Out With the Trash
Sean Moore
All good ideas are recycled, stolen, or rescued from the landfill.
Not too long ago I was having a discussion with my advisor about a hypothetical experiment. Earlier that day, we had been sitting in on a journal club, and near the end we had moved on to what next possible steps researchers could take to enhance the findings. I had made a suggestion, innocuous enough,and it had been debated for a bit before the focus shifted elsewhere.
But after the meeting had been adjourned, my advisor had pulled me aside and told me he thought my proposal was quite insightful (humble brag, I know), and in fact a group had done just that study. He gave me a link to the article, and suggested I read it before we met for our regular meeting so we could discuss that.
I decided to do just that. In between classes, I looked up the article and started to read. About a page or so into it – no small feat with an academic paper – I came to a rather abrupt realization: I had read this article several years ago, and this very experiment I had just hours ago believed to have sprung forth in inspiration had in fact begun as some vague half-remembered reading.
When I began my discussion with my advisor that afternoon, I told him exactly that: that this idea I had supposedly had was instead nothing more than me recalling the details of what I’d read. And then I told him my greater fear: that all my ideas were exactly like this.
This isn’t to stay that stealing inspiration is not without benefit. If you’re an engineer looking to learn how to design a well-built machine, there’s no better way to start than take a part a well-built machine that already exists. As a writer, I consume the material of other authors far greater than myself, in the hope that I can at the very least adequately imitate them. And if you’re trying to make it as a web developer, the best way to get started is to view the source on some gorgeous websites and then get cranking to imitate them as best you can.
Stealing, imitation, reverse-engineering, whatever you deign to call it works because it shows you not only how to make, but how to what you make goes together. In the process of stealing the ideas of others we gain insight into the decisions that need to be made in the act of creation, and how those around us chose to solve the design problems at hand.
Stealing can be great, sure; but what I fear is that in the murky depths of poor memory I go from recognition of a great idea that came before me to an idea I sprung forth from myself. I fear that whatever great ideas I have aren’t ideas at all, but memories of great things that I’ve forgotten and re-remembered, this time without the attribution. I fear that every thought that I have comes not from within, but is instead some hollow echo of a thing I once knew.
And what of that conversation, with my advisor? After he had heard me tell my terror, he smiled. He told me that it didn’t really matter. What was the difference, between a good debate about a paper giving you the spark of a new idea, or a recollection of one you had already read? And who’s to say that you wouldn’t have had exactly that thought, even if you hadn’t read about it before. And finally he said, even with all of that, what is really important is that you can articulate why, that you can understand, why this sort of succession of experiments needs to take place, why A gives rise to B.
And of course he’s absolutely right. It doesn’t matter where our thoughts, our ideas come from. We don’t stand on the shoulders of giants. We stand atop mountains of past experience. All the trash, all the treasure, is lying beneath our feet, waiting to be found and brought back into the light of dy and thought of anew.