This statement follows the broad thesis that imitation is far easier than innovation.

This is equal to the imitation principle of biologically primary knowledge as stated in Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 2011). Perhaps also the borrow-and-reorganize principle though that has to do with biologically secondary knowledge and explicit instruction.

39:00 Vanevar Bush misses out on a whole swath of history regarding commonplace books and indexing. In As We May Think he presents these older methods to the computer. "Why not imitate?" Aldrich says, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel (or thinking you are doing so).

While the idea of a common user interface on computers may have felt like a selling point when facing a new scary machine with a variety of functionalities, did it really save that much time, effort, and learning curve? Particularly with respect to the common office tools it was replacing?

The common user interface was really more a benefit to the company and all the companies which programmed for it at scale. The benefits are like Melvil Dewey's standardization of the Dewey Decimal Classification which allowed libraries everywhere to work on the same system rather than needing to reinvent their own individually.

This sort of innovation with scalability is helpful as humans are far better at imitation than innovation.

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1843k2w/comment/kaypbk2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm reasonably certain that most of the transmission of the traditions was specifically from person to person rather than from text to person. Yours is an interesting and important (and rare oral) example of person to person zettelkasten transmission, of which I've been collecting some scant examples. (Other examples appreciated, inquire within.)

Interestingly a lot of this transmission is still happening every day (though now more "visibly" online) in fora like Reddit, zettelkasten.de, Discord, in social media, and even smaller group courses. As Annie Murphy Paul indicates in The Extended Mind, people like to imitate rather than innovate. Perhaps Luhmann, being on his own outside of the establishment, was more likely to innovate because he was on his own and took Heyde's advice, but evolved it to his needs rather than asking questions on Reddit?

for: imitation - child - mother, social learning, cultural learning - origin, altricial, mother - child relation

Too many zettelkasten aspirants only want the presupposed "rules" for keeping one or are interested in imitating one or another examples. Few have interest in the actual day to day practice and these are often the most adept. Of course the downside of learning some of the pieces online leaves the learner with some (often broken) subset of rules and one or two examples (often only theoretical) and then wonder why their actual practice is left so wanting.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/ZeZEgNm8Ee2woUds5QzgOw

Going back at least as far as the rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, we recognize that while sets of rules can be helpful to the student, these must also be paired with ample imitation and practice.

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

I suspect that artificial memory systems, particularly those that make some sort of logical sense, will indeed be long lasting ones.

Given the long, unchanging history of the Acheulean hand axe, as an example, these sorts of ideas and practices were handed down from generation to generation.

Given their ties to human survival, they're even more likely to persist.

Indigenous memory systems in Aboriginal settings date to 65,000 years and also provide an example of long-lived systems.

The master-apprentice model of teaching and learning in which the master breaks down a problem into a set of subskills which the apprentice solves and practices with regular feedback for improvement is broadly similar to best pathways shown in cognitive science research on improving learning efficiency for building expertise.

(restatement)

This is similar to the IndieWeb and web standards ideas of looking back at history to see the actual patterns of work that were beneficial.

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/HhAj3r1bEeyw9h_Pa4QNrA

Forte is fairly good at contextualizing people and proving ethos for what he's about to present. Essentially saying, "these people are the smart, well-known geniuses, so let's imitate them".

Humans are already good at imitating. Are they even better at it or more motivated if the subject of imitation is famous?

See also his sections on Twyla Tharp and Taylor Swift...

link to : - lone genius myth: how can there be a lone genius when the majority of human history is littered with imitation?

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

Tiago Forte frames the creative process in the framing of divergence (brainstorming) and convergence (connecting ideas, editing, refining) which emerged out of the Stanford Design School and popularized by IDEO in the 1980s and 1990s.

But this is just what the more refined practices of maintaining a zettelkasten entail. It's the creation of profligate divergence forced by promiscuously following one's interests and collecting ideas along the way interspersed with active and pointed connection of ideas slowly creating convergence of these ideas over time. The ultimate act of creation finally becomes simple as pulling one's favorite idea of many out of the box (along with all the things connected to it) and editing out any unnecessary pieces and then smoothing the whole into something cohesive.

This is far less taxing than sculpting marble where one needs to start with an idea of where one is going and then needs the actual skill to get there. Doing this well requires thousands of hours of practice at the skill, working with smaller models, and eventually (hopefully) arriving at art. It's much easier if one has the broad shapes of the entirety of Rodin, Michelangelo, and Donatello's works in their repository and they can simply pull out one that feels interesting and polish it up a bit. Some of the time necessary for work and practice are still there, but the ultimate results are closer to guaranteed art in one domain than the other.

