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The cult of originality is reinforced by the current (psychotic) reliance of academia on papers, which, structurally, must be original to be considered signific
by 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 agoI 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 agoAcademia 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.
- cpach 6y agoVery interesting. Semi-related: Do you know if any such architectural pattern books are available online?
- cactus2093 6y agoAre you making any objective arguments about safety, functionality, construction cost, etc? Or is this just another rant that someone doesn’t find new buildings as pretty as old ones? As a non-architect, terms like “architectural merit” sound pretty hollow to me, often just amounting to gate keeping by people who like a particular style and dislike change.
- recursivedoubts 6y agoObviously I'm not laying out a formal aesthetic argument and most people today feel that aesthetics are not objective, making an objective argument inherently impossible. That's a long conversation. Amusingly, in architecture, the gate keeping is done mainly by modernists (high or post) and it is difficult to even learn traditional architecture outside of a few departments. Christopher Alexander, for example, was mostly ignored and scorned by the architectural establishment, and was picked up by software developers who were working in a new medium. Things work out in strange and humorous ways.