[Paracompact]

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”

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.

[directevolve]

> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain

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.

[MattDamonSpace]

and then I’m reading you

[joshuamcginnis]

How the information is shared can be as important as the act of sharing it in the first place. You might have a particular voice and style for communicating these ideas, but your audience may have otherwise passed it over without your unique approach.

[el_benhameen]

I’ve never thought about it quite like that, but it’s a great point. So, thanks for sharing the thought in this unique way.

[baxtr]

Most relevant xkcd I thing:

https://xkcd.com/2501/

[dchftcs]

"I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"

[tehnub]

Indeed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)

[anileated]

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[melagonster]

Maybe society just rewards the first penguin to jump into the sea.

[rmnull]

tangentially related:

https://youtu.be/4PwDFddpo4c

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.

[genghisjahn]

The first penguin certainly rewards the orcas.

[zephen]

> 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.

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.

[Paracompact]

> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing.

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?

[zephen]

> Not sure how you mean "style,"

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.

[Chu4eeno]

> 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."

I read that as a reference to Dunning-Kruger.

[winter_blue]

One way AI can help here is identifying prior art. Write a quick sketch of you idea, and ask an LLM with uncapped long-running web search capability to find if any prior art exists!

[16bitvoid]

Sorry, I don't mean to single you out in any way, but why does AI/LLMs have to get shoehorned into every discussion here? It's getting exhausting.

[kvdveer]

The added value of the LLM here is probably zero. Just type a search propmt in a search engine. If the top 5 results don't cover the same ground your article is covering, at the very least, your article will expose new knowledge to people using that search term.

Typing up LLM instructions and reading the output is probably more work.