Conversation

90% of the time, it's just some bully wanting you to acknowledge Their Thing™ as a precedent no matter how obvious it is ("There is a lot of published literature on 2+2=4, you can't just do the sum yourself, you should cite the original")
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Also the probability of discovering some cool new aspect/feature/tweak very early in the idea tree is non-trivial and potentially higher than the risk of missing some obvious danger (an oft-cited justification for provenance surveying)
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I have an unpopular opinion on this as well. Originality is not just trivially possible, but almost impossible to avoid. While there is friction/noise/entropy in the world, perfect *unoriginality* is in fact the hard thing to achieve.
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Replying to @vgr
I don't think artists have realized the extent to which "originality" is now completely impossible. Any remotely interesting idea, visual, or concept has been turned over thousands of times on the internet and the best are sucked into the insatiable maw of major content producers
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Replying to
Partly why I put "originality" in quotes. There's novelty in everything but by the outmoded, territorial standards of artists and critics its scarcely possible to deploy a good artistic/literary idea that hasn't been used somewhere fairly high profile (if its a good idea)
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Replying to and
I meant like this nightmarish Scott Alexander tweet where he came up with a clever little thought and people dragged him for not knowing it was already the basis for an entire HBO series.
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The Latin word for God is "Deus" - or as the Romans would have written it, "DEVS". The people who create programs, games, and simulated worlds are also called "devs". As time goes on, the two meanings will grow closer and closer.
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