A common belief is that ideas are "a dime a dozen" and that "execution is what matters". I used to hear these cliches all the time when I frequented the forums here. The problem with these cliches is that they're simultaneously true and also deeply misleading. What do I mean by that?
It's true that ideas are a dime a dozen. On the other hand, that doesn't imply that all ideas are equally valuable. Some are promising, and some just suck. Generating ideas is easy, but figuring out which is ones are good is the tricky part. Throwing time into a bad idea is very costly, but so is missing an opportunity by dismissing a promising idea too early.
The problem is, it's very very hard to evaluate ideas. Anyone who thinks they are good at evaluating ideas probably needs to get their head checked. It requires a lot of taste and expertise, and chances are you might not have enough of either. (That's not a knock on you, dear reader -- most people don't have good taste. I don't. Taste is a skill you have to consciously develop, it doesn't just come on its own).
So why are bad ideas good?
Because the truly revolutionary ideas often initially sound very stupid. The reason why they sound stupid is because they don't fit into our existing understanding of how things should work, and when things don't compute it's natural to think that it's "because it makes no sense".
Indeed, that's why they're revolutionary ideas -- because in the current context they don't quite make sense. Revolutionary ideas are revolutionary precisely because they aren't a product of our current understanding -- they're the product of a a different understanding of the world, an understanding you might not yet be savvy to. If the idea came out of common culture, it'd be an evolutionary idea, not revolutionary.
When something comes out of left field, it's very easy to dismiss it as "dumb" because without the context to understand it, it will certainly look that way. Wikipedia sounded like a profoundly foolish idea initially, and yet it's become one of the most important sites in the world. Facebook is also hard to explain to someone who lacks the necessary context to understand it, but once they experience it they usually "get it" in a way that explanations can't convey.
So the value in bad ideas, I think, is that they can point you to your blind spots if you're willing to consider them on their own merits. Of course, many of them are still just bad ideas, but because ideas are cheap, creating lots of bad ideas will get you closer to the understanding you need to find the good ones.
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(Incidentally this post had nothing to do with what I originally wanted to talk about, it just sort of evolved. Oops. In any case I was going to talk about bad ideas because I'm planning on coming up with a lot of them soon. So hopefully I'll write about that soon. )
