Efficiency, Fat Ideas, and False Negatives

This piece was originally posted in March 20th 2022 on blog.benjaminreinhardt.com. It’s incredibly relevant to the work we do at Speculative Technologies so we’re republishing it here with a few changes.

Before you even undertake the work to create a thing, there’s some assessment of whether creating it is possible and how valuable it will be.1 Some ideas take a large chunk of resources to assess — let’s call these ‘fat’ ideas.2 In other cases, a spreadsheet and well-founded assumptions can make a strong case that “it will be hard, but if we pull off all these things that don’t violate physics along this critical path, it will be incredible” — let’s call these ‘lean’ ideas.

SpaceX’s reusable rocket is a canonical lean idea: “If we can land a rocket (which is very hard but has a clear critical path) then we will increase launch cadence and reduce $/kg to orbit by an order of magnitude, which is a complete game changer.” Ideas can also be lean even without a clear value proposition or critical path if the cost of experimenting is sufficiently low. Many bit-based ideas are lean despite a lot of uncertainty about where they’ll end up thanks to software’s low cost and fast iteration speeds.

‘Basic Science’3 that winds its way to a useful technology a classic example of fat ideas: what started with curiosity-driven study of gila monster venom ended up as GLP-1 inhibitors; what started with poking at yogurt cultures ended up at CRISPR. However, fat ideas include more than just curiosity-based discovery. Most systems research — of the sort that were the precursors of a good chunk of modern technology — is also a fat idea.4

The dichotomy between lean and fat ideas warps which ideas get support, which ones get killed too early, and which ideas people choose to pursue in the first place.

If you want to maximize efficiency — returns per dollar in either financial terms or ‘impact’ — there is a clear strategy: quickly kill ideas and bias towards a thousand false negatives (prematurely killing an idea that would eventually work out) over one expensive false positive (an idea that fails to work out after pouring resources into it).

Imagine that lean ideas take 1 unit of work assess and will create 1000 units of value, while fat ideas take 100 units of