[HN Gopher] Imitate, Then Innovate
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Imitate, Then Innovate
Author : imartin2k
Score : 149 points
Date : 2022-02-16 09:00 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (perell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (perell.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| Talks about a lot of things about being original. Found it a fun
| read and this one struck a chord with me:
|
| > The alternative is a pursuit towards truth. In the words of
| C.S. Lewis, who is famous for the vivid imagination he presented
| in stories like the Chronicles of Narnia: "No man who cares about
| originality will ever be original. It's the man who's only
| thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes
| really original--and doesn't notice it."
|
| I find a parallel working in technical problem where a good
| solution comes from getting to understand the problem in
| fundamental ways and the most basic representation and process to
| solve it imaginable with that understanding is called creative or
| original. The goal was never to 'be clever', in fact 'thinking
| dumb' as in "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"
| is far more effective.
| the-dude wrote:
| One has to be intimately acquaintaned with the field to be able
| to recognize if you are original in the first place.
|
| This was what I was taught in school.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| The whole concept of "originality" does not make sense to me,
| tbh. Who cares?
|
| If you as a member of an isolated tribe in the amazon
| rainforest, with no contact to the outside world, come up with
| a movable-type-style contraption to impress patterns onto woven
| cloth, that's a creative thought - and your fellow tribe would
| consider it "original", even though you do not know that a few
| hundred years earlier, some guy in central Europe had that idea
| before (and some Chinese guy even earlier). You are in no way
| less an inventor if you come up with something that has been
| thought of before, but forgotten.
|
| We should start celebrating creativity (new ideas) instead of
| originality (uniquely new ideas). The quest for proving or
| disproving prior art is ultimately not moving us as a society
| forward.
| ffhhj wrote:
| > Who cares? > If you as a member of an isolated tribe in the
| amazon rainforest...
|
| Actually, there is a creativity's dark side that could makes
| us care. Members of a tribe will perform their gathering and
| hunting tasks, and achieve some degree of creativity on
| tools, organization and processes to optimize their resources
| and live happily. Creativity is nice up to this point. Now
| imagine what happens when they create this powerful idea, of
| building a pyramid of ash, so they burn all the trees around.
| And this have actually happened on different cultures.
|
| Behold our pyramid of ash: consumerism!
| the-dude wrote:
| Sure, everybody should get a prize.
| tom_ wrote:
| People respond to incentives!
| [deleted]
| dTal wrote:
| Not to mention that someone having "thought of that" at some
| prior point isn't a good reason not to explore it from your
| own perspective; your predecessors were not perfect or all-
| knowing.
| bluesmoon wrote:
| Back in the 90s the Microsoft version was "Embrace and Extend"
| which really meant, adopt a standard and then change it so that
| the original implementation no longer works.
| robaato wrote:
| Japanese have the concept of the stages of shu/ha/ri.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari
|
| This applies to learning martial arts, but to many other
| disciplines, e.g. in software engineering:
|
| https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/software-engineering-b...
|
| I am a long time practitioner of Aikido, and it certainly applies
| to that. A very common trap for many is to attempt ha/ri when
| they have not mastered shu.
| ArcMex wrote:
| >To me, the idea of Shu Ha Ri provides thinking tools, a
| language and a frame of reference to approach learning a new
| skill. When you are first learning something, variety of ideas
| isn't usually the most helpful place to start. Once you get the
| basics down, then move on to experimenting and looking to
| integrate new thoughts or ideas. Your experiments will lead you
| to new paths and eventually you'll move beyond the specific
| practices and evolve your own way of doing things.
|
| That is a good summary.
| xarope wrote:
| Bruce Lee's famous quote: "Before I learned the art, a punch
| was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the
| art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick.
| Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a
| kick is just a kick."
| WJW wrote:
| "Coding is basically just ifs and for loops."
| teddyh wrote:
| Chop wood, carry water.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| What's the old joke about asking more and more technical
| people how a light switch works and the child's explanation
| at the beginning and the physicists at the end are identical
| but in between becomes horrendously complicated...
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Were the elements about Collison and Stripe necessary for this
| essay? I don't see what value these parts add. The conclusion
| that Stripe is original by not being original confirms that these
| parts don't belong to an essay about innovation. Collison is an
| intriguing person, though, and Stripe's focus on developer UX for
| payment processing was innovative, but maybe focusing on the
| actual innovation would have been too unoriginal to write about
| in 2022? Maybe writing about who Collison was imitating would
| have been more relevant.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| While I agree that imitation is a preferred way to greatness,
|
| > Modern creators do the opposite though.
|
| Make me react with [Citation needed]. The article sets up to
| defeat a big straw man and doesn't spend enough effort motivating
| why it is supposed to be true (or for that matter, different to
| how it was before).
| wmeredith wrote:
| > Modern creators do the opposite though.
|
| I feel like this thesis is confirmation bias at work. How many
| mediocre renaissance painters have you heard of? How many are
| possible to even _have heard of_? I 'd guess not many.
|
| I still really like the rest of this piece.
