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Every idea is a kind of money, or has a “money aspect”. It may be grounded in something that’s literally useful in a utilitarian/practical sense (ideas in hard sciences can help you feed or kill more people), or it may have some other utility (feels good to believe it), or a mix
Your (abstracted) money is useless if nobody else recognises your currency Your idea can be useful if it helps you achieve your desired outcomes, but in a sense it can also be useless if nobody recognises its value “Better” ideas do not always win (timescale-dependent)
Think of all the people with great ideas who had relatively miserable lives Tesla, Van Gogh and Turing come to mind, and also probably thousands of anonymous geniuses we will never hear about, many of them women and minorities
There’s a language called Esperanto. It’s a great idea: a simple, intuitive language - easier to learn than English, and once you learn it, it’s actually easier to learn other languages. But almost nobody cares about it https://t.co/eQ45B2fvQK https://t.co/KkBum3ySXg
Here we get to some meta ideas about ideas To some people, an idea’s odds of adoption are irrelevant to its greatness - ie you can have a great idea nobody cares about To others, adoption is a prerequisite - a good idea everyone adopts is superior to a great one nobody does
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" applies . You might be right about something, but if you die before you're validated...? Semmelweis insisted that doctors wash their hands. He was fired, then sent to an asylum, where he was beaten, and died. https://t.co/ZwFYSEO9Dj
Kotoku Wamura – mocked for worrying about tsunami, validated 25yrs after death Harry Markopolis, knew what Madoff was doing. Wrote book titled "No One Would Listen" Barry Marshall, ridiculed for his accurate belief that peptic ulcers caused by bacteria https://t.co/SB6hxxy8tN
John Yudkin, figured out that excessive sugar is bad, wrote a book titled “Pure, White and Deadly” - had his career hamstrung for it, and died before the world got around to properly internalizing his findings (we’re still working on it) https://t.co/M1p35DYxjS
Oh this is a good frame https://t.co/VLsAGxiRHG
"Clean your wounds and be careful with the antiseptics!" – Alexander Fleming "No❤️" – the prevailing medical orthodoxy of the 1910s https://t.co/hs2UhJyAkj
a decade before he discovered penicillin, which would be hailed as "the single greatest victory ever achieved over disease", Fleming figured out that you ought to clean your fucking wounds. As always, some guy being right about things is insufficient to persuade the establishment https://t.co/dGLy7j9n5a
sometimes everyone else is wrong https://t.co/4wcxtOSD2t
I rewatched The Big Short last night. I know it's dramatized, but it's really sobering to contemplate how people will think you're insane (literally – they'll think you're mentally unsound) for doing what you think is right, based on your rigorous assessment of reality https://t.co/ZHFhCW1kOg
@visakanv another one for the thread 😩https://t.co/5EZBQ1DaNX