5 ms·

Originality is not the only way

33 points by maverickJ 6y ago

taneq 6y ago
Originality is great and all but if there’s already a known, tried and tested approach, and you can’t see a way to significantly improve it, you should just use il the known approach and save your ingenuity for problems that aren’t yet satisfactorily solved.
- maverickJ 6y ago
  Exactly
- qrybam 6y ago
  Originality Level 1: Review current options; do any of them solve your problem? Originality Level 2: Can any of the existing options be modified in a way that solves your problem? Originality Level 3: Solve the problem yourself.
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    Originality level 4: solve a better problem, in the process making your original problem disappear.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Depends on the context, trying something just because it's new can be useful. You may diverge from the known methods/apparatus and eventually establish something better (in some dimension) than what's common. You may find you gradually converge on the known methods from a different angle; this can lead to understanding - like now I know why they do it like that! Context is whether it's appropriate to do such experimenting and exploring. Most new patents are for incremental improvements. Suggesting most people start from what's known to a high degree. If you've got the resources though, why not try something ...
  - taneq 6y ago
    Yeah, basic research is also important if you have the spare capacity to do it.
qzw 6y ago
“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.” — Samuel Johnson
fizixer 6y ago
Loaded premise. No one in my whole life has claimed originality is the only way, except in case of academic publishing, in which case, yes it's the only way.
leptoniscool 6y ago
This is one of the reason for the success of StackOverflow
mromanuk 6y ago
I don’t agree with the author definition on what is original: Copying Standard Oil solution (different industry) when it was faced with an equivalent problem, was an innovation in meat transportation. It’s an original idea In it’s own right, nobody did that before, it wasn’t tested, there were no guarantees that “oil solution” would work also in meat.
- zwirbl 6y ago
  That's how you get Uber for X
- benibela 6y ago
  An refrigerated transporters are not the most efficient way to transport meat To transport lots of meat, we can look at the oil industry again and move it up to the next level: meat pipelines
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    I hate to think what the meat equivalent of Cushing, Oklahoma[1] might look and smell like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Oklahoma#Transhipment_point_for_West_Texas_Intermediate_(WTI)_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Oklahoma#Transhipment...
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Going in the other direction, meat was the original pipeline. Before motor (and then frozen/chilled) transport, meat would walk itself, without needing to load any wagons, from the pastures where it fattened to the butchers near where eaters lived.
jonahbenton 6y ago
So much of our neural infrastructure is geared towards understanding what other things are doing, and copying them. The fidelity error in the do-it-myself is what we call novel/original behavior. It is the tiny tip of the iceberg residing on top of an enormous copy-paste machine.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
The cult of originality is reinforced by the current (psychotic) reliance of academia on papers, which, structurally, must be original to be considered significant. Historically, tradition was more important than originality. Logically this makes sense: most new ideas are more likely to be bad than the current set of ideas, settled on in a somewhat darwinian manner. In many fields the cult of originality isn't too damaging: you get a lot of useless "original" stuff that is quickly forgotten and discarded. Pointless and expensive, but ultimately of little importance. Architecture, unfortunately, is an area where the cult of originality has done real damage to the actual, physical world. There are power stations built by anonymous journeymen in obscure parts of the US, using pattern books, with more architectural merit than much of the stuff built after WW2. We now put expensive lofts in what were once storage sheds in major cities, because they were built when tradition was still a functioning factor in building. htmx, to an extent, is an example of something that mixes originality and tradition. It takes the traditional understanding of HTML and web development (itself an original idea!) and adapts that to AJAX.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  I agree with most of the post but I don't think academia is generally obsessed with originality. A lot of academic work is explicitly incremental by nature, which is determined by the methodology of academic work, which aims to satisfy formalisms and to be reproducible (at least ideally). One just needs to look at the turmoil that the proof of the abc-conjecture caused in maths. I associate forced originality more with Silicon Valley startup culture, which used to look down on places like China not too long ago for copying on every opportunity it got, and there was probably one blogpost per week complaining about rote memorisation in education and deschooling their kids coming out of that culture.
  - LeegleechN 6y ago
    Academia is obsessed with "novelty" which is a weaker form of originality. Very frequently there are ideas which are an obvious next step to everyone in the field, but the first person to actually implement and publish it is the one who will get the credit / future citations. I wouldn't consider those kinds of ideas original because many people already independently conceived them and are working on implementing them, but they are novel in that they haven't been instantiated before.
polote 6y ago
Another example is most news articles are just adaptation of AFP or Reuters reports
- jcims 6y ago
  Or direct copies - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
thewhitetulip 6y ago
True originality will be so different that barely anyone will like it. Evolution is the way to go. I'm an aspiring writer and when a random internet person comments on my short stories, they're focused on "oh it is like X Y" "oh it is like Z movie" They're obsessed with finding which story it relates to rather than enjoying the story (and it isn't like I'm a pathetic writer) I'm not saying I'm the best writers ever, but why I don't like such morons is that they don't have any otger constructive criticism like "your character sucked ass" or "dogs don't fall in love with cows" No. Their entire problem is "oh I saw a movie like this and that's why this is a shitty story" These morons fail to realise that LoTR derives heavily from Mythology, GoT is literally a fiction version of War of Roses But these snobs will love and swear by LoTR because "that's original" and other books are "copy cats" The idea doesn't matter, execution does. Sure Gone Girl came first but girl on the train is also a good book. It isn't "copy cat" just because it has a untrustworthy narrator. Gone girl wasn't the first one to have untrustworthy narrator, I think
- kranner 6y ago
  The Unreliable Narrator is an old trope. [1] Gone Girl has stellar writing. I don’t think commercial success in fiction has much to do with being first to market with a novel idea. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
  - thewhitetulip 6y ago
    Yes that's the point. Now that Gone Girl is a phenomenal success, every unreliable narrator book will be "copy cat" of gone girl That's my issue with snobs who claim to like "originality" like LoTR when is is clearly inspired by loads of mythology. He certainly didn't invent elves!
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > I don’t think commercial success in fiction has much to do with being first to market with a novel idea. Commercial success in anything doesn't have much to do with being first with a novel idea - in general, but also in "first to market" sense. Video games: before Minecraft there was Infiniminer (by none other than Zachtronics Industries). Before Portal there was Narbacular Drop. Mobile: before iPhone and iPad, there were other devices with a touchscreen on the market (and they had a stylus, benefits of which people are slowly rediscovering today), and the concept dates all the way to Alan Kay's Dynabook, and in parallel to Star Trek (not just 1960s communicators and 1980s PADDs, but Star Trek in 1960s also portrayed tablets with a stylus attached). Etc., etc.
meagher 6y ago
There seems to be an infinite supply of think pieces like this on Substack. They cover mental models, productivity, startups, why your product should be more like Stripe, tech brain[1], etc. I guess if you pump out enough pieces like this over a long enough time horizon, you get "1k true fans" or something. [1]: https://pycnocline.substack.com/p/tech-brain https://pycnocline.substack.com/p/tech-brain
vmception 6y ago
Part of a series on Cognitive Dissonance

