Is there a word or phrase that describes the experience of learning there is an established academic definition for an idea you thought was yours alone?

January 3, 2008 7:37 PM

Is there a word or phrase that describes the experience of learning there is an established academic definition for an idea you thought was yours alone?

I often have an epiphany or long-held viewpoint about a subject and thought it was all my own, but when I go online to research it, I find my epiphany is decades old and by now is well-researched and established.

Is there a term for this sort of ignorance? Has anyone written about this in detail?

posted by Lownotes to writing & language (20 comments total)

"Scooped"?
posted by interrobang at 7:43 PM on January 3, 2008

"Great minds think alike?" :)
posted by aeschenkarnos at 8:04 PM on January 3, 2008

Disappointment.
posted by thedanimal at 8:18 PM on January 3, 2008

"Duh" ;)
posted by MiffyCLB at 8:24 PM on January 3, 2008

Mine's still better.
posted by thivaia at 8:32 PM on January 3, 2008

I guess you'd call the fact of this happening being preempted. A term to describe your feelings on being preempted, I'm not sure.
posted by chinston at 9:42 PM on January 3, 2008

A publication called "\\Previous Idea\\ Revisited"
posted by chrisalbon at 9:51 PM on January 3, 2008

I don't think there's a specific term and was going to write something snarky, but this is the year of the kinder, gentler sfkiddo, so:

What you're experiencing is the result of getting older: when you're younger, you feel like everything is new and original, including your own thoughts. Realizing that someone else has come up with "your" idea can feel deflating at first but it's actually an opportunity to collect all those smart ideas (including your own) and put them together into a structure you can keep building for the rest of your life. And it gets rewarding when you start applying all old/new info to your general framework which gets more and more informed from your perspective of art, history, politics, etc.

Unfortunately, this is not the year of non-pedantic sfkiddo.
posted by sfkiddo at 9:52 PM on January 3, 2008

Naive eureka.
Ignorant epiphany.
Unoriginal invention.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:25 PM on January 3, 2008

Graduate School.
posted by generichuman at 3:05 AM on January 4, 2008 [5 favorites]

I tend to go with "all my best ideas are taken".
posted by Leon at 4:06 AM on January 4, 2008

Thanks Generichuman. Early morning laffs from that one.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 5:10 AM on January 4, 2008

Yup, scooped. (Don't ask me how I know.)
posted by Quietgal at 7:17 AM on January 4, 2008

This would probably be considered a cognitive bias, although I'm not sure which one. Perhaps something like the availability heuristic is at work here: you know what you know, not what other people know, and since you're not aware that the idea is out there in the world, you imagine that it isn't out there.
posted by adamrice at 7:40 AM on January 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Googling.
posted by thinkpiece at 8:26 AM on January 4, 2008

A while back, when lists of oddly-named variants on Murphy's Law were popular on the internet, I tried to promulgate my own that speaks to this situation:

Velleman's law: Any interesting generalization you can think of has already been named and posted online.
Velleman's 0th corrolary: Including that one [if only barely].
Velleman's n+1th corrolary: Yeah, that one too.

In hindsight, "published" would have been better than "posted online." In any case, it never caught on.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:10 AM on January 4, 2008

Nothing new under the sun or revelatory letdown, I suppose, if you want to refer to the process.
posted by ersatz at 9:54 AM on January 4, 2008

The philosopher Margaret Boden's research in creativity posits "P-Creativity" (essentially, your experience, of coming up with an idea in isolation, but not being the first to do so) and "H-Creativity", the historical creative event that produced the idea originally. Well, that's roughly the idea and I don't claim to be an expert on it.
posted by galaksit at 10:38 AM on January 4, 2008

Prior art
posted by euphorb at 12:31 PM on January 4, 2008

The Hundredth Monkey
posted by bricoleur at 7:25 PM on January 4, 2008