HBIs: An Introduction to Half‑Baked Ideas

 A Reboot of I. J. Good’s “Partly Baked Ideas”

1. Preface

This note launches a new series of HBIs — Half‑Baked Ideas. The acronym does indeed resemble Hibiscus, but the resemblance is botanical rather than philosophical. HBIs are meant to precede I. J. Good’s PBIs (Partly‑Baked Ideas) in the developmental life cycle of thought. If PBIs are ideas that have spent a few minutes in the oven, HBIs are the raw dough: sticky, unshaped, and possibly missing ingredients.

2. What Counts as an HBI

A Half‑Baked Idea is any of the following:

  • a speculation whose assumptions are unclear even to its author

  • a question that might be meaningful, or might not, but feels promising

  • a conceptual seed lacking context, justification, or direction

  • a conjecture that has not yet survived contact with reality

  • a playful analogy that may collapse under examination

  • a hypothesis missing essential nouns, verbs, or mechanisms

Where PBIs are “partly baked,” HBIs are pre‑baked, proto‑ideas, or premature inspirations.

3. How Long an HBI Should Be

Good once proposed a humorous formula for estimating the length of a PBI based on two factors:

  1. how important the idea is, and

  2. how baked it is.

The more important and more baked the idea, the longer the write‑up should be.

For HBIs, we operate in the half‑baked regime, where the bakedness is extremely small. In practical terms, this means:

  • an HBI should be short,

  • but not so short that the reader cannot tell what the author was excited about,

  • and not so long that the author begins to realize they have no idea what they are talking about.

The ideal HBI ends at the moment the author’s confidence begins to evaporate.

4. Why HBIs Are Worth Publishing

HBIs serve several purposes:

  • They encourage sharing ideas before they become respectable.

  • They legitimize intellectual play and curiosity.

  • They reveal the raw materials of thought.

  • They invite others to complete, refute, or reinterpret the idea.

  • They preserve the moment of inspiration before it dissolves.

Science often advances through provocations rather than polished theories. HBIs are provocations in their purest form.

5. A Spectrum of Bakedness

We may define a light‑hearted scale:

  • 0% baked — A fleeting intuition, possibly misremembered

  • 5% baked — A sentence fragment with ambition

  • 10% baked — A diagram drawn on a napkin

  • 20% baked — A conjecture with at least one noun and one verb

  • 30% baked — A plausible analogy

  • 50% baked — A PBI candidate

  • 100% baked — A publishable paper (rare, possibly mythical)

HBIs live in the 0–30% range.

6. Sample HBIs (to be expanded later)

  • The idea that intelligence might be measured by how quickly one abandons bad ideas.

  • The suspicion that most theories are correct only in the limit where they do not apply.

  • The thought that creativity is the entropy of thought.

  • The notion that the universe is optimized for producing unanswered questions.

These are not PBIs. They are HBIs, and proudly so.

7. Conclusion

HBIs celebrate the earliest stage of intellectual fermentation — the moment when an idea is still warm, unstable, and structurally unsound. If PBIs are partly baked, HBIs are the dough itself: untested, unrefined, and full of potential.

Future installments will present HBIs in their natural form: short, speculative, and only marginally coherent.

8. How to create an HBI codex for yourself

HBIs don’t need a central authority or a master list. Anyone can create and share one, as long as they attach a clear codex: a compact label that says who, when, and how baked the idea is.

We’ll use this general pattern:

HBI — Author — Date — Bakedness

You can omit pieces if you like, but this is the full “formal” version.

1. Choose your author tag

Pick a short, stable identifier for yourself:

  • Examples: Good, Rivera, Chen, A. Smith, J. Doe

  • It should be something you’re happy to see attached to your ideas in public.

This becomes the author part of the codex:

HBI — Rivera — …

2. Add the date

Use a simple, sortable date format:

  • Recommended: YYYY‑MM‑DD

  • Example: 2026‑04‑09

Now your codex looks like:

HBI — Rivera — 2026‑04‑09 — …

This doesn’t require any central coordination; it just records when you baked it.

3. Assign a bakedness level

Estimate how “done” the idea feels, as a percentage:

  • 0–10%: wild hunch, barely language

  • 10–30%: intriguing but unstable

  • 30–60%: has a spine, but many holes

  • 60–90%: almost an essay, still flexible

  • 90–100%: arguably no longer an HBI

You can write this as:

14% or Bakedness: 14%

Now the full codex is:

HBI — Rivera — 2026‑04‑09 — 14%

4. (Optional) Add a short title

For human readability, you can append a brief title:

HBI — Rivera — 2026‑04‑09 — 14% — “Title of Paper”

This is not a global ID; it’s just a clear label that travels with the idea.

5. How to use this in practice

When you submit an HBI to any blog, you can include the codex at the top or bottom of the piece, for example:

Codex: HBI — Rivera — 2026‑04‑09 — 14% Title of Paper

This way:

  • No one needs to ask permission to “get a number.”

  • Different authors can coexist without collisions.

  • The HBI still feels like part of a shared, recognizable tradition.

For a brief history of how HBIs came to be, see the unnecessarily long footnote below.

FOOTNOTE**

A Short Historical Note on the Lost Origins of Half‑Baked Ideas

In 1958, long before he formally introduced Partly‑Baked Ideas (PBIs) in The Scientist Speculates (1962), the statistician and polymath I. J. Good published a curious little article in the IBM Journal of Research and Development. The citation reads:

IBM J. Res. Dev., Volume 2, pp. 282–288, 1958. Title: “How Much Science Can You Have at Your Fingertips?”

At first glance, it’s a technical meditation on information storage, compression, and the future of scientific access. But read closely and you find something more: the unmistakable DNA of what would later become PBIs — and, by extension, the HBIs we’re writing today.

Good speculates about:

  • how much knowledge a person could realistically hold

  • how scientific ideas might be indexed, compressed, or retrieved

  • how future technologies might reshape the way we think

  • how incomplete or fragmentary ideas still carry value

In other words, he was already circling the concept of ideas that are useful before they are finished.

He didn’t call them PBIs yet. He certainly didn’t call them HBIs. But the intellectual posture is unmistakable: a willingness to publish thoughts that are provocative, partial, and structurally unstable — ideas that are, in his own later terminology, not fully baked.

This makes the 1958 IBM article the earliest known proto‑PBI. It’s the conceptual ancestor of the playful, speculative tradition that Good would formalize four years later.

And now, in a pleasing twist of intellectual genealogy, it becomes the ancestral root of HBIs — Half‑Baked Ideas — the series you’re creating. HBIs take Good’s spirit one step further back in the developmental timeline: ideas still warm from the oven of intuition, not yet shaped into PBIs, and certainly not ready for publication in any traditional sense.

By Kenneth Myers

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