The individual "stealing" them did their best to make sure no one knew where he was getting his ideas, which robbed me of the benefits of sharing those ideas as volunteer.
He also badly botched them all.
This is in line with the meme that "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." Me saying "You should do X!" utterly failed to result in X actually happening by someone not who was not me. That pithy one-liner failed to convey sufficient information to result in the production of the X I was envisioning when I said it.
The example I typically give is the word "chair." If I say "chair," what kind of chair do I mean? Am I thinking of a wooden kitchen chair while you are thinking of an overstuffed living room wing chair?
I had a similar thing happen at my corporate job where a new manager met very privately with me, implemented my proposal without giving me credit and bastardized it so badly that I wouldn't have wanted my name associated with her terrible, terrible program that completely missed the point of what I had proposed.
Years ago, I started a project to try to develop language for talking about ideas themselves and to make the kinds of distinctions you are talking about. We use the same word -- "idea" -- to talk about radical new theories and to talk about more prosaic details of how to get things done, business-wise: "It was my idea to paint it blue, not green."
I think we really need better ways to make such distinctions.
As an aside....etc etc
As an aside, I generally bring up Semmelweis and the like because I'm one of those unfortunate souls the world has decided is a loon. I don't have any answers for you because my methods for discovery and proof of concept fall outside of accepted scientific methods.
Silly me: I wasn't trying to make a scientific discovery backed up by evidence. I was just trying to not die and to be less tortured by my defective body.
People can basically take my word for that or not. Most people choose "not."
I don't have a ready solution for that.
Sounds wonderful! An IDE for concepts and definitions. Now it would have to have a visualizer and a bunch of NLP.
And when I say, "the colorless green ideas sleep furiously" it could synthesize an abstract picture of ideas (shapes) being various shades of grey, the ideas a new (green) and growing but the pace at which they stir starts to grow. A colorless idea is one which describes a technique or a capability but without a goal or context. To hammer, a hammer, a specific hammer, a specific hammer to build a house ... join, flatten, temporary, permanent, to move.
I could see a system like this being used in very delicate negotiations. It never occurred to me how difficult bidirectional translation could be with all the semantic nuance, history, idioms, etc. And then have personalities and intellects involved. The translators are the true heros of non-war.
Always enjoy your take.
I did a bit of work on the project back in November and since talking with you I have done some updates and made it public. There isn't much there at the moment but I think I know what I am doing now, which I didn't know five years or so ago.
I am not Galileo when I argue that our linear pricing model is an active blocker to product adoption and that we need to move to sublinear one asap in a bullshit corp meeting.
I wish I was. Lots of good ideas get lifted all the time, in the context of the Aiken quote, new is outside of the overton window, it flips problems on their heads. Some of the new ideas actually do have to get shoved, because also in this definition of new, it isn't really about quality. It is about newness.
We should solve the metaproblem of people not accepting the Scientific Method. It ultimately comes down to proof, verifiability, falsifiability and the techniques we choose to get there. Ridicule and rejection of concepts because they are new, I think are wholly human social traits.
How do we get answers to questions we can't even think of asking? And how do we expand the ways in which we ask questions?