33 points by maverickJ 6y ago

Originality is great and all but if there’s already a known, tried and tested approach, and you can’t see a way to significantly improve it, you should just use il the known approach and save your ingenuity for problems that aren’t yet satisfactorily solved.

maverickJ 6y ago
Exactly
qrybam 6y ago
Originality Level 1: Review current options; do any of them solve your problem? Originality Level 2: Can any of the existing options be modified in a way that solves your problem? Originality Level 3: Solve the problem yourself.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Originality level 4: solve a better problem, in the process making your original problem disappear.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Depends on the context, trying something just because it's new can be useful. You may diverge from the known methods/apparatus and eventually establish something better (in some dimension) than what's common. You may find you gradually converge on the known methods from a different angle; this can lead to understanding - like now I know why they do it like that! Context is whether it's appropriate to do such experimenting and exploring. Most new patents are for incremental improvements. Suggesting most people start from what's known to a high degree. If you've got the resources though, why not try something ...
- taneq 6y ago
  Yeah, basic research is also important if you have the spare capacity to do it.

qzw 6y ago

“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.” — Samuel Johnson

fizixer 6y ago

Loaded premise. No one in my whole life has claimed originality is the only way, except in case of academic publishing, in which case, yes it's the only way.

leptoniscool 6y ago

This is one of the reason for the success of StackOverflow

mromanuk 6y ago

I don’t agree with the author definition on what is original: Copying Standard Oil solution (different industry) when it was faced with an equivalent problem, was an innovation in meat transportation. It’s an original idea In it’s own right, nobody did that before, it wasn’t tested, there were no guarantees that “oil solution” would work also in meat.

zwirbl 6y ago
That's how you get Uber for X
benibela 6y ago
An refrigerated transporters are not the most efficient way to transport meat To transport lots of meat, we can look at the oil industry again and move it up to the next level: meat pipelines
- tuatoru 6y ago
  I hate to think what the meat equivalent of Cushing, Oklahoma[1] might look and smell like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Oklahoma#Transhipment_point_for_West_Texas_Intermediate_(WTI)_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Oklahoma#Transhipment...
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Going in the other direction, meat was the original pipeline. Before motor (and then frozen/chilled) transport, meat would walk itself, without needing to load any wagons, from the pastures where it fattened to the butchers near where eaters lived.

