Comments on: 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?

Question: 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?

Lownotes — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:37:53 -0800

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?

By: interrobang

interrobang — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:43:47 -0800

"Scooped"?

By: aeschenkarnos

aeschenkarnos — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:04:52 -0800

"Great minds think alike?" :)

By: thedanimal

thedanimal — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:18:31 -0800

Disappointment.

By: MiffyCLB

MiffyCLB — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:24:21 -0800

"Duh" ;)

By: thivaia

thivaia — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:32:27 -0800

Mine's still better.

By: chinston

chinston — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:42:34 -0800

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.

By: chrisalbon

chrisalbon — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:51:07 -0800

A publication called "\\Previous Idea\\ Revisited"

By: sfkiddo

sfkiddo — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:52:27 -0800

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.

By: Meatbomb

Meatbomb — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:25:49 -0800

Naive eureka.
Ignorant epiphany.
Unoriginal invention.

By: generichuman

generichuman — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:05:07 -0800

Graduate School.

By: Leon

Leon — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:06:17 -0800

I tend to go with "all my best ideas are taken".

By: I_Love_Bananas

I_Love_Bananas — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:10:10 -0800

Thanks Generichuman. Early morning laffs from that one.

By: Quietgal

Quietgal — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:17:21 -0800

Yup, scooped. (Don't ask me how I know.)

By: adamrice

adamrice — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:40:26 -0800

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.

By: thinkpiece

thinkpiece — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 08:26:04 -0800

Googling.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:10:15 -0800

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.

By: ersatz

ersatz — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:54:15 -0800

Nothing new under the sun or revelatory letdown, I suppose, if you want to refer to the process.

By: galaksit

galaksit — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:38:48 -0800

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.

By: euphorb

euphorb — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:31:52 -0800

Prior art

By: bricoleur

bricoleur — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:25:54 -0800

The Hundredth Monkey