Is Originality Overrated?
Plus! Sunday Assorted Links #6: Disrupting FAANG, Shopify, Alien life, Global Pandemics and more!
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Is Originality Overrated?
What is originality? It’s when you get ideas that have not been thought of before.
Why is it important? Because novelty subverts expectations. It leads to creation of something fresh, new and well…original. Nothing like it has existed before; it’s a true contribution to the knowledge pool of humanity.
The problem, however, is that if you have thought of something, it is very likely that someone else has also thought of it. That is what makes originality hard. There are 8 billion1 brains thinking and what are the chances that your brain has thought of something that other brains haven’t? It’s 0.0000000125%
. If that is not infinitesimal enough, consider all the humans that have ever walked on Earth - 117 billion2 brains. What about the thoughts each brain has? The average human has 178 million thoughts during his/her lifeitme. If we take that into account, then the chances of thinking something original is 5 x 10^(-20)
. Infinitesimally infinitesimal. For scale, the chances of a candidate cracking the Indian Civil Services exam (UPSC), one of the toughest exams in the world, is 0.13%3.
If it is this hard, can originality ever be overrated? And yet, it is overrated in some sense. But before we talk about that, let us look at how ideas themselves are formed.
What are ideas?
Ideas are the output generated by our brains. We can understand this using a mathematical analogy:
Y = f(x)
where Y
are the ideas you create (output), function f()
is your brain and x
is what you feed your brain (input).
x
is anything that you experience be it cognitive, sensory, social or emotional; x
is anything you feed your brain by consuming text (books, blogs, tweets), audio (podcasts, conversations with friends & family, Clubhouse conversations), video and images (memes, YouTube, Netflix); x
is the experience you have accumulated so far.
Our brain is the function that operates on this input and generates an output i.e ideas. With that out of the way, lets look at why originality is overrated.
Ideas are art
Ideas are like a piece of art. As Todd from Bojack Horseman says, it’s more about what people get out of it than it is about what people put into it.
If someone benefits from an idea, does it really matter whether it was original or borrowed?
Originality is subjective
Inputs (x
) are like your thumbprints4 but better. They’re a mental thumbprint; they uniquely identify you. x
is what makes you, you. No two people have the same x
. This allows for recycling.
You could be recycling the mental model you heard in a podcast or a philosophy you read in a book, it could be a investment strategy that you read in a blog or a productivity framework that your friend told you about. None of these are original in the sense that you did not come up with them, you simply heard it or saw it elsewhere. But it can be original to someone who did not read that blog or hear that podcast. Originality is subjective. Not everyone has the same inputs (x
) and to those people, your ideas sound original.
Since originality is contextual, your output can simply be the input (Y = x
) and still sound original. Of course, one should not take credit for someone else’s idea (more on that below) but this kind of recycling is necessary. Because ideas, especially good ones, need to scale.
Ideas need to scale
How sad it would be if a good idea died with its creator; how sad it would be if its potentialities went unrealized by the masses. Original ideas don’t just have to be created, they also need to be propagated and the act of propagation is inherently unoriginal. So trying to scale ideas is a good idea (pun intended).
Not only does the idea itself benefit people (first-order effect), there are second order effects with far-reaching ramifications. Take the example of a light bulb. The first order effect is simple - it eliminates darkness. The second order effects? Factories did not have to shut down after sunset which meant they could employ more people which meant that people could earn more which meant they could afford an education for their kids. It meant reduced robbery and crimes which in turn meant people could step out at night without fear which in turn meant they could hold gatherings, travel, and party at nightclubs. The second order effects are innumerable. There is another powerful second order effect: ideas, irrespective of their originality, can inspire other ideas in other people. This is the butterfly effect at work - “A small change can make much bigger changes happen; one small incident can have a big impact on the future.”
So it is okay to simply regurgitate what someone said but to a different audience for idea propagation is as important as idea creation. Just be honest with yourself about what you are doing though. Are you propagating an idea or are you creating one? If it’s the former, then give credit where it is due; don’t appropriate someone else’s creation. You can also scale ideas by building on top of the original idea. Start-ups do this all the time - Flipkart was inpsired by Amazon, Ola by Uber, Google Cloud and Azure by AWS. Quentin Tarantino, one of the greatest filmmakers, famously said “I steal from movies all the time”.
Avoid copy pasting, though. Add your own twist, flair and personality to it. If you’re doing that, you might as well share the OG material.
True originality is impossible
When there are a 117 billion brains with each brain having 178 million thoughts during its lifetime, the chances that two brains had the same idea is pretty high. Many have experienced this first hand.
Derek Sivers, for example, in a podcast5 recounted: “I was 42 when I read my first book on stoicism and I went ‘HOLY SHIT!’ I thought it was just me! This is my quirky weird Derek philosophy that I have been living by since I was 14 years old. Like this whole thing about making life deliberately tough on yourself to strengthen yourself for the unknown future. All this is like..my quirky philosophy I have been living by for 25 years and holy shit. It’s got a name, it’s got an ‘ism’, it is 2000 years old. It’s amazing. It blew my mind to realize it was not just me.”
