For people who write ideas/theories, and hope their ideas/theories get traction, the frustration is often directed at critics who reject their idea without taking the time to read it.
Meanwhile, there are many supportive people in the comments, who did take the time to read the idea, and did say “yes, this is a good idea, I never thought of it! Good luck working on it.”
The author only sees these two groups of people, and feels that his/her fight is to push people in the former group to read their idea more clearly, so that they may move to the latter group.
But the author doesn’t realize that even if they did read the idea, and did move to the latter supportive group. The idea will be almost as badly ignored in the end.
It would cure his/her frustration towards “people who never bothered to read,” but his/her idea won’t take off and succeed either. He/she will finally learn that there is something else to be frustrated about: even if everyone reads your idea and agrees with your idea, nobody has time to do anything about it.
A lot of authors never reach this second stage of frustration, because there is indeed a large group of critics going around criticizing ideas without reading them.
But these critics are rarely the real reason your idea is getting ignored.
I’m one of the people who have strongly supported many ideas/theories, only to never talk about them again, because I don’t have the time. I see many others doing this too.
The real problem is still the lack of time.
EDIT: actually I’m a bit confused. Maybe the real problem is the argument cannot just argue why the idea is good or why the theory is plausible, but why a reader (satisfying some criteria) should drop what she is doing and work on the idea/theory for a while. Maybe it should give a cost and benefit analysis? I’m not sure if this will fix the Idea Ignoring Problem.
I think there’s an important crux here.
For people who write ideas/theories, and hope their ideas/theories get traction, the frustration is often directed at critics who reject their idea without taking the time to read it.
Meanwhile, there are many supportive people in the comments, who did take the time to read the idea, and did say “yes, this is a good idea, I never thought of it! Good luck working on it.”
The author only sees these two groups of people, and feels that his/her fight is to push people in the former group to read their idea more clearly, so that they may move to the latter group.
But the author doesn’t realize that even if they did read the idea, and did move to the latter supportive group. The idea will be almost as badly ignored in the end.
It would cure his/her frustration towards “people who never bothered to read,” but his/her idea won’t take off and succeed either. He/she will finally learn that there is something else to be frustrated about: even if everyone reads your idea and agrees with your idea, nobody has time to do anything about it.
A lot of authors never reach this second stage of frustration, because there is indeed a large group of critics going around criticizing ideas without reading them.
But these critics are rarely the real reason your idea is getting ignored.
I’m one of the people who have strongly supported many ideas/theories, only to never talk about them again, because I don’t have the time. I see many others doing this too.
The real problem is still the lack of time.
EDIT: actually I’m a bit confused. Maybe the real problem is the argument cannot just argue why the idea is good or why the theory is plausible, but why a reader (satisfying some criteria) should drop what she is doing and work on the idea/theory for a while. Maybe it should give a cost and benefit analysis? I’m not sure if this will fix the Idea Ignoring Problem.