millions of dollars" indicates
to me that a lot of very intelligent people view this as a very profitable
field. It is worth keeping in mind that Intellectual Ventures, as a company,
aims to produce no product. They only seek to amass a portfolio of rights
granted by the US Government to seek injunctions against others using ideas to
which they've laid claim.

Now I suppose it is possible that Intellectual Ventures could come up with
useful inventions and license them to the public at a fair price, but that is
not the impression I get in their case. It seems to me that, their
contributions to national defense notwithstanding, they've created a humongous
patent troll, and that they intend to front-run intellectual development in
this country. They only have to pay a stable of experts to stay a few months
ahead of the state of the art, and they don't have to pay a dime for product
development. Whether or not they turn into a patent troll, this is in fact
what they are incentivized by the market to do. Companies with unregulated,
government-granted monopolies rarely charge fair rates for their services.

Public understanding will almost certainly be advanced short-term by
Intellectual Ventures, but the question is whether they are deserving of this
money, producing no product themselves, and whether they won't harm us in the
long run by stymieing the progress of someone who might. Remember, without the
protections of patent law, this company wouldn't exist. My concern is not with
the people who start a company like Intellectual Ventures, but with the patent
laws that make it so enticing for a company like Intellectual Ventures to
behave in a counterproductive way.

~~~
menloparkbum
"The world owes a great debt to Einstein and Godel, for relativity and
incompleteness, but it is widely recognized that without them the same results
would still have been achieved only a few years later. "

This is hardly widely recognized.

~~~
bluishgreen
1.The mathematics that sort of fell into and formed the structure of Einsteins
work was about 50 years old when he used them. I am talking about the attempt
to prove Euclids 5th axiom using the first 4 and the subsequent evolution of
hyperbolic geometry.

2.Godel was working on the problem that was proposed by Hilbert (Google for
Hilbert's List Of Problems). At the time when Godel was working on it, it was
actively pursued by prominent math dudes of the era;

One connection that I find in both these cases is this: They were both trying
to prove something is not possible. And whenever that happened in Science - it
usually causes a huge splash. Another example is Group Theory: fell out of the
proof for the fact that a 5th degree equation cannot be solved using algebra.

~~~
bkovitz
Actually, I believe group theory emerged very gradually from many simultaneous
developments. Other sources: permutations, symmetries of crystals and linear
transformations, quaternions and matrices (though theory of equations was
indeed the main driver). I believe it wasn't until after a bunch of these had
reached a high level of development (around 1880) that the abstract group
concept began attracting attention as a field of research, because then people
could see its use for unifying all those others. Abel's proof for 5th-degree
polynomials came out in 1824, and Galois' general proof was published in 1846,
so this was slow going, even by nineteenth-century standards.

BTW, I thought I read that Gödel worked pretty much as a lone wolf on his
stuff, as most mathematicians weren't into it. And the trend has continued:
foundations of mathematics has gotten research attention from surprisingly few
people. I'm not 100% sure of this, though.

But anyway, yeah, proving that something can't be done is definitely a big
deal. Interesting observation. I will percolate on that.

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scott_s
The article suggests that geniuses may just be more efficient discoverers than
the "average" researcher. The example is that Kelvin had 32 multiple
discoveries, so the implication is that Kelvin is equal to the sum of those 32
people.

Maybe there's something to this. But I have to wonder if certain discoveries
really do require a genius, and not just someone who is good. That is, is a
genius more than just the sum of his lessers?

What pops into mind is special and general relativity. In Bill Bryson's _A
Short History of Nearly Everything_ , a physicist says that special relativity
was an idea whose time had come. If Einstein hadn't discovered and published
it, someone else would have. But he followed that up with if Einstein hadn't
come up with general relativity, we'd still be waiting for it.

Going back to Newton, calculus was a multiple, but as far as I know, his laws
of motion and law of universal gravitation are not.

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DmitriLebedev
The article sounds doubtful: the smart guys gathered and invented something,
but, as I understand (having jumped paragraphs to save time), they only
patented their ideas, neither evaluating, nor testing any of them. This may
lead to making a set of useless patents that nobody will ever try to use.

Imagine that instead of YC there were a "think tank", a gathering of people
who would invent websites or startups and then just document the ideas. This
can be much more entertaining and may seem a deeper thought than advising on
and evaluating the "materialized" projects. But how many projects, that sound
nice, will ever be done, and how successful can they be?

~~~
bkovitz
I would love to read what such a think tank comes up with. Right now my brain
is fried for coming up with business ideas, but groovin' on doing
implementation work. If I knew of a small web-site idea that had a really good
shot at making money by subscription, I would blast it out immediately. Then
my rent would be paid for when I go to grad school this Fall. :)

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fallentimes
It's not the big ideas that are rare - it's the execution/implementation.

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DaniFong
Intellectual Ventures sounds like dinner in grad school

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dangoldin
I'm surprised that we are able to get articles that are future dated.

It's not even May 12th yet but I get to read the articles now - now that's a
discovery!

~~~
cdr
You must not read magazines (the dead-tree type) much.

~~~
dangoldin
I used to but I've moved on to the wonderful world of the internet.

At least I never bothered with TV.

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TrevorJ
Well well worth the read, thank you.