| mb_72 wrote:
| "Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate" - credited to jazz trumpeter
| Clark Terry (b 1920), so hardly a new concept. Also, these days I
| see a lot of content creators only making it to the first stage,
| mindlessly aping others or creating short-form unoriginal
| material for TikTok etc; being 'original' seems not really to be
| a priority.
| lancesells wrote:
| I think there's two reasons that things seem less original
| these days: Prior to the internet that first stage was hidden
| from view until someone made it to the second stage. Digital
| tools have made creation accessible to pretty much everyone
| with the technology.
|
| I'm not sure I know TikTok content too well but I think it's a
| good thing that people are creating a little more than
| consuming. Even if it's a blatent copy of something else.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Are most TikTok posters even trying to create something? My
| understanding is the majority are trying to participate in a
| trend or show off to peers.
| bluepizza wrote:
| Naive question - maybe someone has an interesting point of view.
|
| Wouldn't "imitate then innovate" just lead us to very efficient
| horse carriages instead of cars?
| jmmcd wrote:
| I guess the author's response would be no, it would still give
| us cars, but they would have good wheels instead of square
| ones.
| moring wrote:
| I don't think so, for two reasons. First, a lot of things one
| the way from a horse carriage to a car are actually the same,
| like wheels and seats. They diverge later on.
|
| Second, the article promotes innovating from other fields, not
| your own field. That might mean a carriage moved by a steam
| engine, for example, which also brings you closer to a car.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >That might mean a carriage moved by a steam engine, for
| example, which also brings you closer to a car.
|
| they made those!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_car#History
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I believe Archie of Riverdale's car was originally depicted
| as one of those!
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > Wouldn't "imitate then innovate" just lead us to very
| efficient horse carriages instead of cars?
|
| But early cars WERE based on horse carriages; they literally
| did NOT reinvent the wheel, but instead strapped a combustion
| engine onto a horse carriage. Then did they start - or continue
| - innovation with things like suspension, tires, brakes, and
| later on safety systems etc.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Absolutely. Hell, some of them even had a fake horse out
| front.
| mro_name wrote:
| that's exactly what it started with and developed stepwise from
| then.
|
| Look at Gottlieb Daimler's motor-carriage of 1886:
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlieb_Daimler#/media/Datei:...
| leroman wrote:
| I'm bootstrapping a SaaS business with the same approach, I've
| been imitating and iterating over what I see other's have been
| doing, while trying to be original (but very conservative) in
| some parts.
|
| Hopefully, when I decide the imitation part is good enough
| (mostly in terms of feature parity), I add one of my more
| original ideas for a feature to the product.
| pfarrell wrote:
| I cofounded a startup a few years ago that ended in an
| acquihire. If I could redo it, I realize we didn't front load a
| killer feature.
|
| We spent too much time on table stakes so we'd look like
| competitors, there wasn't much that set us apart to endear us
| to the alpha user base. We only developed some really novel
| things after like nine months. Looking back (and for next
| time), I'd have _greatly_ descoped what we needed to imitate
| and gotten on those killer features asap.
| leroman wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
| mlvljr wrote:
| going_ham wrote:
| There is this video of Steve job's quoting, "Good artists copy,
| great artists steal." [0] That one hits me the most. To steal an
| idea you really have to understand it and find ways to integrate
| into the system and design. Copying is really straightforward.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/a6jeZ7m0ycw
| jmmcd wrote:
| Research isn't mentioned, but this is good advice for research
| too. If you want to make a contribution to research you have to
| know the field, and be able to re-implement what others have
| done, before you can add anything.
| mro_name wrote:
| "Talent borrows, genius steals" being attributed to Oscar Wilde
| but being possibly stolen as well :-)
|
| At least Goethe (the german shakespeare if you will) said quite
| the same in the 18th century.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Also attributed to Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky.
| the-dude wrote:
| Dude. This is HN. The only right answer is Jobs.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's quickly becoming Papa Musk at this point in time though.
| Jobs was 5-10 years ago.
| the-dude wrote:
| Does Elon actually already have memorable quotes? Nothing
| comes to mind.
| granshaw wrote:
| Something something pedo submarine
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Does Elon actually already have memorable quotes?
|
| While he isn't the only one to use the phrase "funding
| secured" has been linked to him in a way "one more thing"
| was linked to Jobs.
| ArcMex wrote:
| Whenever I am learning something with zero knowledge, certainly,
| I imitate. As I gain more knowledge, I start to see patterns that
| allow me to branch out. I feel like this is a natural progression
| of things.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| It's a long fluffy article that doesn't even include the source
| of the famous quote. Miles Davis said this and would reference
| how important the fundamentals are to any instrument like the
| drums:
|
| "Drummers ape each other. The way every rock'n'roll record sounds
| like something else but not all together. Everything other
| drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear. They know
| how to play everything now. It's the flood of records. Drums and
| trumpet and bass ... it's like a big tree of goodies. You can
| just buy this record and pick this off and get this bass and flap
| it up! The good drummers don't play all that in-between stuff,
| only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can't
| lay in the pocket. He has to learn that basic stuff first."
