Originality is not the only way | Hacker News Reader

Originality is not the only way

leveragethoughts.substack.com

33 pointsmaverickJ31 comments

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

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

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!

> 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.

I can empathize with your comment insofar that simply interacting with others for me has been difficult at times because of the whole 'how does that thing you say relate to that thing I saw online'.

There are times where it feels like every observation I make is related to a reddit comment. The comparison is not inaccurate, but it destroys or at least harms the implicit contract of me having a conversation with someone else.

I can definitely imagine this problem is even bigger for a creative writer, when both parties have more time to compare things to other things.

I hesitate to say this is /bad/. Perhaps I'm just getting old. But it's definitely /different/ and quite often unpleasant to me.

It is not bad, it is annoying. People these days don't read a new thing and try to express the issue in it, they HAVE to relate it to something they saw or read.

I had written a scifi short story and people told me "Oh yeah it was predictable, very much like the movie X"

Sure harry potter too was predictable, Harry was going to win and Voldemort was going to die, but the same peop don't say that to HP!

There is a social contract, an implicit one to praise famous books. A person I knew got mad at me for pointing out obvious flaws in HP like why don't they use time turners more before they're broken during Order of Phoenix or a somewhat gray area

Elder wand is the most powerful, Dumbledore had all 3 deathly hallows at a point in time and despite being a master of death, he didn't kill voldemort.

The last one is a bit vague yes, but instead of discussing with me and saying "maybe Voldemort hid from Dumbledore for that reason" this person went like "you are posting this to get attention"

There was another idiot who kept on bugging me that I don't write good English, I think in my mother tongue and translate it to English

And this moron didn't even know common idiom I had used was also a common idiom word-to-word in English as well

He kept on insisting me to think in English. I studied in a convent school so I know how to not think-translate mother tongue into English

As a novelist who was trying to write for the first time, the man was toxic, as were almost all morons I met on the site. They didn't encourage, didn't have any single constructive criticism, "oh you don't know x y"

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.

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.

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.

Very interesting.

Semi-related: Do you know if any such architectural pattern books are available online?

Are 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.

Obviously 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.

“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

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.

Exactly

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.

Originality level 4: solve a better problem, in the process making your original problem disappear.

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 ...

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

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.

That's how you get Uber for X

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

This is one of the reason for the success of StackOverflow

Part of a series on Cognitive Dissonance

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