Think Before You Speak (And Signal It)

Most new ideas that human beings come up with are wrong, and if someone just thought of something five seconds ago and excitedly wants to tell you about it, probably the only benefit of listening is not offending the person.

This doesn't jive well with my intuition about conversations being good ways to shape new ideas. It's very common for conversation participants to state their ideas aloud without having even thought about them for 5 seconds. Maybe if we were all robots sending signals to each other using TCP/IP then it would be good for each individual robot to spend a certain amount of processing power on an idea and ensure basic soundness before sending it to other robots in the network, but humans can't flip on excitement like a switch. Excitement is valuable, and conversations about exciting topics are a good way to generate it artificially.

Hmmm... just a couple of days ago I posted a comment here at LW, initially prefaced with something to the effect of "I've actually been thinking about this exact issue off and on for several years now".... but I ended up editing that out because I thought it sounded pretentious.

I don't know about other people, but I do know something about myself: I don't fully know what I think until I either write it down or speak up. Moreover, the benefits of speaking up without fully thought through ideas is high in group conversations - rather than trying to complete a thought with one's own limited repertoire of to-hand facts and concepts, one can use the group's.

Interesting idea.

I agree that trusting newly formed ideas is risky, but there are several reasons to convey them anyway (non-comprehensive listing):

• To recruit assistance in developing and verifying them

• To convey an idea that is obvious in retrospect, an idea you can be confident in immediately

• To signal cleverness and ability to think on one's feet

• To socially play with the ideas

What we are really after though is to asses how much weight to assign to an idea off the bat so we can calculate the opportunity costs of thinking about the idea in greater detail and asking for the idea to be fleshed out and conveyed fully. This overlaps somewhat with the confidence (context sensitive rules in determining) with which the speaker is conveying the idea. Also, how do you gauge how old an idea really is? Especially if it condenses gradually or is a simple combination out of very old parts? Still... some metric is better than no metric.

Time spent thinking about something correlates far too much with how much a person likes an idea. People who believe strongly in the Holy Trinity have spent far more time on average thinking about it than people who don't.

So, you will end up very strongly biased if you follow own advice (but then I haven't thought about it much at all).

I have been thinking about this comment for three hours before making it. I do that for all my comments, which is why you should trust my inferences more.

This may be either in addition to or as an alternative to other ways of communicating how confident we are about our ideas.

Time spent by you thinking about a question doesn't necessarily allow other people to make meaningful conclusions about whether the conclusion is reasonable. Maybe you are brilliant at X, and two minutes' thinking produces reliably correct conclusions, but you are confused about Y, and several months' thinking shouldn't be trusted to be adequate.

Once you are introspective enough to consider the advice of this post, you should also be in a better position to make the corresponding correction in your level of confidence. Overall, it's easier to communicate only the level of confidence that takes into account the appropriate factors, rather than communicating the factors themselves, such as the time spent thinking. This is also polite, like including a link to a discussed article in a post, instead of giving the readers hints on how to find it themselves using a search engine.

So, the advice I can draw from this post is, in estimating your confidence in conclusions you've made about X, take the time spent thinking about X into account, and don't forget to signal your confidence in the assertions you make.

P.S. This post should link to Hold Off On Proposing Solutions.

Regarding time, it seems to me that the attitude with which an idea is embraced has as much to do with its credibility as the amount of time spent on it. God is plausibly the idea which has had the most time spent on it, but not very successfully. Most of Newton's time was spent on it, for instance. In philosophy, concepts from evidential decision theory to epiphenomenalism have absorbed massive effort by capable people. In a more practical domain, so have essentially all ideologies and movements, yet the intellectual output of almost all ideologies and movements seems to rapidly level off.

Also, I don't think that your objection to the co-CEO issue works well within Robin's usual frame of status-competition. If co-CEOs are needed for decision making, just hire two non-twins, but if you are looking for incredible productivity as a status symbol twins are advantaged. Many companies, but particularly the Virgin group, clearly benefit from this.

For a clearer case, if you can tell a VC that you completed 4 Bachelors degrees in 3 years while working half-time and coding some open-source software, then twins who hired a third party to play them in the open-source community have a huge advantage.

I noticed that the variance in the amount of time different people spend thinking through new ideas before they speak is quite high.

This is one of the basic characteristics of introversion vs. extroversion where extroverts tend to have less of a filter on their thoughts before speaking.

This is probably a good idea in general. However, there is likely an advantage to discussing an idea reasonably soon, rather than letting it bounce around too long in the echo chambers of one's own head. When I've tutored freshman physics, I like my students to explain concepts back to me; it's a good way to see if they understand the connections between ideas or are just doing algebra - or worse, have developed a preliminary distorted "theory" of physics (what's the gravitational potential energy of the earth wrt the sun? oh, that's easy. E=mgh).

But I think it's an excellent idea for this community. (5 min).

A good way of doing this, ISTM, would be to encourage the practice of writing posts that got their start in life as comments.

This leaves a visible record of a) how long someone has been informally kicking an idea around before writing it up, b) if the write-up comes as the summation of a somewhat extended discussion, what objections were raised and dealt with.

There are certainly posts that I've thought about more than the twin post, but I'm not sure it was below median. I certainly do have opinions on the relative quality of my posts, and I've struggled with how to signal that to readers. And it is interesting that bloggers don't more often explicitly make that distinction. Even in this post you didn't rank it relative to other posts of yours, which would be the most useful info you could offer.

On the plausibility of secret twins, Vassar has it right below. Twin CEOs only appear more productive, and perhaps only are more productive if a wider audience doesn't know their secret.

Well, I think it depends on the kind of idea.

A complex theory requires a lot of thinking, and one should do all a favor by making sure there are no obvious showstoppers.

On the other hand, when coming up with ideas for a product name, it can be very effective to do some brainstorming with other people.

Most new ideas that human beings come up with are wrong.

Added to my quotes file.

Is this a disguised plea to karma-enforce a more rigorous separation between "things that should be Open Thread comments" and "things that should be top-level posts"? If so, I suggest you go ahead and suggest that norm. Otherwise, yours seems to be a very vague post.