Hacker News | Ask HN: What to do about "grand ideas" in fields you have no expertise in?

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	Ask HN: What to do about "grand ideas" in fields you have no expertise in?
	37 points by sendos 44 days ago \| comments
	Assume you have a great idea in a field you have no expertise in. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. This imbalance (for insiders and outsiders) is large and could be leading us to miss out on some great stuff in various fields. Some questions for you guys: 1) Is it as impossible to do anything about ideas in fields you have no expertise in as I think it is? 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? 3) If the answers to the above are 'yes', is there anything that can be done to change this? 4) Is my premise wrong? Am I missing something? (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)

14 points by hugh3 44 days ago | link

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.

4 points by derefr 44 days ago | link

If you're humble and skeptical about it, though, you'll never believe in it strongly enough to even get out of the house and talk to the experts. Better "strong opinions, weakly held."

1 point by sendos 43 days ago | link

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?

1 point by hugh3 42 days ago | link

Pop-up sunshields do exist for back windscreens, I remember seeing one on an S-Class Mercedes back in 1995ish. I find it hard to believe that nobody in the car industry has ever thought about putting one up front as well.

1 point by chc 43 days ago | link

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

1 point by sendos 43 days ago | link

I think this is almost by definition the case, since if you are not working in some field, the way you get an idea for an improvement for that field is by being a user of a product of that field (e.g. by driving a car), and therefore you lack the knowledge base to make truly fundamental changes. You will most likely come up with modifications to existing products you use (e.g. the intermittent wipers)

But that's OK. It's not only huge advances (like the design of a nuclear power plant, which no outsider to that field will ever be able to accomplish) that matter; our life is also improved by many small advances. The more a society enables such things, the better.

1 point by alok-g 43 days ago | link

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.

1 point by sendos 43 days ago | link

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)

1 point by alok-g 43 days ago | link

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.

1 point by eavc 43 days ago | link

Because when you assume something, it allows for the conversation to progress to a more interesting point. What you're describing is obvious and common, so there's no need to harp on it.

1 point by alinajaf 44 days ago | link

+1 on the plans for perpetual motion machines, I actually get these once every few years from otherwise smart people who don't understand the basics of physics.

6 points by mechanical_fish 44 days ago | link

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...

3 points by mkramlich 44 days ago | link

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.

5 points by Eliezer 44 days ago | link

> 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.

6 points by cb18 44 days ago | link

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...

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.

3 points by chc 44 days ago | link

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.

3 points by dotBen 44 days ago | link

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").

2 points by jacquesm 44 days ago | link

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

4 points by javery 44 days ago | link

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.

2 points by pavs 44 days ago | link

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.

1 point by goodside 44 days ago | link

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.

3 points by hakunin 44 days ago | link

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.

2 points by noverloop 44 days ago | link

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

3 points by dbjacobs 44 days ago | link

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.

2 points by eavc 43 days ago | link

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.

1 point by DennisP 43 days ago | link

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.

2 points by blasdel 44 days ago | link

There's an app for that: http://www.halfbakery.com/

1 point by mkramlich 44 days ago | link

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.

2 points by zb 44 days ago | link

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

2 points by tocomment 44 days ago | link

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.

1 point by jacquesm 44 days ago | link

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.

0 points by themullet 43 days ago | link

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.

1 point by sayemm 44 days ago | link

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

1 point by _delirium 44 days ago | link

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.

1 point by skurland78704 44 days ago | link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Frequency-hopping_s...

1 point by dogmatic69 44 days ago | link

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.