Unsurprisingly, this is not uncommon. Issac Newton was not the only one to come up with Calculus. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also came up with it at the same time independently. Darwin was not the only one who theorized that Natural Selection is how species evolve. Alfred Russel Wallace also came up with the exact same theory independently. It is called ‘Multiple Discovery’ or ‘Simultaneous Invention’ and it even has a Wikipedia page.
In the context of humanity, ideas being objectively original is near impossible. Given how hard it is, perhaps originality is correctly rated. It is being unoriginal that is underrated.
Thanks to Ananya and Krithika for reading drafts of this.
This Week’s Interesting Reads
No rabbit hole for this week but we do have lots of interesting places to visit so put on your helmet!
Who Disrupts the Disrupters
By Packy McCormick
Blog | 35 minute read | Tags: Web3.0, Blockchain, Silicon Valley
Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple are too big to be disrupted. Too big in the sense that their reach is all encompassing. Disruption can happen when there is a section of people that could not be catered to. For example, those wanted to chill at home while watching a movie couldn’t until Netflix. But thanks to internet and the deep pockets of these tech companies, their reach is unlimited and thus, there is no scope for small start-ups to disrupt these giants.
Have we hit a dead end, then? Nope, web3 is here to disrupt web2. If the crypto world has ever seemed mysteriously confusing to you, read this article to get a better understanding of what it can do and how it can improve our lives. Packy mentions a couple of terrific platforms built on top of the block chain and talks about the disruptive potential of web3. A riveting read.
Shopify: The E-Commerce On-Ramp
By Patrick O’Shaugnessy
Podcast | 1hr | Tags: Shopify, E-Commerce, Start-ups
How is Shopify similar to Apple? How does Shopify view its competition? How is it different from Amazon? Can adding friction for the users possibly do any good? A fascinating glimpse into the Shopify ethos, what makes it tick and their strategy.
Engineering the Apocalypse
By Sam Harris
Podcast | 3hr 45min | Tags: Pandemic, bio-war, apocalypse
COVID-19 was just a dress rehearsal and we failed horribly at dealing with it. If COVID-19 was only a bit more deadlier, we would be in an apocalyptic scenario. The problem is, due to the developments in synthetic biology, it is easy to engineer a virus that can wipe humanity off of the earth. Like how computers shrunk in size from occupying an entire room to occupying just our pockets, advancements in genetic engineering have led to easier access to synthetic engineering equipment. This is worrisome since it is akin to making guns easily accessible to everyone and we all know how that went. At least with guns, the death count is under 4 digits (mass shootings, terrorism). With a synthetically modified deadly virus, the death count could be in billions.
And no one is really keeping an eye on the usage of these equipments and labs. At least with chemicals used to make RDX, for example, there is a surveillance mechanism. With synthetic biology, there is no authority overseeing what kind of modifications are being made to a virus.
In fact, there are some terrifying incidents that have happened already. We spent decades to eliminate small pox. Yet, the small pox virus managed to leak from a bio-storage facility. Thankfully, It didn't cause an outbreak but leak it did.
People worry about doomsday scenarios involving AI and aliens. But those are science fiction at best compared to the threat of a deadly pandemic. A synthetic biologist messing around with a H5N1 virus to make it more contagious is far more likely to usher us into a doomsday scenario than AI. It's real, it's here and we need to do a lot of things to ensure we don't go extinct because of it.
This episode is like a nail biting thriller movie. You will forget that it is nearly 4 hours long. A must listen.
Evolution: Animals, Aliens, and Ourselves
By Bio Eats World
Podcast | 3hr 45min | Tags: Aliens, biology, evolution
Biology is the study of living organisms and we have only encountered life on Earth. Unlike physics, math or chemistry, whose laws are universal, biology isn't universal. However, what is universal is the theory of evolution. Aliens would also develop features in accordance with the theory of evolution and natural selection.
We evolved to be intelligent because it was necessary for our survival. We had to navigate complex ecosystems and tackle complex problems. If we did not have to do those things, there would be no need for intelligence. This could very much be the case for aliens. Unless their environment demands it, there is no need for them to develop consciousness. So aliens need not be intelligent like the sciFi movies portray them to be. For the same reason, they probably won't have telepathic abilities or ability to fly like superman because if there is no need for it, then they won't develop those traits. For all we know, aliens could just be dumb fish-like creatures - fragile and harmless.
Quote of the week
Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like ‘news’. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world. - @Ideopunk
That’s all for this week!
Rounding off to the closest billion. And yeah, we are more closer to 8 billion than we are to 7 billion | Source.
The chances of two people having the same fingerprint is 1 in 64 billion (Source). The chances of two people being the same? Zero.
A comment on footnote #4 - Though entire fingerprints may be unique, parts of fingerprints are not. This is a problem in crime scenes where often it is parts of fingerprints that are recovered, instead of a complete fingerprint. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/myth-fingerprints-180971640/)