Mimesis has re-revealed its awesome and godly power to me over the last few months. Not Girardian mimesis, but hominid mimesis. Best way to do almost anything is to literally copy others, especially the best people but really the triangulation between any few people will do. Don’t know how to write an email? Copy it from an email you received. Don’t know how to do any chore, cooking, dance, etc? Just look it up on youtube. This is a long ways from Connor of 2018, who fastidiously avoided watching youtube videos of poi so I could explore it all on my own for months.
Mimesis has a bad rap in my local culture. But, huge postulate: mimesis is ONLY bad when coupled with such tight need for approval that it is a hard constraint on what you can do. That’s the combination that results in whole segments of society that can’t innovate, can’t fix basic problems, general cheems mindset. In our scene of non-conformists, there is essentially no downside, I postulate!
You can make arguments like “thinking things through for yourself first can help avoid anchoring”, or “you can genuinely learn better if you take a first stab yourself and then see the diff”. Sure, but I think these are the exception that proves the rule. Holding off on mimesis is very useful in a few contexts, and all the time for a few occupations; for most people, 99% of stuff is best to do starting from the shoulders of giants. If you like thinking for yourself, trust me that you will do that just the same while cooking from a recipe compared to trying to derive it yourself. If I had just started learning poi as the experts do it, I would have much more quickly gotten to a place where creative energy and first principles yielded interesting new results, rather than just new results.
Not sure where that is but, pure imitation, and no innovation does seem to have downsides yes. (Aside from incomplete copying, can mean stuff degrades over time.) That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful tool. There are other tools as well. Knowledge isn’t always explicit, and doesn’t have to be, but there are benefits to making things more explicit if that knowledge is used.
99% of stuff is best to do starting from the shoulders of giants.
Yeah...unless you acquire all the (explicit) knowledge yourself—approaches that are not imitation will still draw on other’s knowledge and work. (That doesn’t mean all of it will be right, easy to use, or useful.)
Mimesis has re-revealed its awesome and godly power to me over the last few months. Not Girardian mimesis, but hominid mimesis. Best way to do almost anything is to literally copy others, especially the best people but really the triangulation between any few people will do. Don’t know how to write an email? Copy it from an email you received. Don’t know how to do any chore, cooking, dance, etc? Just look it up on youtube. This is a long ways from Connor of 2018, who fastidiously avoided watching youtube videos of poi so I could explore it all on my own for months.
Mimesis has a bad rap in my local culture. But, huge postulate: mimesis is ONLY bad when coupled with such tight need for approval that it is a hard constraint on what you can do. That’s the combination that results in whole segments of society that can’t innovate, can’t fix basic problems, general cheems mindset. In our scene of non-conformists, there is essentially no downside, I postulate!
You can make arguments like “thinking things through for yourself first can help avoid anchoring”, or “you can genuinely learn better if you take a first stab yourself and then see the diff”. Sure, but I think these are the exception that proves the rule. Holding off on mimesis is very useful in a few contexts, and all the time for a few occupations; for most people, 99% of stuff is best to do starting from the shoulders of giants. If you like thinking for yourself, trust me that you will do that just the same while cooking from a recipe compared to trying to derive it yourself. If I had just started learning poi as the experts do it, I would have much more quickly gotten to a place where creative energy and first principles yielded interesting new results, rather than just new results.
Not sure where that is but, pure imitation, and no innovation does seem to have downsides yes. (Aside from incomplete copying, can mean stuff degrades over time.) That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful tool. There are other tools as well. Knowledge isn’t always explicit, and doesn’t have to be, but there are benefits to making things more explicit if that knowledge is used.
Yeah...unless you acquire all the (explicit) knowledge yourself—approaches that are not imitation will still draw on other’s knowledge and work. (That doesn’t mean all of it will be right, easy to use, or useful.)