Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal

"The aesthetic impulse to share is at least as strong as the impulse to imitate."- Wittgenstein

I was somewhat aware that coming up with an idea is worth nothing if nothing is done to act upon it and use it to change something in the real world, but recently I realized that it looks like I was focusing too much on just the idea generation process. The implementation might be much harder, as you say, which to be honest sounds like a really good thing to me, for the reasons I'll describe now. It's kind of a bittersweet feeling. I have this new idea, and then I discover it's already been conceived in the past by someone else.

I'm frustrated that someone else has already thought about my idea, but happy because I know thinking that is irrational because of course someone else has thought of it before and I'm happy that someone so accomplished and genius happened to come up with the same idea as me, and this means that there is some merit to the idea and it's a good idea, and also happy because as far as I know it's not been implemented yet, so I can still develop their ideas and build upon them! With that said, Dr. Eric Drexler is in competition with MIT Media Lab for stealing most of my ideas.

Just in case you're curious, this was my idea: if we could just develop very expert AI in specific narrow domains, and develop lots of such AI systems, that could work independently but in conjunction, simultaneously all at once, and give us the piece of info that we require from them independently that we ourselves piece together, put together and combine in a way that only we know how to do and have the ability to do. This Drexler guy comes once again and steals my novel idea, already came up with it a few decades ago, or rather I'm the one who came up with it a few decades late. But due to the reasons I mentioned above I'm more happy than disappointed.

Some links to help you learn more about his projects:

https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reframing/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler

Oh other than MIT Media Lab and Dr. Drexler there is another person whom I have come to admire for his accomplishments and because he works in a field similar to what I wish to work in, Dr. Friston. While reading about him I also discovered that when he was younger than me he had this idea to discover the fundamental axioms from which he could derive everything else, and I realized it's eerily similar to my current project of building an AI system that converts everything into mathematical and logical symbolic language and extracts general principles from specific cases to figure out some fundamental principles that hold true universally.

He never really tried it, but he developed the free energy principle, and I was happy to see someone so accomplished and talented have the same ideas. So I'm just wondering now how to go about it.

So my main takeaway from this is that I'll try to implement all my ideas before someone else comes up with them and also implements them and history repeats itself like with Tesla and Edison and a few other scientists I forgot. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries)

No, I'm just kidding because I don't care who does it first and I'd only like to see these ideas come to reality without any care for superficial external validation because it's counterproductive and distracting so anyone reading these ideas let me know if you find some flaw in it or collab or even doing it yourself alone if you can do that because that would also be great, just let me know when you do. There are still many I haven't and don't intend to share but they're probably nonsense anyway, or at least so I'd like you all to believe.

You must've heard the popular quote attributed to Picasso- “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” I used to think this is just a snarky remark but recently I have realized that it actually contains great wisdom. All Ideas Are Borrowed.

Just think about it. All your ideas, beliefs, and thoughts are constantly influenced by, and many times directly borrowed from, other people's thoughts. We are interdependent on each other, and our previous generations. The scientific process also works by building up on the discoveries and inventions of our predecessors, and improving on existing ideas. Artists recombine existing ideas in novel ways that excite us.

A common man is even more dependent on others because he doesn't have the time and/or resources to achieve expertise in any domain, so he depends on experts and whatever seeks reliable to him. We may at times come up with a novel idea or thought, but it would also be built upon things already been created by others, and more frequently than not we discover ideas we like by learning from other's writings or teachings and eventually adopting those ideas as our own if they satisfy some criteria.

Just going a little off topic again I wanted to comment that extracting key takeaways from concepts is something I've recently realized to be very important, and without doing this everything you learn is useless.

It's when you connect the concepts to your personal experiences, the real world, your everyday life and understand it's relevance to the present day and how it's going to help you going forwards, understand intuitively the concept so that you can apply it in novel situations and connect it with previously acquired pieces of information, only then would I be actually able to learn and apply it in my real life, and know why I'm learning this and how it's going to help me make better decisions in life or help me solve social problems or investigate topics relevant to my research interests, and when you ask these questions you also discover why you're learning might be just to pass exams, in which case you're wasting your time unless you have something more important going on, "important" of course being subjective and depending on the individual in question.

But if you wish to go one level further maybe you could also try to figure out what you should learn according to your values and future goals, which books and topics you should focus most on, what timelines and which techniques are best for learning them, and according to your individual differences which learning method is best for you.

Finally, coming back once again to the main topic, all ideas and beliefs are borrowed, because we usually first come across them while reading books, watching the television or talking to people, and we like them so we adopt them, and if we like them then our brain starts coming up with reasons why we like it and why it must be true and we fall prey to confirmation bias, which could make us emotionally attached to ideas and make us prone to violating one of the core principles of scientific method and rationality: open-mindedness, because in this situation we are more susceptible to falling for dogmatic ideological beliefs and taking any sound logical argument or contradictory evidence as a person attack instead of trying to search for the truth.

Just because an idea is borrowed, it doesn't make it any less valuable or imply that you have done something wrong. Even the scientific community builds upon the work of their predecessors, engineers depend on scientists and workers to help them bring their products to reality, and every single human on Earth is in some way or the other, directly or indirectly, dependent on each other and on the wider ecosystem of nature and life.

If we don't borrow ideas, we won't be able to build on them and improve them and use them to improve our lives, and there would be not scientific progress, because we would, constantly have to keep reinventing the wheel, metaphorically speaking. And if we don't allow others to borrow our ideas, we won't pass on our learnings to others and to the future generations, and our ideas and learnings would perish with us, without leaving any impression or having any possibility of impact in the world whatsoever, so you might as well never have existed.

