What's hard is finding original things that *work*. Almost definitionally, if something is original then we lack cultural knowledge around to pull it off, so even if the idea is good (which most aren't), the execution is way more likely to fail.
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And then even if you succeed you have to market it, and again almost definitionally if it's particularly original then people won't be familiar with it so you won't have much to lean on in that marketing.
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Most successful things are not that original, but that's not because originality is hard, it's because being successful is hard and originality makes it harder.
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I mean you're right that people who are being original are at the frontier of their field, but that's because the frontier of a field is defined as the bits where the original stuff lives. There are just way more fields than we give credit for.
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Replying to @DRMacIver @Lynoure
Hm, I see, you're thinking more of entrepreneurs, I was thinking of intellectuals But still my intuition would be that for every successful startup, there must've been hundreds of people (surely, on a planet of 8 billion) who thought of it but didn't get around to implementation
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Unless you're in some well-financed tech lab doing cutting edge research on things nobody outside the lab ever heard of, which is what I meant by frontier
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Replying to @mechanicalmonk1
No, it works for both entrepeneurs and intellectuals. It's just not hard to find problems or ways of looking at things that nobody else has worked on before. You just take a bunch of ideas from disparate fields and try to synthesize them and something new will pop out.
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Replying to @DRMacIver @mechanicalmonk1
And it won't necessarily be new and good, or even new and interesting, but it will be new. Additionally, even if you have the same idea that other people have had and not followed through on, actually doing the work inevitably puts you in new situations and gives new insights.
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Replying to @mechanicalmonk1
David R. MacIver Retweeted David Chapman
Also, this: https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1218960929305415680 … There's just a huge amount of stuff where nobody ever seems to have done the work because there's no incentive to do it. Originality is easy if you can buck the incentives and just look for weird shit nobody's bothered with.
David R. MacIver added,
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For example, you’d think “how does graduate school work?” would be worth looking into a bit, butpic.twitter.com/vs40m6S39B
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Replying to @Meaningness @mechanicalmonk1
I suspect the people who would ask this question are afraid of the answers they might find.
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