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The point that majority of the work goes to figuring out how to execute well, and only a tiny amout towards the execution itself can be generalized to more than just copying website ideas. It applies to formulating hypotheses when solving problems. Most of the work is spent on figuring out the right question to ask, and only the little part is needed to actually answer it. It was nicely described on LessWrong:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jn/how_much_evidence_does_it_take/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jo/einsteins_arrogance/

Relevant quotes from the second post:

(...) you need an amount of evidence roughly equivalent to the complexity of the hypothesis just to locate the hypothesis in theory-space. It's not a question of justifying anything to anyone. If there's a hundred million alternatives, you need at least 27 bits of evidence just to focus your attention uniquely on the correct answer.

At the time of first formulating the hypothesis - the very first time the equations popped into his head - Einstein must have had, already in his possession, sufficient observational evidence to single out the complex equations of General Relativity for his unique attention. Or he couldn't have gotten them right.




>Most of the work is spent on figuring out the right question to ask, and only the little part is needed to actually answer it.

That sounds like operative part of the Feynman Algorithm:

1. Write down the problem.

2. Think real hard.

3. Write down the solution.

Where the harder part is in actually defining the problem which you're trying to solve, then writing that down.


Fascinating links. Thanks for sharing!


> Most of the work is spent on figuring out the right question to ask, and only the little part is needed to actually answer it.

These arguments are always a form of "Whole > Sum of Parts".

There is no such thing as private ideas.

It's always unwarrented-self-importance and greed that asserts otherwise.




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