
Originality is not the only way - maverickJ
https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/originality-is-not-the-only-way-it
======
thewhitetulip
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
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)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _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.

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recursivedoubts
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
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
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.

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qzw
“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

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taneq
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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
Yeah, basic research is also important if you have the spare capacity to do
it.

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mromanuk
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.

~~~
benibela
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
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Oklahoma#Transhipment_point_for_West_Texas_Intermediate_\(WTI\)_oil)

~~~
082349872349872
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.

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fizixer
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.

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jonahbenton
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.

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meagher
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)

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

~~~
jcims
Or direct copies -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI)

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leptoniscool
This is one of the reason for the success of StackOverflow

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vmception
Part of a series on Cognitive Dissonance

