Are There Any Good Ideas That Will Succeed?

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Goshawk: I distinguish between different kinds of bad seeming ideas. One is an idea where you're like, well, even if you succeeded your goal, which is really difficult, it will be pointless. He says there aren't going to be many flying machine ideas around that people are kind of interested in at any given point in time. Goshaw: The cloud revolution took off 20 years ago; Amazon started doing the two day delivery five years ago.

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How are curiosity and innovation connected? What's the most important problem in your field? And are you working on it? Why or why not? Is curiosity the best heuristic — either for an individual or for society at large — for finding valuable problems to work on? What mental models do people tend to use by default? How much is an academic degree worth these days? What are some alternatives to degrees that could count as valid credentials, i.e., as unfakeable (or very-hard-to-fake) signals of someone's level of skill in an area? Can people learn to fake any kind of signal, or are there some that are inherently unfakeable?

Rohit Krishnan is an essayist at Strange Loop Canon, where he writes about business, tech, and economics. He's been an entrepreneur and an investor and is very excited to see when crazy ideas meet the real world. Follow him on Twitter at @krishnanrohit.

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