One-way ideas

In cryptography there are “one-way” functions: you can feed it some input, and it will reliably generated deterministic output. But from that output you cannot (in reasonable time) restore the original input.

I just noticed that something similar happens to ideas: when you tell a person a powerful idea, it’s absurd to expect that he will use it.

I have always thought that it happens for 2 reasons.

Either the advisor overlooks an important part of the context, and in that particular situation the idea cannot be implemented. For example, when someone is advice to learn a new skill, the advisor can overlook that the person simply has no time or emotional resources to do that.

Or the person just forgets the idea too quickly, and it does not “bubble up” in his mind anymore, not even at the time when he is thinking about a problem.

In either case, we can spot the asymmetry between how easily an idea is consumed by the listener, and how difficult it will be for him to use it.