Posted by Curiositry 15 hours ago
Think of this way. It doesn't matter if the message/info you are sharing is already written about. A ton of people didn't know about it. So when the message is written about again by YOU, more new people will know about it. And read it. Sucks for people who know about what you are sharing. But you're not writing for them, are you?
Not to mention, even if a person already know about the topic someone wrote about, there is still new perspective and angle to it that this piece might have. So, read it for different perspectives or angles!
Relevant xkcd <https://xkcd.com/1053/>
As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.
> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.
I am so happy that I listened because it seems the few people who have checked it out generally enjoy it. Most commenters have positive things to say and some have stated they learned things.
If I have an interesting thought about a topic and I share it with an audience that is not PhDs, to them it might be interesting and insightful and provoke new thoughts. Most likely yes, someone in the 70s somewhere in the world already wrote a paper about this idea or even a book. Does it matter though? Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
I don't think that what's worth sharing are only documents that quote everyone else that already talked about it and their thoughts. That might work if I want to prove that my work is at boundaries of human knowledge or that is the most plausible explanation for something, but if I just want to share ideas then I find it limiting. Not just because it limits the people with the knowledge to write anything to a handful, but also because for those people there is this anxiety of "not worth it, wasting people time" if it's not researched for months like you mention. Share your thought, if some expert will find it wasteful or naive they will not read it, but someone else might and it might open their mind.
This makes me think about philosophy, if you really dig down into it virtually all philosophy ideas were already discussed first by Plato and Aristoteles. You cannot find a modern philosophy thought that isn't in some way already discussed by those two. Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
"Relevant" needs disambiguation. It does not make your thoughts less valid in any moral sense that you should feel ashamed of them or anything, but IMO, it does mean that they are less worthy in the attention marketplace. If these thoughts are not competing in the attention marketplace, and rather being shared amongst acquaintances, or offered up in the aim of constructive criticism, then it does not risk turning the attention marketplace into a competition of hustling mediocrity.
> Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
> Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
I would invite you to read more philosophy if that's your idea of what philosophy is, because it feels very far from what has been discussed over the centuries by many authors way smarter than me and you.
One of the signs that you're writing really great or really bad is if people ignore it. You're not popular so if it's really good nobody cares, and if it's really bad? Well, it's bad.
The problem comes when you write a really good essay that's just a point or two less than perfect. It's flawed enough to gain readers. It's insightful enough to help people. But guess what? Now you're in a popularity war with all the other bozos who want to create content around your topic.
That's why the greatest compliment you can receive is "Well, heck, that's been done before. There's nothing new here."
Everything has been done before. Don't sweat it. I am reminded of a great scene from the TV show Third Rock From The Sun where John Lithgow's character accuses another professor of plagiarism. His line is roughly "It's obviously shabby and repeats things done before. Take a look at the text. (he then holds up a book) Have you ever heard of the _Dictionary_??"
Write for yourself. Use writing to learn stuff. Done.
ADD: Here's the scene I was referring to. John Lithgow had far, far too much fun chewing up the furniture on that series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIN4tC5Zwx0
This is one of my favorite videos. After the first penguin jumps the crowd follows till then they confused. Regardless the sight of penguin jumping is breathtaking.
Thanks for the video!
This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing, and maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
> Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
Languages are themselves redundant, because it aids in comprehension.
Sometimes people need to hear the same thing over and over before it sinks in.
Sometimes it needs to be said in different ways, before it sinks in.
Sometimes it can be short and pithy, and other times it can fill a short book.
How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell.
tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes.
> Maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
Not sure how you mean "style," but it is some sort of inferiority complex or insecurity. I do not claim it is a good or rational feeling.
> How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell. tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual. Are those rituals a good thing on the whole? Even if they are, why dress it up with all these theological truth propositions and elaborately fraudulent mythologies? Why do we have to be so verbose and repetitious, and pretend there's really 10,000 books' worth of depth to the Serenity Prayer?
You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
> Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual.
The core of the Serenity Prayer is not really religious. Sure, it starts off "God grant me the..." but really, that's not really different than saying "Today I hope I have the strength to..."
In any case, many of the books saying the same thing are not religious at all.
I'm not claiming it's a good or rational thing that I'm not motivated. (I'm also not claiming this happens to everyone with credentials.) I'm very nostalgic for that unembarrassed enthusiasm I once had, because, were I to possess it now, at least I would have a shot at producing something of value.
You may have gotten the wrong impression when I coupled this rueful sentiment with a criticism of the verbosity and redundancy of blogs and self-help books. These two things are in tension with each other but not strictly contradictory. "I am large, I contain multitudes."
I read that as a reference to Dunning-Kruger.
Doesn't make it non exhausting, just understandable
Typing up LLM instructions and reading the output is probably more work.
1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.
"I used to struggle w needing to be “creative” or “original” in my work. At some point I had a breakthrough that really helped me: I cannot repeat an idea, no matter how basic or common, without imparting some of my worldview into it.
Even by choosing which basic ideas to amplify, I impart some small amount of myself into each output. It’s literally impossible for a given tweet to be “unoriginal”. Equally impossible to be Truly Original too of course, since you’re always remixing others thoughts.
This POV does put a premium on cultivating and developing one’s worldview, since that is the underlying originality simmering under the surface of each “basic” thought. The best writing is rewriting, including of other people’s words, and the lens is your whole mind."
One challenge is that it takes repetitions to get good enough that you can even bring your ideas to life, and many people don't push through this (Ira Glass "taste gap").
Full interviews here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/making-things-interview-series
There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.
(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)
Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.
I want to dig more into archival of the sources I use. I think it is important when linking to an other resources to at least describe what was found there or just mirror the source. I have read enough forum posts with link-rotted images to know how a useful comment can become a puzzle when a few links, images or referenced source dissapears.
Now I wonder how well the web will be archived in the long run, but that's another matter. Seems it is an ever sliding window where knowledge of the past is build upon but not kept.
Plus let's be honest, there are a surprising number of topics where the obvious hasn't actually been documented in any real way, or where finding an answer to certain questions is near impossible. In those cases, just having an answer publicly available rather than say, on Discord or Google Docs can be a huge help.
I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”
I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.
At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.
Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.
I've felt the "chilling effect" way too often when considering if I really want to put an idea out there that might later turn back to haunt me (even for things I would not consider controversial). I am very aware of the irony that oddly enough, psychologically I don't perceive the same level of danger from random HN comment threads though.
I don't think i ever went past the 5-blog count on any of my attempts.
And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.
I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.
And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.
Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.
Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.
So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)