The anatomy of a bad idea
I had a bad idea.
But I won’t tell you about a specific bad idea — I will tell you about all of them.
I will generalize to a pattern that many ideas — bad and good — follow. I’m hoping that you — yes, you — will find this exercise helpful or interesting. If not, well, it wouldn’t be the first bad idea I’ve had.
What’s an idea?
By “idea,” I am implicitly talking about solutions to problems. For me, those are usually abstract concepts that require mathematical modeling to solve technical problems.
A secondary motivation for writing this is that people — and, importantly, that includes scientists — should be more open about their bad ideas and failed experiments. But before all this starts to sound too negative, I want to emphasize that “bad” is really good!
Negative results
People rarely like to admit failure. It’s no surprise, really. There are a myriad of psychological and social reasons not to. On the other hand, with maxims like “fail fast, fail often,” it is clear that failure is a prerequisite for success. Of course, it’s not failure per se but how one fails and iterates that determines eventual success.
In science, a study that fails is one that does not find a connection between experimental…