|
| The author definitely knows how to optimize SEO, but not even
| googling their own title of an article and including one of the
| more famous examples seems a bit odd to me.
|
| There's quite some claims that modern creators are afraid to
| imitate each other? Has the author opened up TikTok, YouTube, or
| copied a popular tweet into Google to see the thousands of
| copycats getting the same recognition in their own bubbles of the
| world?
| trgn wrote:
| Weird, I thought it was a great article. One that actually gets
| better as it progresses. I don't see how it's fluffy at all.
|
| In the first half, he is mainly referring to the current state
| of fine-arts, which is still in the grip of the "originality
| disease". It's a different way of describing a particularly
| outgrowth of modernism, the rejection of bourgeois values,
| which included conformity, propriety, and the existence of
| objective truth and beauty. The horrors of World War 1 were the
| turning point, how could something so grotesque arise in the
| pinnacle of civilization after all. The author mentions the
| influence of Freud's work, which absolutely demolished the
| collective psychic order, turning everybody into a neurotic.
|
| Interesting too, is that he really highlights the self-
| absorption which underlies modern/contemporary "high" fine
| arts. That criticism is not new. The first real critical
| assault on modernism was in the seventies. However, it didn't
| stick, instead it turned ideals of bourgeois respectability
| into a form of pageantry. Think a critic like Tom Wolfe as an
| anachronistic dandy, or the weird Lego-classicism of postmodern
| skyscrapers. But the core of that criticism stands though: a
| half-century later, and we have still not overcome the absolute
| degeneration of artistic production.
|
| I hope to see by the end of my lifetime that we have dug out of
| this hole, and art is unabashedly the pursuit of truth and
| beauty again. That will require artists and their patrons to
| stop navel-gazing though.
| VMtest wrote:
| No wonder they said hacker news is a toxic community
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349222 | I love you,
| Hacker News, but you're toxic (kg.dev)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Yep, my comment is toxic because I'm critical of the article
| and gave an opinion.
|
| https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/critic-is-a-four-
| lett...
| itrollpussies wrote:
| Sometimes, it amazes me how some of you reason, the article
| deeply reflected on some crucial things that I personally I can
| relate to, and the only thing you could point out is one stupid
| famous quote that know one has idea about.
|
| Give foolishness a break, at least for a week.
| aykae_ wrote:
| Seems odd to me to deem a post labeled as a long-form essay as
| "fluffy", especially when most of the "fluff" is substantial
| arguments padded with well-researched support. I personally
| perked up at the sight of a short scrollbar, it was a good
| read, I gained some security in my own case of Originality
| Disease.
|
| I don't think a slew of bullet points could have accomplished
| the same.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| For those unfamiliar "ape" means to imitate here and "in the
| pocket" means to have fun with it / feel comfortable
| performing.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| "In the pocket" has to do with a certain feeling or "groove"
| that occurs when the bass player and drummer sort of "lock
| in" (that's my terminology). I definitely know when I'm "in
| the pocket" but it's one of those things that's difficult to
| describe.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| In hiphop culture "in the pocket" means perfectly on the
| beat.
| bavell wrote:
| In rock it's really tight timing and nailing
| transitions/fills. At least the way I've heard it used in
| my circles.
| lioeters wrote:
| > In _The Jazz Theory Book_, Mark Levine defines playing _in
| the pocket_ simply as grooving, where the rhythm section is
| locked in and working as a unit.
|
| > in the pocket - When the music is rhythmically in a groove.
|
| > groove - The "lock" between members of a rhythm section
| playing well together.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This would also elegantly solve the reproduction crisis that now
| plagues many sciences at once.
| evancoop wrote:
| Admittedly, the alliterative title is catchy. Curious if what
| occurs in the learning process is really "pattern recognition,"
| then innovation. When a child learns to play the piano, are they
| "imitating" Bach and Beethoven or recognizing patterns of chord
| progressions? When a child learns to read/write, they are
| probably not imitating childhood authors per se, rather, learning
| patterns in how words are assembled.
|
| Perhaps, creativity is simply an extension of the same process.
| Recognize pleasing patterns, learning which can be broken, and
| assembling those patterns in a new way?
| adrianthedev wrote:
| That's what we did with Avo. We started to create a Laravel Nova
| clone because we found its utility immense.
|
| Somewhere along the way, we figured out that our users have
| different needs, and the whole project pivoted to something else,
| becoming a unique product in itself that better serves our users
| than we initially thought.
|
| Without imitating the original, we wouldn't have come up with
| this wonderful product that helps teams save tons of time.
|
| https://avo.cool
| jasfi wrote:
| That looks really cool indeed! I might do something similar for
| the UI framework I'm working on: https://nexusdev.tools/
| kitd wrote:
| The format I was taught is: Imitate, inculcate,
| innovate
|
| ie. you need to spend time imitating others, but then more time
| totally grokking it to fully appreciate the whys, costs, &
| benefits of the old approach before trying to innovate past it.
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