This incessant push for originality is probably largely what drives imposter syndrome in academia. From the outside, our work may even look brilliant to laypeople, but from the inside, we know how painfully derivative all our ideas really are.
Counterpoint (sort of; maybe more of a juxtaposition):
I am aware of at least one academic field where, from the outside, the work looks very original; and from the inside, it also looks original—and this is a bad thing, because the demand that all research should be “novel” largely prevents the field from doing useful work, from developing a corpus of established knowledge and robust models, from developing clever ideas into truly useful and comprehensive solutions to real problems…
To put this vague complaint into perspective: in the field in question, approximately 3% of published papers are replications. 3%! Needless to say, the journals and conference proceedings are littered with abandoned, barely formed ideas and with repeated reinventions of half-baked wheels that’ve been invented before a dozen times, but slightly differently, and never built up into anything except “proofs of novel concepts”…
This is the true price of chasing “originality” and “novelty”!
This incessant push for originality is probably largely what drives imposter syndrome in academia. From the outside, our work may even look brilliant to laypeople, but from the inside, we know how painfully derivative all our ideas really are.
Counterpoint (sort of; maybe more of a juxtaposition):
I am aware of at least one academic field where, from the outside, the work looks very original; and from the inside, it also looks original—and this is a bad thing, because the demand that all research should be “novel” largely prevents the field from doing useful work, from developing a corpus of established knowledge and robust models, from developing clever ideas into truly useful and comprehensive solutions to real problems…
To put this vague complaint into perspective: in the field in question, approximately 3% of published papers are replications. 3%! Needless to say, the journals and conference proceedings are littered with abandoned, barely formed ideas and with repeated reinventions of half-baked wheels that’ve been invented before a dozen times, but slightly differently, and never built up into anything except “proofs of novel concepts”…
This is the true price of chasing “originality” and “novelty”!