> So you think that it's worse than min(idea, execution)?

Generally, yes, or at least "not better and usually worse."

But I said "more like idea * execution" -- compared to min(idea, execution) -- and the "more like" is important. Its not a strict mathematical relationship, and sometimes an imperfect implementation of an imperfect concept will end up better than either the implementation or the concept because it will be equivalent to a better implementation of a better concept by accident. But that's kind of exceptional case.

Yeah, it's not a perfect relationship, I just wasn't sure if your constraint to [0,1] was intentional or incidental. Thanks for clarifying.

I do. A mediocre idea (0.5) with a flawless execution (1.0) is probably better than a mediocre idea (0.5) with a mediocre execution (0.5).

Might not be quite so linear though.

You can't directly compare numerical values of "idea" to "idea * execution": the two are conceptually different things.

To abuse physics terminology, the units are different. In physics, a mass of "12 kg" is not in some sense greater than a force of "6 Newtons", even though the two are related by F = m * a. Similarly here, dragonwriter is defining "quality = idea * execution", so there's no reason to expect that the numerical value of this notion of quality should be directly comparable to the numerical value of either of its components. (Comparing the value of "quality" defined this way to the value of "idea" would require assuming some specific value for "execution" for the comparison to be sensible. If you just compare the numbers directly, you're assuming perfect 1.0 execution, which probably isn't what you intended.)