When I posted my first ever blogpost, a commentator wrote:
You have rediscovered Parkinson's law.
What’s the tone of that message? When I read it, I immediately went to look Parkinsons law up and sure enough, it’s a pretty close description of what I was describing. I got a hit of anxiety: “how did I not know?”.
When I write I want to feel like I’m contributing something new, otherwise it just feels like I’m doing another essay for school. As soon as I do some research for an idea and realise someone has already spoken almost entirely about what I want to add, I lose almost all my motivation. So when I read that comment, it felt like “hey, someone already got there first, you’re not that cool”.
Except, of course, it is still cool? It’s not comparable in degree but if someone independently developed say, the theories of relativity based on only the same underlying knowledge as Einstein had, it would be, as an intellectual achievement, equally impressive. Granted, there’s always something special about being first, but in terms of what it says about a person timing shouldn’t really matter. The only reasonable exception is, as Tomska puts it, subliminal appropriation, which is where even though we can’t remember where we got an idea from it may not wholly be our own. Equivalently, nobody in the modern age will ever actually be in the state where they know all the things Einstein knew prior to his theory, but nothing more.
And, In some sense, it’s even cooler? My idea matches that of someone who’s idea is well accepted, therefore that adds to the validity of mine without detracting from the coolness of coming up with it.
But why does it matter?
Ok fine cool or not why does it matter? It’s just bragging rights? What I want to add is that I think there is somehow some shame in coming second. Even more so if you initially think that you were first. But there really, really ought not to be. Working a problem and coming to a conclusion on your own is not just how we get new great ideas, it also trains your brain to think in that way. A thousand ideas and if only one of them is new, that can still be a big deal. I like writing a lot without researching too much, because I know that finishing the idea is better than leaving it half baked. Afterwards, comparing it to what’s out there is incredibly valuable too, seeing what you missed. I know that doing that can make me sound a little unacademic. Few citations, idiosyncratic terminology, but still the idea can be good. Some other things I’ve “rediscovered” on this blog:
- My second ever post, about love, has a closely related term, Limerence
- My post on ranking people with LLMs uses a method that now has academic support
In both cases I may not have sat down and wrote those if I’d seen someone else had already worked on them. Maybe that’s just a me problem but I think this feeling is shared by quite a few people. It also feels different depending on the kind of problem. Something like building a compiler can be a fulfilling challenge regardless of the fact that it’s been done before. I think that’s because the “effort” involved is easier for everyone to recognise. Unless you just copy code or use an LLM, for which you might get caught, writing a compiler is hard and people can readily recognise that. This is true for many challenges, but when it comes to novel “ideas” there’s always a lot of uncertainty. You’re sure you haven’t heard it before? Were the key insights your own, or did you just expand on them? Are you just translating a concept from one domain to another (which may still be impressive, but is easier?).
Why does it feel so demoralising?
I think I can point to three main reasons:
- So much really has already been discovered. We’ve come pretty far on the science and thought tech tree, and there’s so many ideas that although impressive to form for oneself aren’t really likely to be novel.
- We’re just so connected now. You can look up every idea and sure enough someone has probably said something similar.
- Most of the time at school, we learn in the format of “here is a thinker and their ideas, here’s a maths formula and the guy that came up with it. You are not expected to come up with any of this yourself, there’s anyway too much and you are just here to use what’s already known”. No doubt this is efficient. We can’t ask every kid to come up with everything themselves, they need to get out into the workforce and start putting this knowledge to use!
That last point is why I appreciate teachers who really try to instil curiosity into students. Sure, it’s all already been done but we’re going to try and figure it out anyway! 3Blue1Brown does this so regularly, he really wants you to feel “how you might have stumbled across this solution yourself”, and I genuinely think that’s one of the reasons he is such a good educator.
It’s a problem though that teachers like this are rare, that curiosity like that is hard to come by, because it’s a skill we really do still need. Even if you aren’t coming up with new, earth shattering ideas, reasoning like that is how you think critically, avoid fallacies, and have an open mind. Realising that the people who came up with great ideas were wrong just as often as you were frees you from the desperate need to always be right. Needing to always be right is something I’ve seen poison people, and even myself at times.
Damn ok that got a bit too deep, take whatever parts of this post that you like, I’ll end it here. Thanks for reading. Comments are on Hackernews.