Simon's "how to write a great research paper" material is simply great. I think I need to follow his advice, particularly about starting to write early and often.

I've countless ideas bouncing inside my head, most of which will simply get lost, but many of which I truly believe should see the light of day. I think I'm a bit of an over-thinker, and tend to wait until my ideas sufficiently mature before expressing them. It's weird, but I guess I've always been like that. The problem is, I have so much stuff that goes on in a typical day, so many ideas coming and going, that I'm not able to mature those ideas as I would like. Most of it just gathers dust and eventually dissapears. I suspect a lot of people have this problem.

Ideas are cheap.

There's a significant difference between an idea and an implementation of that idea. This, too, is where I get caught up. Sure I could come up with some nice theoretical goop, but if there's no implementation, what the hell good is it? Somebody might read it someday, but likely not. But unfortunately, implementing an idea is much more costly than simply thinking it. And I tend to get bored pretty quickly anyhow, instead preempting progress in order to gravitate towards better ideas that I perceive to be more worth my time.

It seems to me that the most successful people in our society are those that can follow through and execute on mediocre-to-good ideas. There's much more value in being able to implement an idea (be it your own or somebody elses) than actually thinking it in the first place.

Open source seems to be pretty helpful in solving this problem. Similar to how a senior researcher will often be given a group of folks to implement his/her ideas, if you can start an open source project and convince a bunch of people it's worthwhile you can acheive much more in a shorter period of time than doing it by yourself. Of course, commercial environments are much like this, too, but it's often more difficult to sell ideas in a corporate environment. In a smaller business, you're likely to have a better chance. Starting a start-up to implement your idea is another great option, one that's usually significantly most costly than any of the others above.

I mention all of this without discussing goals. What is the goal of implementing an idea anyhow? For some, I suppose it's money. A good implementation of a good idea probably will get some level of recognition, and with clever distribution models for that idea, you could make some cash. But for a lot of people, I think it's laying the foundation for future ideas. As Simon puts it, infecting your audience with your idea. So when I mention “benefit,“ it's highly subjective based on whether you're a greedy bastard or a naive idealog (of course there are other choices, too ;)).

How does one evaluate the cost/benefit of following through on an idea? I wonder if there are any decent models out there that would help. I suppose choosing between ideas is a bit like branching between possible nodes in a graph in elementary utility theory. Simply calculate the probability of a given outcome, cost of traversing the node, and perceived benefit, and simply seek to minimize cost and maximize benefit. Seems so simple. The inherent lack of structure in human thought troubles me. The fact that I put up with it even more so.

Random.

Back to writing my book.