Comment by nabla9
10 years ago
This is related to things that people like Robert Axelrod have been studying. It's innovation vs imitation dilemma in social learning and evolutionary game theory.
Science. 2010 Apr 9;328(5975):208-13. doi: 10.1126/science.1184719. Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20378813
Related xkcd http://xkcd.com/1170/
Like all good philosophy, this idea has a long history. I encountered it in Taleb's Black Swan as Pyrrhonian skepticism, which flourished in Greece as the Aristotelian Academy. Very down to earth and actionable advice on living and doing. Many Pyrrhonians were doctors and that colored their philosophical views—at a time when philosophy was taken very seriously and meant more than it does today (see it as a precursor of today's science).