I sense a bit of loss aversion here :)

Actually, I agree with you. My thinking is along slightly different lines, though. I think you’re basically saying that high-impact ideas carry high risk, while low-impact ideas carry low risk. Well, duh. Ideas are like potential energy. That energy can be used to do good or bad. The more potential energy you have, the more good or bad you can do.

I would say it’s not that we should necessarily avoid high-impact ideas to avoid risk. We should pursue high-impact ideas, but we need to be patient and take the time to break them down into incremental pieces, which can be tested and validated on their own. For example, artificial intelligence is a high-impact idea. I suspect we will one day be able to unlock amazing possibilities with AI, but only if we don’t kill ourselves with it first — which could very well happen if we move too quickly.

As a species, we’re pretty bad about that; we like to leap before we look. I believe the reason has to do with mortality and our sense of self. Most of us, at least in western cultures, fantasize about making a big impact in the span of one lifetime; i.e. we want to be the one in the history books, the celebrated innovator who solved the world’s biggest problems. I would like for us to unlearn that, to de-program ourselves of the desire for individual glory. In order to pursue high-impact ideas responsibly, we need to be okay with contributing just a small part of something big, even if it means the full scope of the impact we’re helping to make isn’t realized until after we’re gone.

This is probably an odd note to close on, but that is one reason why I suspect religion and spirituality have historically played an important role in human progress. The idea of a soul, and of enjoying some form of existence after the death of the body, helps us to cope with the limitations of having only a finite amount of time on this earth. This in turn allows us to conceptualize our role as a small part of something greater, so that we can all work together and potentially deliver on high-impact ideas, not in a single lifetime but over the course of generations.