jonahbenton 6y ago

So much of our neural infrastructure is geared towards understanding what other things are doing, and copying them. The fidelity error in the do-it-myself is what we call novel/original behavior. It is the tiny tip of the iceberg residing on top of an enormous copy-paste machine.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

The cult of originality is reinforced by the current (psychotic) reliance of academia on papers, which, structurally, must be original to be considered significant. Historically, tradition was more important than originality. Logically this makes sense: most new ideas are more likely to be bad than the current set of ideas, settled on in a somewhat darwinian manner. In many fields the cult of originality isn't too damaging: you get a lot of useless "original" stuff that is quickly forgotten and discarded. Pointless and expensive, but ultimately of little importance. Architecture, unfortunately, is an area where the cult of originality has done real damage to the actual, physical world. There are power stations built by anonymous journeymen in obscure parts of the US, using pattern books, with more architectural merit than much of the stuff built after WW2. We now put expensive lofts in what were once storage sheds in major cities, because they were built when tradition was still a functioning factor in building. htmx, to an extent, is an example of something that mixes originality and tradition. It takes the traditional understanding of HTML and web development (itself an original idea!) and adapts that to AJAX.

Barrin92 6y ago
I agree with most of the post but I don't think academia is generally obsessed with originality. A lot of academic work is explicitly incremental by nature, which is determined by the methodology of academic work, which aims to satisfy formalisms and to be reproducible (at least ideally). One just needs to look at the turmoil that the proof of the abc-conjecture caused in maths. I associate forced originality more with Silicon Valley startup culture, which used to look down on places like China not too long ago for copying on every opportunity it got, and there was probably one blogpost per week complaining about rote memorisation in education and deschooling their kids coming out of that culture.
- LeegleechN 6y ago
  Academia is obsessed with "novelty" which is a weaker form of originality. Very frequently there are ideas which are an obvious next step to everyone in the field, but the first person to actually implement and publish it is the one who will get the credit / future citations. I wouldn't consider those kinds of ideas original because many people already independently conceived them and are working on implementing them, but they are novel in that they haven't been instantiated before.

polote 6y ago

Another example is most news articles are just adaptation of AFP or Reuters reports

jcims 6y ago
Or direct copies - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI

thewhitetulip 6y ago

True originality will be so different that barely anyone will like it. Evolution is the way to go. I'm an aspiring writer and when a random internet person comments on my short stories, they're focused on "oh it is like X Y" "oh it is like Z movie" They're obsessed with finding which story it relates to rather than enjoying the story (and it isn't like I'm a pathetic writer) I'm not saying I'm the best writers ever, but why I don't like such morons is that they don't have any otger constructive criticism like "your character sucked ass" or "dogs don't fall in love with cows" No. Their entire problem is "oh I saw a movie like this and that's why this is a shitty story" These morons fail to realise that LoTR derives heavily from Mythology, GoT is literally a fiction version of War of Roses But these snobs will love and swear by LoTR because "that's original" and other books are "copy cats" The idea doesn't matter, execution does. Sure Gone Girl came first but girl on the train is also a good book. It isn't "copy cat" just because it has a untrustworthy narrator. Gone girl wasn't the first one to have untrustworthy narrator, I think

kranner 6y ago
The Unreliable Narrator is an old trope. [1] Gone Girl has stellar writing. I don’t think commercial success in fiction has much to do with being first to market with a novel idea. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
- thewhitetulip 6y ago
  Yes that's the point. Now that Gone Girl is a phenomenal success, every unreliable narrator book will be "copy cat" of gone girl That's my issue with snobs who claim to like "originality" like LoTR when is is clearly inspired by loads of mythology. He certainly didn't invent elves!
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > I don’t think commercial success in fiction has much to do with being first to market with a novel idea. Commercial success in anything doesn't have much to do with being first with a novel idea - in general, but also in "first to market" sense. Video games: before Minecraft there was Infiniminer (by none other than Zachtronics Industries). Before Portal there was Narbacular Drop. Mobile: before iPhone and iPad, there were other devices with a touchscreen on the market (and they had a stylus, benefits of which people are slowly rediscovering today), and the concept dates all the way to Alan Kay's Dynabook, and in parallel to Star Trek (not just 1960s communicators and 1980s PADDs, but Star Trek in 1960s also portrayed tablets with a stylus attached). Etc., etc.

meagher 6y ago

There seems to be an infinite supply of think pieces like this on Substack. They cover mental models, productivity, startups, why your product should be more like Stripe, tech brain[1], etc. I guess if you pump out enough pieces like this over a long enough time horizon, you get "1k true fans" or something. [1]: https://pycnocline.substack.com/p/tech-brain https://pycnocline.substack.com/p/tech-brain

vmception 6y ago

Part of a series on Cognitive Dissonance