Comment by dredmorbius
5 years ago
Agreed that you learn much about a work (I've retyped a few articles and books simply to get a usable copy). But copying is not the same as creating --- you'll see the finished product, and may intuit hints as to how it was created, but what you're not getting is the creation process itself: research (especially for nonfiction), structure, plotting and character (for fiction), editing, rewriting, restructuring and reordering content, additions and deletions.
Writing (and reading) short disconnected bits is fairly easy: nothing interrelates strongly, composition is simple and forgiving. Longer works are complex: they have structure, arcs, need to retain interest, jumps and connections need to be plausible, the whole be consistent (unless inconsistency is used for effect), etc., etc.
And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works.
I see a similar failure-to-grasp in some proposals for hypertext or advanced publishing systems. Reading is inherently serial, in that we follow lines of text on a page. Interactivity --- usually defined by the ability to skip between previously-written segments --- just offers more serial paths.
The value of hypertext and related tools may be far more on the writing process, where vastly more sources can be referenced and cited with greater ease. Some might be incorporated into the final work, but an excess of interconnections and quotations is itself distracting.
I see this as a particular blindness of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, despite many fascinating and original elements to it.
> And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works.
Well, I think the point is that you may get knowledge, but nt necessarily of the type that lets you make another great work. Doing is an act of learning, whether very small amounts of learning as you do something you've done countless times before, or possibly large amounts of learning as you try something absolutely new, or learning about yourself and what you like, what you don't, what you feel is worthwhile even if you dislike it, etc.
Ultimately, there's something to be learned from everything. Even the book you read that purports to teach you someething that you find worthless for the task should be illustrative of either what things are not useful for you in learning that, or how to structure something in such a way that it's hard for you to take away good meaning from it, and ultimately, some hints about what to look for next time that doesn't have the same problems.
So, copying isn't necessarily creating, but it should be an act of learning, and learning should hopefully help in creating, even if it's something totally divorced from what you were originally copying.
I think we're mostly in agreement: copying is useful. It is not complete.
And any learning process which focuses largely on output or product rather than process, shares this deficiency.
To your other point, serendipitous discovery is very much a thing. I find that it is helped by haviing a conceptual structure or mental model which allows slotting new concepts from unrelated areas into a larger whole.
Recent example: moralising pathologies fallacy, in wildfire:
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e...
We are, I wasn't intending to rebut you, but instead to expand on a a specific aspect you touched upon and tie it back to the context of the discussion in a slightly different way.
> I find that it is helped by haviing a conceptual structure or mental model which allows slotting new concepts from unrelated areas into a larger whole.
I very much agree. In fact, I think discovering new mental models is one of the best ways to come to new understandings about things. My entire stance on topics has changed in the past when I found on revisiting it I now had a mental model that I thought applied better/more closely than the ones available previously, and looking at the topic from that new perspective yielded a different opinion.
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