

Ask HN: What to do about "grand ideas" in fields you have no expertise in? - sendos

Assume you have a great idea in a field you have no expertise in.<p>Of course, almost all people who are in this situation really don't have a great idea, but for the sake of this thread, let's assume that the idea is indeed great.<p>That is, great in the sense that if people with expertise and a proven track record in the field, and with connections in the industry, and with a lot of hard work, etc, could turn into something valuable.<p>e.g. a dentist having the idea for Tivo years before Tivo was out, or a computer programmer coming up with a design for a better propeller for oil tankers.<p>It seems to me that there is almost nothing you can do in this situation. Breaking into the TV/entertainment business, or the oil tanker business, or similar large industries is close to impossible for outsiders with no expertise in the field.<p>On the other end of the spectrum, I'm always fascinated by how easy it is for people within a field to test even half-baked ideas. A simple example is on the show Survivor, when the host once said that his niece had an idea for a challenge for the players, and the Survivor crew put it together and it was on the next episode. An outsider to the show and/or the industry would likely have to have a huge compelling case and do a lot of hard work before they even listen to his idea for the show.<p>This imbalance (for insiders and outsiders) is large and could be leading us to miss out on some great stuff in various fields.<p>Some questions for you guys:<p>1) Is it as impossible to do anything about ideas in fields you have no expertise in as I think it is?<p>2) Are we as a society losing out on some great or at least useful innovations because as society is currently set up, it doesn't facilitate cross-discipline (outsider) idea dissemination?<p>3) If the answers to the above are 'yes', is there anything that can be done to change this?<p>4) Is my premise wrong? Am I missing something?<p>(I should note that I can see that most ideas coming from people outside a particular field are useless, have been done before, are impractical, etc, but I think there may be a tiny minority that could prove useful in the right hands)
======
hugh3
_Of course, almost all people who are in this situation really don't have a
great idea, but for the sake of this thread, let's assume that the idea is
indeed great._

Why are we assuming that, again? Surely we should start by supposing we
_think_ we have a really great idea, and then making our first step figuring
out to figure out whether we have an actual great idea or a bad one. And the
best way to do that is to talk to someone who is an expert.

So while I don't have a solution to the general problem of what if you really
_do_ have a great idea, I do have the following advice: if you _think_ you
have a great idea, please be humble and skeptical about it. Please be willing
to accept that it might actually be a dumb idea because of some detail that
you, as a non-expert, know nothing about.

Personally I'm sick of reading disproofs of relativity and plans for perpetual
motion machines.

~~~
sendos
I need to clarify the OP, since it seems many are responding to points I
wasn't making.

Basically, like many of you, I have some ideas for things outside my field. I
can see that, if pursued by someone _in that field_ , they have an epsilon
probability of success and a (1-epsilon) probability of failure, where epsilon
can be very small.

What I was trying to say in the OP is that even if one of the ideas is within
the epsilon range, that doesn't mean that if _I_ pursue it, it will have
probability of success epsilon.

Most likely, if I pursue it, it will have probability of success of delta and
probability of failure (1-delta), where delta is much smaller than epsilon,
and is zero in most cases.

That's why some ideas, if they are had by people in the field may be worth
pursuing by them, since the odds of success, even if small, are not
negligible. If those same ideas are had by people outside the field, the odds
of success become negligible or zero, so they are never pursued.

As a small throw-away example, I live in an area where people put those silver
or white covers on the dashboard of their cars, to prevent the sun from
overheating the cabin of the car. I always thought that instead of this being
a gadget you buy and then have to manually fold and unfold and store when not
in use, cars should have those built-in, and you just press a button and some
silver-coated cover emerges from the front of the dashboard and covers the
front wind shield. Whether or not this particular idea would ever work, the
point is that if someone inside, say, Honda or BMW or whatever, has this idea
they can quickly make a CAD drawing and see how it would fit and work within
the existing CAD drawing of one of the company's cars, they could probably
price it, and if things look decent, they can pitch it to their boss. If
someone from outside the car company has this idea, the number of obstacles
they have to overcome just to get the idea heard is huge.

(Wasn't there a movie recently with Greg Kinnear where he played a guy who
invented intermittent windshield wipers and had a very tough time with the car
companies? I just found the person he was portraying:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns>)

The question is how many innovations like the intermittent windshield wipers
do we as a society miss out on because of the huge imbalance of how easy/hard
it is for people inside/outside a field to pursue ideas?