That's not as horrible as it might sound at first, because nothing really matters in the long-term, and most of what we do is going to be forgotten anyway, and at the end humanity itself would probably meet the same fate, if we don't make some great progress in the coming centuries and go by the past, which to be fair is not an accurate predictor of the future.

Though I did find that it is in criminology and behavioural science, and the more we procrastinate something, the less likely we are to do it in the future, which is some sort of law I don't remember the name of, but names are not nearly as important as the concept, which is something Feynman and Huberman have also said at times

I also discovered that this procrastination law fits a general principle I came up with- if you have done A in the past, you are more likely to do A in the future, according to behavioural psychology and criminology. Replace A with not B, and you get: if you have done (not B) in the past, you are more likely to do (not B) in the future, which in other words is the same as: not doing B in the past is a strong indicator that you will not do B in the future. And that's the law of procrastination! Hence proved. Q.E.D.

Okay I might have made some mistake, if you detected any please let me know. And I realize I went wildly off tangent, so coming back to the main topic now and ending the post, because some people have told me the posts are too long, and I'm too busy and too lazy (yes, both at the same time) to break down my posts into smaller pieces, and right now I'm mainly writing for myself, so I might just organize it all in some structured form and bite-sized posts in the near future, if I feel like it, I have the time, I stay alive for long enough to do that, the world doesn't end, the internet doesn't go down, I don't lose my linguistic or cognitive abilities, I don't lose my hands, I don't lose access to the net, I'm not abducted by the government or aliens, or don't come up with some ingenuous insight and disappear from the face of Earth to work on my grand project or solve some Millennium problem or something. Or any of the thousands of other ways of could go wrong.

Coming back, as I was saying, meaninglessness and nothingness aren't so bad, but borrowing and letting others borrow ideas is good for everyone in the long term, what's called a positive-sum game in game theory, which is a very interesting branch of microeconomics I'd encourage you to check out even if you don't ever have to devise a clever strategy for an army, because it's a helpful thinking and decision-making tool.

This is also one of the reasons I'm a strong proponent of open source applications and free information. In all of science, research usually funded by taxes, and yet the general public has to subscribe to expensive journals and scientific magazines to access such information, and I believe that is unfair.

Another point is related to my belief that age and credentials must not present hurdles for motivated people interested in getting involved in the scientific community and research, and they should have all tools and knowledge available, with certain exceptions and complex cases I won't get into now- things like infohazards and codes for bioweapons that could be used by terrorist organizations, for instance. In fact I have been collecting a list of infohazards somewhere in some notepad, so I think I'm aware of the dangers of what I'm suggesting here. Still in general I think that scientific progress could be sped up greatly if most of the information was free.

Being a Ravenclaw, bookworm, philomath- a lover of learning, and someone who holds lifelong learning and curiosity as some of their core values, I might be biased, and of course as always, I'm willing- and more than happy- to change my mind if anyone is able to present me with contradictory evidence or convincing logical arguments against my beliefs.

Finally, for anyone interested in this topic I'd encourage them to check out this psyche essay- https://psyche.co/ideas/beauty-is-not-an-ornament-to-the-good-life-it-is-at-its-heart

I think as the essay says, imitation could be a visceral desire to imitate ideas and behaviour that touches something deep within us, and we desire to imitate and spread the ideas or behaviour- be it a piece of art or meme- to allow share the joy with others, and as not everyone would find it as enjoyable as you do- many people don't get chills down the spine (frissons) while listening to Mozart's piano sonata number 8, like I do, and I might not get them at songs that other people like listening to- and so we are able to connect with like-minded people who share the same sense of aesthetics and appreciation for beauty, and bond over the common interests.

"After all, you don’t imitate and share any old aesthetic thing: you don’t don any old outfit, you don’t order everything on the menu, and so many aesthetic goods you ignore. Why did that outfit inspire? Why did you share that song, play it on repeat, find that specific recipe and recreate the dish? In one way or another, you are moved to imitate and share the things that speak to you, that seem, in one way or another, to be alive."

"Aesthetic life is driven by cycles of imitation, expression, and sharing. But notice that you cannot do this alone. Aesthetic life requires another person" Maybe these aesthetics are intuitions that give us pleasure at a visceral level and so connect with like similar people at a fundamental level.. and so they would also likely to have similar values and intuitions regarding their ideal selves, as they share similar intuitive feelings and it affects their preferences in every domain of life. Or am I pushing this too far?

This also relates to my idea of how every profession contributes to humanity in some way, and improves lives, as in the past I mistakenly believed that only certain professions are more 'practical' and 'useful', but now I have realized: a scientist finds aesthetic value in doing science, the same as an artist does in art. Everyone is interdependent on each other and we can not live fulfilling lives without people who do their job well and derive satisfaction from it. Aesthetic value directly contributes by making our lives better, and indirectly in ways like scientist doing his work with joy that contributes in improving others lives in other ways.

Another point in favour of aesthetic values (tangible and intangible)- when AGI is created and suffering is eradicated and no one is required to work, this aesthetic value is all that could make human life worth living.

When everyone would be automated, in a distant utopian world, then we would not not have to worry about insignificant stuff like working boring or hard jobs to make ends meet, just to survive, and we could do what we wish, and then we would have to confront what is probably the biggest unanswered question for human civilization- what makes a life fulfilling? Or: What is a life well-lived, and how could we all discover what we want in life: our values, beliefs, interests, abilities, desires- that could enable us to self-actualize?

Let me know if you have any comments and feel free to connect.