Re: how to judge creative ideas

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

Chris Horton wrote:
>
...
> There are many values we hold as a society which cannot be
> reduced to the bottom line.

I agree.

There's a lot going on that cannot be described by the
usual laws of economics.  All in all, the not-for-profit
sector (including charities, hobbies, pets, and all that)
is comparable in size to the government sector and the
for-profit business sector.

> But for many stockholders there is only the
> bottom line.

There are such things as non-profit and not-for-profit
corporations.  I sit on the board of one, and belong to
others.

I enjoy gardening as a hobby.  I don't pretend that it is
an economical way to to produce food;  if you figure what
my time is worth, I grow some astonishingly costly tomatoes.
I don't expect anybody to buy them at price=cost or anything
like that.

Some people play chess as a hobby.  It takes a certain
amount of time, and produces nothing salable.  Some people
do amateur physics as a hobby.  Once again, it produces
nothing salable.  All this is perfectly understandable.

The place where I get confused is when people do hobbyist-
grade physics and expect taxpayers to pay for it.  I don't
expect the government to subsidize my tomato-garden, and
if I do "physics" that is of no interest to anybody but
myself, I wouldn't dare ask the government to pay for that,
either.

...
> Among these societal interests are the intellectual curiosity and adventure
> of discovering the unknown, and the fascination of learning about who we are
> and how we got here.

If I do something to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity,
I pay for it with my own resources.  If I claim to do it to
satisfy the public's intellectual curiosity, I have a
responsibility to focus my intellect on areas that the
public is curious about.

> These last is in fact powerfully important, and for
> growing numbers of people it increasingly becomes an underpinning of the
> fundamental personal philosophies with which we guide our lives.

Very few people guide their lives by physics to such
degree that they need to know the mass of the top quark.