~~~
chc
This is true only for ideas that aren't original, but instead are very small
modifications to existing products.

~~~
alok-g
Or is it?

Even ignoring that the idea may be very original and still be a very small
modification to existing products, validating or implementing an idea takes a
lot more effort than coming up with an idea whether or not it is a small
modification to an existing product.

~~~
sendos
Do you think that if a dentist comes up with an idea for a more efficient
internal combustion engine, or comes up with the idea for intermittent
windshield wipers, that the effort to validate or implement those two ideas is
the same?

Validating small improvements to existing products is usually much easier than
validating fundamental changes to how things are done.

(Even ignoring the fact that, when the idea comes from someone outside the
field, if the idea is a fundamental change to how things are done, it has a
much higher probability of being a crackpot case, than if the idea is a small
modification to an existing product)

~~~
alok-g
Sure. Sure.

Having an existing product gives you a framework to validate it, so makes
things much easier. Yet, it is going to take more time and effort than
thinking of the idea itself.

Someone outside of the field may still come up with an original idea (with
much higher chance of it being a crackpot case), but would have no easy means
to validate it, whether it relates to an existing product or not.

------
cb18
If it is something you want to spend time doing, then act on it. Your outsider
status can be construed as an advantage in that you are less likely to be
constrained by unconscious acceptance of the current dogma of the field.

You have less excuses that ever before, and the availability of knowledge and
tools is greater than ever before.

If you want to design a 3D model - <http://sketchup.google.com/>

If you want to learn more about aeronautics -
[http://videolectures.net/mitworld_young_corn_garvey_haggerty...](http://videolectures.net/mitworld_young_corn_garvey_haggerty_flight/)

or, Neuropsychological Associations with Social Versus other Media -
<http://videolectures.net/icwsm2010_counts_ybf/>

or, whatever - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare>

If it is not something you want to spend time on, but feel it is truly a
'great idea,' then I would advise clarifying the idea and passing it on to
someone you think might be interested in acting on it. The ability to locate
these people is greater than ever before as well.

A google query of inurl:.edu _topic of interest_ , and you are essentially
searching across all the university departments in the USA.

------
mechanical_fish
Do not confuse ideas about the thing with the thing itself. [1]

You can have the idea for the TiVo without ever building a TiVo, just as
Babbage had the idea of the digital computer but couldn't find the money or
expertise to build one. But you can't watch television with your idea.

And it turns out that you can have a very complicated thing -- a dinosaur,
say, or a monkey -- without _anyone ever_ having had the _idea_ of a dinosaur
or a monkey.

The connection between great ideas and great things is often exaggerated. A
person with no ideas and an auto parts store is more likely to build a great
car than a person with nothing but ideas.

\---

[1] [http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/not-ideas-about-the-thing-
but...](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/not-ideas-about-the-thing-but-the-
thing-itself/)

~~~
mkramlich
Exactly.

Arthur C. Clarke is generally considered to be the guy who "invented"
telecommunications satellites. But he didn't build the first one. He just had
an idea. And he may not really have been the first person to have the idea,
just the first one to publish a document describing it that was read widely by
others. But if you want to somehow give monetary credit to anybody anywhere
who merely "has an idea" for something, without really going into the critical
details of making it real, and without making a real thing based on it, then
that leads to a world where patent trolls are much more powerful and
malevolent than they are currently.

