What Makes an Idea Great?
What even is an idea?
To understand what qualifies as an idea, I will define it with percepts and concepts. Precepts are basic observations of objects and ideas that exist in the world and do not qualify as an idea. For instance, a mental image of a mountain isn’t an idea. However, different percepts can fuse together to make a concept; the percept of a mountain and the percept of gold can form the synthesis of a golden mountain. A concept most definitely is an idea.
Of course, concepts can synthesize into other concepts too. Using the golden mountain example, people could imagine a golden mountain with a stream of flooding gemstones. Any synthesis of either percepts or concepts is an idea.
So what makes an idea “good” or “bad?” When addressing this question, I will be focusing on what makes an idea successful. To define “success,” I’m striving to find what makes an idea accepted, popular, and impactful, not necessarily if the idea is logically sound.
Can’t be banal
Of course, trite ideas are not appealing: syntheses that have been made commonly before are deemed cliche. One could imagine a metaphysical boundary in the mind: within the boundary, we have subconsciously memorized common syntheses. For instance, you could probably find the phrases “sapphire seas,” “emerald eyes,” and any common love story pattern in this boundary.
We are almost automatically repulsed by hackneyed ideas. But why do we strive for originality in the first place? Humans are biologically engineered to be bored easily and crave novelty to survive and reproduce. Also, the reason why people want to have a great idea is to make some kind of innovation that changes how people think and behave; they desire good ideas to transcend normality. By definition, trite ideas are unattractive.
Can’t be too complicated
Ideas that are way beyond the cliche boundary are also problematic. People find attraction in something that is half-familiar and half-new. Many of these ideas are too obscure and difficult to be either applied or appreciated. A lot of intricate ideas can be logically sound but ineffective. In philosophy, the discussion of morality, which is a lot closer to our boundary, is a lot more prominent than the questioning of obscure metaphysics. Great ideas are often on the cusp of the boundary, slightly leaning outside the comfort zone.
Availability heuristic and idea evaluation
But you’ve all thought of the two criteria mentioned above before. What really makes the difference beyond that is how we evaluate ideas.
The availability heuristic is the idea (full pun intended) that people justify topics and concepts using immediate examples that pop into their heads. A famous instance that people use to explain the availability heuristic is going on plane rides. If someone is afraid to go on plane rides, they can remove the fear by reminding themselves that car rides are more dangerous statistically, but they still ride cars anyway.
To evaluate ideas, people must be able to quickly and easily pull examples that support the idea. This processing can be done statistically or anecdotally. For instance, when thinking about buying an insulated water bottle, a bunch of examples will pop into someone’s head: the time when the coffee went cold at work, the time when an iced tea became hot tea in the summer weather, and the time when a glass bottle shattered. Statistically, 9-hour insulation sounds great. The customer buys the bottle. Personally, I do this for every single purchase. When I wanted a smartwatch, I imagined every example that made a smartwatch useful: timing myself for studying, the statistic of people becoming fitter with smartwatches, and how cool it would look. Most of these examples do not necessarily have to be rational or grounded in logic. An idea that can simply trigger these examples to occur is already a great one.
An academic example of the availability heuristic’s role can be the success of utilitarianism. It’s a simple idea: maximize pleasure, and minimize pain. Someone can very easily pull thousands and thousands of examples of when pleasure felt good and pain felt horrible. Contrast this idea to ideas that have much harder and fewer examples, such as Spinoza’s long mathematical proof that nature is “God.”
This third criterion actually goes hand-in-hand with criterion two (don’t be too complex or obscure) because people find a hard time pulling examples from topics they’ve never heard of before. Great ideas should be able to make people think of hundreds of examples.
When an idea is right outside the cliche boundary, isn’t too complex, and can make people think of examples to justify why it works, it often hits a lot of success, both academically and commercially.
