I wrote something similar just yesterday – I should have used your Aiken quote in it! Darn!

Great post.

Mine is http://adriancrook.com/top-5-reasons-stealth-mode-will-kill-your-startup/

1-Maybe few people care about your idea. >>> There are always people around to benefit from anything you may have for free! No matter it is small or big idea.
2-It’s hard to steal ideas. >>> No at all. The core of idea is very easy to caught, especially if it is other one’s.
3-It’s common for multiple people to have the same idea. >>> Never two idea can be exactly the same. There is always something to be stolen.
4-Ideas take hard work to implement. >>> OK. It does not mean should be kept on air!

It is very very common practice in universities that “Professors take credit for their student’s work,…”. This is however a very disgusting fact in the community of researchers.

The reality of good ideas used by big business where the one
with most money wins regardless of who’s idea it was!

http://mashable.com/2012/10/27/apple-stolen-ideas/

It’s entirely possible to steal ideas, through use of ECT or drugs (such as amnesiacs) or other such things which can cause temporary or persistent memory loss. But that’s not what people are talking about here.

What we are talking about here is stealing credit for an idea. And that’s a murky issue. I can know when I started thinking a thought, but how can I know what other people were thinking? I can certainly see what’s being done, concretely, but that does not tell me about thoughts that other people have had but have not pursued. And what if both of us have been inspired by someone else?

And this problem gets worse when I am not talking about ideas I have thought (where at least I have an understanding of my own thinking) and instead I am talking about other people’s ideas.

Anyways, as some people will put it: ideas can be shared, but cannot be stolen. I would not go that far (see my first paragraph in this comment for one of the reasons I disagree with that idea) but I do think that there is some significant validity to this kind of thinking.

Make the whole thing a diagram and point to things. It will help.

I am now mainly interested in finance but the same here: I would go so far as to state that if somebody found the Holy Grail of Investing (not that I particularly think there is one) could print it on large placards and put them into Central Park in NYC – nobody would care and (s)he would even be ridiculed. Meaning: Most of those über-secretive hedge funds managers are just suckers that have something to hide, in most cases their bad performance and their being overwhelmed by noise. The real sophisticated people in finance are quite open about what they do and their shortcomings too.

LOL, exactly, nobody’s using the tiniest parser generator I made, likely because nobody understands why it works.

I did when a former employee of a company I was leading published a rip-off of my personal work under his own name.

I wish people *would* steal my ideas. My good ideas.

That way, someone else can work on them while I work on my other good ideas.

That, and I want my ideas to survive. If no one steals them, the chances of that are less than if everyone steals them.

P.S. Clearly the above is only true because I don’t care much about being credited for my ideas. As long as they help the human race and make a difference, that’s much more important IMO.

1. Maybe few people care about your idea.
2. It’s hard to steal ideas.
3. It’s common for multiple people to have the same idea.
4. Ideas take hard work to implement.

I like the David Freedman quote above: “When you are young you are afraid people will steal your ideas; when you are old you are afraid they won’t.” I guess I’m old. I’ve seen how hard it is to transfer an idea/project to someone else, even when both parties are willing.

The more profound an idea is, the harder it is to transfer it, unless the recipient has done some of the same homework you have. If they’ve thought about the same problem but are missing one piece that you can provide, they’ll grab that piece quickly, for good (e.g. handing over a software project) or for ill (e.g. stealing an idea). But otherwise, they’re going to have to do some of the work you did before they can appreciate the solution.