------
hakunin
Most of the comments seem to be missing the point. There's a lack of cross-
discipline. If you are bad in field A, and an expert in field B, you may be
able to comeup with a revolutionary idea for field B, not because you're one
lucky son of a bitch, but because your expertise in area A put you in
advantageous/unique perspective. We all saw biologist cooperate with engineers
(using nature-invented systems in engineering, prostetic arms, etc),
politicians cooperate with doctors (cheap medical solutions for poorer
countries), and many more awesome examples. I think we're lacking some kind of
platform or incentive to interconnect disciplines. Programmers among us see it
everyday — just go to your local DMV, take a spot in the endless waiting line,
and notice how much you wish they'd let you write a decent piece of software
or build a simple mechanism to make this hell go away. We need to allow people
to tinker in unrelated to their own fields. How? I don't know, but I think
it's a big deal.

------
Eliezer
> _Assume you have a great idea in a field you have no expertise in._

Assume flaming monkeys are crawling out of my nose. How often does that ever
happen? I couldn't name three real examples off the top of my head.

------
javery
Since the best idea without the knowledge or ability to execute is worth $20
at most (<http://sivers.org/multiply>) I think your best bet would be to try
and give your idea to someone who can execute on it and if your lucky get a
point or two in their company or a role as an advisor.

------
chc
If your idea is really good and truly concrete, you can just make it. If a
dentist had an actionable idea for a DVR and the drive to make it happen, he
could have made it.

If you can't make the idea a reality, then you didn't have an actionable idea
to begin with. I don't believe you can possibly have a novel idea that a
skilled worker could implement as-is but not have the know-how to do so
yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

If you won't put in the effort to make it happen, then it doesn't make any
difference whether you were in the field or not.

~~~
dotBen
_If a dentist had an actionable idea for a DVR and the drive to make it
happen, he could have made it._

Yeah but if a DVR firmware developer had an actionable idea for a new form of
filling substrate it's unlikely he'd be able to get his idea to market. It's a
regulated area practiced by individuals with academic and industry
accreditation

(unlike the DVR, and wider software/hardware, industries which has no real
formal accreditation or academic requirements. This is why your way around
works and thus the answer to OP is "depends which market").

~~~
jacquesm
Well, he could set up shop in a non-regulated region and make a killing.

------
dbjacobs
This is a well known problem. How do you filter through the tons of junk to
find the golden nuggets? Experts are bandwidth constrained and can't look at
everything. So if you have a great idea/ product you must market it through
your social graph until someone who believes in you recommends to an expert
who values their opinion that they should look at the idea.

The only way around this is to implement the idea/product yourself or be
famous.

------
pavs
People often think their idea is great or very unique. What makes an idea
great is not that you think its great, but that it has transformed from just
merely an idea in your brain or skecth-pad to an action and the end result has
met your expectation for it to be considered a great idea. Then we can safely
say your idea is great.

At this moment, your idea is just an idea. Its not great. Yet.

------
DennisP
People are treating cancer fairly effectively with antiangiogenic drugs, which
restrict the tumors' blood supply.

Tumors generally have a poor blood supply in the first place. A while back I
read about some researchers who were using some kind of microbe that attacked
cells with poor blood supplies, as a way of attacking tumors.

I had just read about antiangiogenic therapy, which I think was fairly new at
the time. So I thought, hey, combine the two! Use the drugs to restrict the
tumor's blood supply even more, and then apply the microbe!

So I tracked down the email address of one of the microbe researchers, and
sent him my idea, prefaced by saying that I was an amateur and was probably
wasting his time.

Unfortunately he did not send back "OMG you just cured cancer!!" But he did
send a pleasant response saying that some of the best ideas in science come
from people outside the field.

------
eavc
My advice would be to find someone who is experienced in that field. I don't
mean cold-call the leading expert.

I mean dial up a buddy in a related field. Talk with them about your idea.
They can help you understand the things you might be overlooking or introduce
you to someone closer to that topic.

------
tocomment
This is a great question. I think you're right that we need some new social
institutions to make it easier for outsiders to propose ideas for other
industries.