Commonplacing or slipboxing allows us to take the ability to imitate, which humans are exceptionally good at (Annie Murphy Paul, link tk), and combine those imitations in a way to actively explore and then create new innovative ideas.

Commonplacing can be thought of as lifelong and consistent practice of brainstorming where one captures all the ideas for later use.

Link to - practice makes perfect

If the creative process has timeless principles found throughout history, why aren't they written down and practiced religiously withing our culture that is so enamored of creativity and innovation?

As an example of how this isn't true, we've managed to lose our commonplace tradition and haven't really replaced it with anything useful. Even the evolved practice of the zettelkasten has been created and generally discarded (pun intended) without replacement.

How much of our creative process is reliant on simple imitation, which is a basic human trait? It's typically more often that imitation juxtaposed with other experiences which is the crucible of innovation. How often, if ever, is true innovation in an entirely different domain created? By this I mean innovation outside of the adjacent possible domains from which it stems? Are there any examples of this?

Even my own note taking practice is a mélange of broad imitation of what I read combined with the combinatorial juxtaposition of other ideas in an attempt to create new ideas.

Forte frames things primarily from a digital perspective so he talks about folders and tags, but seems to wholly forget the grand power of having an subject index. While they're broadly the same, it's as if he's forgoing two thousand years of rhetorical tradition to have something that seems new and innovative, but which are paths that are incredibly well travelled.

This pulls into question our zeal for innovation. Most thought is created and honed against other pre-existing thought.

Some of the fun of note taking is not only rewriting an idea in one's own words for potential understanding, but expanding upon it to extend the ideas, sometimes based on our pre-existing world view and knowledge. The rest is linking this idea into place with our other knowledge and then combining an permuting it with that knowledge to create new knowledge.

This seems to be a building block of the broader idea of "combinatorial creativity".

link to: - Annie Murphy Paul's contention that imitation > innovation - Lee Vinsel's The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most

can imitation lead to innovation?

innovation is the use of combinatorial creativity to make new things... rarely, if ever?, is true innovation made from whole cloth, there is always(?) something used as a base which is extended.

What here is exactly innovative? He's talking about a centuries old idea.

He's just giving you something slightly updated to imitate.

How does this fit into the broad idea of imitation >> innovation from Annie Murphy Paul?

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

An easy way of creating new music is to take a short length of music and break it down into smaller constitutive parts and then loop them and potentially then build them back up into longer pieces.

Older content may broadly be considered more valuable than newer content. The fact that it has been "tried and true" gives it enormously more value than newer and untested content.

Newer content is primarily valuable solely because it is new. How much of it will live on to become old content without falling off of the long tail of the value distribution?

Link this to the idea of imitation > innovation in Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind.

Link this to the fact that NASA uses 30+ year old software and systems in their outer-space program because all the glitches and bugs have been found and it's far more reliable.

Finding the older gems has generally been the sort of driving idea behind @peterhagen and his https://lindylearn.io/ site -- particularly his Hacker News tool.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/aVetvME-Eey28u-vkmJ1Hg

This same analogy also works in advanced mathematics courses where students are often learning dense and technical vocabulary and then moments later applying it directly to even more technical ideas and proofs.

How might this sort of solution from law school be applied to abstract mathematics?

By providing students solid examples of work that is expected of them they can more easily imitate the examples which frees up cognitive bandwidth so that they can focus their time and attention on creating their own content related to particular assignments.

Literature scholar Edward P.J. Corbett used to command "Imitate, that you may be different!" While his rhetoric and composition textbook may have encouraged students to emulate the masters, this pattern goes back to ancient Greek rhetoricians who also admonished

Link to rhetoric examples in antiquity. Link to the Finding Forrester example.

Showing students examples of work and processes that they can imitate will fuel their imaginations and capabilities rather than stifle them.

American children aren't encouraged to as attentive imitators as their foreign counterparts and this can effect their learning processes.

I can anecdotally confirm that my two year old used to imitate clapping at the end of songs on the radio because of what she'd seen us do in the past.

Research has shown that humans are "high-fidelity" imitators to the point of overimitation. It's possible that as an evolved and highly social species that imitation signals acceptance and participation by members of the society such that even "cognitively opaque" practices will be blindly followed.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/lROFtsDkEey_yHtNNJ_NfQ

Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

Explore this area more deeply.

Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?

total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

Studies have shown that humans are highly selective about whom they choose to imitate. Children up to age seven show a propensity to imitate their parents over strangers and after that they primarily imitate people who have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent within an area of expertise.

This has applications to teaching with respect to math shaming. A teacher who says that math is personally hard for them is likely to be signaling to students that what they're teaching is not based on experience and expertise and thus demotivating the student from following and imitating their example.

Oded Shenkar's three step process for effective problem solving using imitation: - Step 1. Specify your problem and identify an analogous problem that has been successfully solved. - Step 2. Analyze why the solution was successful. - Step 3. Identify how your problem and circumstances differ from the example problem and figure out how to best and most appropriately adapt the original solution to the new context.

The last step may be the most difficult.

The IndieWeb broadly uses the idea of imitation to work on and solve a variety of different web design problems. By focusing on imitation they dramatically decrease the work and effort involved in building a website. The work involved in creating new innovative solutions even in their space has been much harder, but there, they imitate others in breaking the problems down into the smallest constituent parts and getting things working there.

Link this to the idea of "leading by example".

Link to "reinventing the wheel" -- the difficulty of innovation can be more clearly seen in the process of people reinventing the wheel for themselves when they might have simply imitated a more refined idea. Searching the state space of potential solutions can be an arduous task.

Link to "paving cow paths", which is a part of formalizing or crystalizing pre-tested solutions.

courses on effective imitation.

If imitation is so effective, what would teaching imitation to students look like in a variety of settings including, academia, business, and other areas?

Is teaching by way of imitation the best method for the majority of students? Are there ways to test this versus other methods for broad effectiveness?

How can we better leverage imitation in teaching for application to the real world?

In a 2002 dissertation and subsequent articles, Tess Pape proposed imitating solutions proposed by the FAA in airline accidents as a means of limiting distractions during medicine dispensing by nurses and medical staff to limit preventable medical errors.

the innovator—and yet it is the imitator who consistently captures the lion’s share of financial returns.

Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 50.

Anyone use imitation-type exercises for learning, whether for yourself, for students, or another learning situation?

This is still too often the case in the general public as evinced by watching the Obsidian and Roam Research spaces.

The history of rhetoric is littered with suggestions to imitate. Early commonplace book handbooks encouraged it heavily.

Cross reference: https://hyp.is/mCsl9voQEeuP3t8jNOyAvw/maggieappleton.com/echo-narcissus

On the importance of imitation...

I'm reminded of Benjamin Franklin imitating what he thought were good writers to make his own writing more robust.

See: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm

Maybe the aphorism: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," should really be "Imitation is the sincerest form of learning."

Tangential to my particular study, but consider the idea of Donald Trump as being an imitator within this framing. He would frequently float ideas at rallies (cf. George Lakoff) to see what would get a rise from the crowed and riff off of that. In some sense he's not leading, yet imitating the mobs.

Miyoshi, S., Jusup, M., & Holme, P. (2020). Flexible imitation mechanisms suppress epidemics through better vaccination. ArXiv:2009.00443 [Physics, q-Bio]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00443

Lelonkiewicz, J. R., Gambi, C., Weller, L., & Pfister, R. (2020, April 15). Lelonkiewicz_et_al_2020_Adaptation_and_Anticipation. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000717

Imitation makes another appearance, which (as mholder pointed out with Vico) "was one of the dominant methods of instruction in rhetoric up through the Enlightenment".

I think imitation is particularly important in terms of women's education, as women often would have little to go by but a model, specifically one observed (over ones read about).

He mentions imitation twice in this paragraph, which was one of the dominant methods of instruction in rhetoric up through the Enlightenment. What does imitation look like today? I'm curious as to what that might (or does) look like.

Mirror, imitation?

Imitation

Imitation, what a wonderful tactic!

Good artists copy; great artists steal. -P.P.

Interesting.

Man sees himself in everything

Deaf man metaphor, we can never know the original or truth, but approximate

We are merely trying to fill roles and hide our true selves because we recognize our insufficiency.

Imitation is important and students must choose the best to imitate.

Those we imitate act as the fertile soil we grow from

It sounds like Plato's cave metaphor

Requires ingenuity and imagination. We must do something more with what we imitate

Imitation is a continual theme throughout this work

Writing is the last and highest in the progression

imitation, mimesis