These are quotes and memos from Ideaflow written by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn.

TL;DR: Test to choose the right idea out of many.

• "Even if you're an acknowledged expert in the field, you simply aren't qualified to decide which ideas to pursue in the absence of real-world data. Nobody is!"

• "Go through stages: test, analyze results, refine, test again." Refining steps make a solid product. My very first implementation of a hidden Markov Model worked just fine. On the benchmark data, the performance was slightly off, compared to the one TA in Machine Learning class showcased, it was just off by a very minute level. The points were taken just because of slight mistakes. If the algorithm were deployed to a real-world example and repeatedly used, the errors could have snowballed into a big mistake. If the test hints at something, it's important to refine and test again. Most people hate this.

• "Scientists don't win Nobel Prizes for publishing a lack of positive results." A great discovery could be hidden until a sufficient heap of negative results was piled up.

• "A good test rules out lots of options that won't work while homing in on the ones that might, vastly reducing the risk of failure."

• "Sir James Dyson tested at least one variation a day for four years, fastidiously documenting the impact of each incremental change to the design." A great product is the result of assiduous fine-tuning. With the help of AI tools, I think such a process can be a lot less painful.

• "Getting an unbiased outside perspective is too important to skip." This is so difficult not to.

• "Winnow by excitement"

• "If you're not curious to find out whether an idea will work, don't try to find out!"

I've struggled so hard to reclaim my right to have "little joy of making one discovery." My reading is definitely biased toward achieving that goal. Just as Jeremy Utley mentioned, AI tools are never an obstacle to constant idea flows. On the contrary, it is a great tool for generating ideas and conducting thought experiments to figure out the right problem, which will keep me awake at night with excitement.