For the time being i make sure to write down my ideas for other industries.

~~~
jacquesm
That social institution is already here, it's called the comment section on
just about every blog.

BP has a problem with their well at a mile under water ? Let's send divers
there! And so on.

Outsiders will _very_ rarely have a 'great idea' for some other field, but the
cost of processing all the junk probably far outweighs the benefits.

A more likely course is that someone is able to take an idea from a non-
related field and apply it to their own.

For instance, I have an 'idea' (more of a sketch of an implementation) about a
solar powered Stirling engine coupled with a Stirling engine driven in reverse
to provide air conditioning driven by renewables. I probably have the gear
required to make a proto type and I might just be able to find the time to do
it.

But heating and cooling is not 'my field' (not by a long shot), so instead of
sitting on the idea or trying to mint it (very very hard, for just an idea)
I've thrown it out often enough that it would be fairly hard for someone else
to come along and patent an implementation. So even if I won't derive direct
value from the idea I may one day be able to buy the device.

And I even doubt that my 'idea' is an original one, it's a pretty obvious
combination of elements.

------
goodside
Even if the idea is great, for the sake of argument, it doesnt count for as
much as you seem to think it should. There are several products that I thought
of before they were released, but I didn't see them as good enough to throw my
life at. It's safe to assume that for _any_ good idea that takes lots of
initiative to get off the ground, it was already thought up by dozens of
people who were either lazy or underestimated its significance. The idea
doesn't entitle you to anything just because somebody somewhere might be
willing to run with it.

------
themullet
Few grand / silly ideas had:

Neuroscience - Brain scan a person from all religions to show it's the same
thing that they are all doing. (massive blood flow reduction in the part of
the brain that orientates their positioning)

Eco - Do a tidal power generator crossed with a desalination plant. Experiment
with resonance frequencies of hydrogen and ionosphere for clean power. Make
ultra cheap solar panels and dump them in the desert. (pretty sure some tin
foil, a way of converting and some genetic algorithm shaping should get this
done) Patch any ozone holes with spraying of o^3 / something to counter act
the cfcs. Co2 problem (down to 60% of the problem from 90% a few years ago)
harvest the co2 out!

Physics - There's always going to be smaller! One of the strings in string
theory is consciousness

Society - Legalise all drugs, prostitution and assisted suicide (stops making
so many people into criminals) No speed limit on motorways at certain times

Biology - Find what plants grow well in all soil / sand conditions. (grow the
desert / useless land) Bacterial recycling / break down of rubbish.

TV/entertainment - Providers release torrents / streams to anywhere with ads
before the pirates do it for them.

And to answer the ops questions: 1\. I think it's possible to influence fields
you have no expertise in, as can email scientists / producers. 2\. yes 3\.
More empowerment to people to get involved. One day a year ask people if they
have any ideas or suggestions in x field.

------
zb
Occasional false negatives are the price you pay for filtering out the
crackpot ideas and I, for one, am OK with that.

------
blasdel
There's an app for that: <http://www.halfbakery.com/>

------
mkramlich
the modern web should make this less of a problem though. just imagine sites
where folks of a certain profession/industry gather. now somebody outside that
profession can go to that site, post their idea, boom, it's seen, and somebody
in that industry or with the right skills can act on it. it's not perfect, but
it does allow something like you're describing.

now if you want to make something where the contributor's idea is "protected",
while still being thrown over the wall like that, it would be harder. by
protected I mean ensuring the contributor will get credited or paid if the
idea turns into something. The standard solutions for that are to start a
business and/or file a patent.

------
sayemm
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp had absolutely no exp in the field for Palantir, yet
they've executed and made it happen: <http://bit.ly/Ja6YZ>

~~~
_delirium
On the plus side, Thiel was already really rich, which made it a lot easier to
hire people who did have experience in the field. May have been trickier if it
was two people with no experience in the field and _also_ not in possession of
billions of dollars.

------
skurland78704
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Frequency-
hopping_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Frequency-
hopping_spread-spectrum_invention)

------
dogmatic69
I think the saying "if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it" holds
true. Not everybody can be a Steve Jobs or Lary Page.

------
noverloop
I would suggest pitching your idea to people who are active in that industry
but not in a position to execute the idea, he will have a more educated grasp
if you can execute your idea on your own. There is a quote from someone that
you might find useful (if anybody on HN knows from who this quote is, please
tell)

The difference between a visionary idea and a stupid idea is that other people
can see the vision

