Ideas without faces

[Duke]

The Premise

Good ideas will stand on their own two feet no matter the source.

The Game

We create gimmick accounts, and just start exchanging ideas. The rule is that you cannot reference any source material describing your concept. You may provide analogies to other sorts of ideas that are well known, dictionary definitions of words that people may not know, but links to papers or books on the subject are forbidden.

We need gimmick accounts because we know each other enough for that to bias our discussions. The only dictionary we can use is the OED, if there's an issue with a word definition. The point is that it can only be for clarity, and not for explaining a concept beyond what you're capable of.

Anyhow, if this seems stupid ignore it. I just think it'd be neat to see both what ideas end up becoming the most popular, and also how well we actually do understand what it is that we're talking about.

[Borodog]

I like it.

[E Spaceman]

This idea is bad

[ QUOTE ]
A. adj. I. In a privative sense: Not good.

1. a. Of defective quality or worth, ‘of no good’; below par, poor, worthless, ‘wretched,’ ‘miserable’; that one does not think much (or anything) of.
1297 R. GLOUC. 108 Wat is vs to lete {th}is badde kyng Go {th}us o liue as a schade, {th}at nys wor{th} no{th}ing? c1350 Will. Palerne 5024 Of here atir for to telle to badde is my witte. c1386 CHAUCER Monk's T. 430 [In prison] Mete and drynke he hadde..it was ful poure and badde. 1393 GOWER Conf. II. 47 Her sadel eke was wonder badde. c1440 Promp. Parv. 20/2 Badde, or nowght worthe, invalidus. a1553 UDALL Roister D. V. ii, Better a bad scuse then none. 1732 POPE Horace Sat. II. ii. 63 Nor stops, for one bad cork, his butler's pay. 1873 BLACK Pr. Thule xxiv. 413 Sometimes they sent him a letter; but he was a bad correspondent.

[/ QUOTE ]

[Silent A]

This could be interesting.

[Duke]

I figure it'll have to start several hours after now so that anonymity can be preserved. It's also a pretty tough thing to start up. We'll see.

[Taraz]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Could you give an example of what an initial post would look like and what a follow up would be?

[Mr E Gimmick]

Society shouldnt expend any substantial effort keeping people alive who have long-term illnesses/defects which will result in their likely death before being able to make a contribution to society.

[Duke]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Could you give an example of what an initial post would look like and what a follow up would be?

[/ QUOTE ]

The one just posted by M E Gimmick or whatever is a good start. It lays out an idea without any supporting evidence except a little bit of reasoning. We're just looking for ideas here with sound reasoning, but without supporting evidence, I guess. "Einstein said blah, and data from telescopes says blahblah" is not what we're going for. If an idea requires a whole lot of "insider" knowledge, then it's going to be impossible to talk about unless you can reason to that point starting from first principles and connect the dots. On your own. Paraphrasing is even OK, but you may have to back it up with more reasoning depending on the responses. If you don't know enough to connect those dots "cold" then you might want to refrain from it.

If it's some sort of religious idea, then it can't reference any religious works, or mention that people X Y and Z agree with it. If it's science, it can't reference studies, papers, or a list of people who agree.

Say I want to discuss the idea that books will be gone in the near future. I can't link to facts and figures about book sales, or what any expert says. I'm relegated to making observations that we're all free to make (google is cataloging everything anyhow, books take up a lot of space, a DVD can hold tens of thousands of books on it, even as PDFs, an iPhone with an interface to project gutenberg could replace a decent portion of typical libraries and be portable).

The whole thing is that I'm just building an idea based on observations. If the same idea has been presented before, then I can't cite it. If it's based on nothing but a bunch of data points collected in some study, then I'll need to figure another avenue for introducing the concept, since a study is off limits unless it's really just observation that anyone could easily do on their own immediately. Feel free to reference the recent work that showed that people like sex because it feels good, for instance.

Anyhow, I think I just wanted to open up a thread here where ideas battle it out on their own merits, and aren't aided or hindered by the source.