---
client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h05m
qa_time: 0h10m
---
Here’s a story you may recognize. There's a bright up-and-coming young person - let's call her Alice. Alice has a cool idea. It seems like maybe an important idea, a big idea, an idea which might matter. A new and valuable idea. It’s the first time Alice has come up with a high-potential idea herself, something which she’s never heard in a class or read in a book or what have you.

So Alice goes all-in pursuing this idea. She spends months fleshing it out. Maybe she writes a paper, or starts a blog, or gets a research grant, or starts a company, or whatever, in order to pursue the high-potential idea, bring it to the world.

And sometimes it just works!

… but more often, the high-potential idea doesn’t actually work out. Maybe it turns out to be basically-the-same as something which has already been tried. Maybe it runs into some major barrier, some not-easily-patchable flaw in the idea. Maybe the problem it solves just wasn’t that important in the first place.

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mfPHTWsFhzmcXw8ta/the-feeling-of-idea-scarcity

Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO.

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