- Jun 2024
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jaredhenderson.substack.com jaredhenderson.substack.com
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Narratives are how we conceptualize the world. Certain narrative links – links between events that we add in to help explain the world – are picked up through mimesis. We see others think of the world in a particular way, and we start to conceptualize the world in similar terms. And the best solution to a harmful narrative is a more enriching narrative. You have to have a replacement for the narrative you are trying to rid yourself of.
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.
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- May 2024
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theinformed.life theinformed.life
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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).
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- Apr 2024
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archive.org archive.org
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[Narrator]: The power of the MC 68000 permitted another breakthrough:the common user interface.[Bill Atkinson]: On Lisa we make each of the programs have a similar user interface,so that what you've learned from using one programcarries over and you feel naturally how to use the next.
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.
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- Nov 2023
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documented evidence of oral transmission of index card use as a method
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?
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- Oct 2023
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www.sciencedaily.com www.sciencedaily.com
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for: imitation - child - mother, social learning, cultural learning - origin, altricial, mother - child relation
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- Apr 2023
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Local file Local file
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one must also submit to the discipline provided by imitationand practice.
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.
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they weresensible enough to recognize that one does not acquire a skill simply bystudying rules; one must also submit to the discipline provided by imitationand practice. And they recognized too that in order to derive the maximumbenefit from precept, imitation, and practice, the student had to be firedwith a desire to learn as much as his natural endowments permitted.
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.
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- Feb 2023
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
- Jan 2023
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www.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org
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We appreciate this is a long span of time, and were concerned why any specific artificial memory system should last for so long.
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.
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- Oct 2022
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physicstoday.scitation.org physicstoday.scitation.org
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Cognitive-science research shows that people improve learning efficiency by practicing the set of specific cognitive tasks required for their area of expertise.11. K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, C. Tesch-Römer, Psych. Rev. 100, 363 (1993); https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363A. Ericsson, R. Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, HarperOne (2017). Although that approach is based on learning research, it is uncoincidentally quite similar to the ideal master–apprentice method for traditionally teaching a craft (see figure 1).
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)
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- Jul 2022
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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It’s so much easier to see what worked than to predictwhat might work. Sönke Ahrens
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
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- Jun 2022
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Local file Local file
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Ernest Hemingway was one of the most recognized and influentialnovelists of the twentieth century. He wrote in an economical,understated style that profoundly influenced a generation of writersand led to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
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?
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If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model ofdivergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template forthe creative process in our time.
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.
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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.
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As powerful and necessary as divergence is, if all we ever do isdiverge, then we never arrive anywhere.
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
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This standardized routine is known as the creative process, and itoperates according to timeless principles that can be foundthroughout history.
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.
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Tags can overcomethis limitation by infusing your Second Brain with connections,making it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns thatdefy simple categorization.
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.
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Our creativity thrives on examples
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.
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Annotators
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Tiago is a true pioneer and innovator of our time!
What here is exactly innovative? He's talking about a centuries old idea.
He's just giving you something slightly updated to imitate.
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www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
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The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most
How does this fit into the broad idea of imitation >> innovation from Annie Murphy Paul?
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
- Apr 2022
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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one of those powerful things that any musician can do like take this song [Music] and you could basically cut out little loops from that
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.
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winnielim.org winnielim.org
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It is always about the new The frontpage of any content-driven media is often geared towards the latest happenings. But what if there are old gems hidden beyond? A new user wouldn’t be able to discover them.
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.
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instructors and experts must also become more legible models. This can beaccomplished through what philosopher Karsten Stueber calls “re-enactiveempathy”: an appreciation of the challenges confronting the novice that isproduced by reenacting what it was like to have once been a beginner oneself.
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As Smith notes, the emulation of model texts was once a standard feature ofinstruction in legal writing; it fell out of favor because of concern that thepractice would fail to foster a capacity for independent thinking. The carefulobservation of how students actually learn, informed by research on the role ofcognitive load, may be bringing models back into fashion.
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In the course of teaching hundredsof first-year law students, Monte Smith, a professor and dean at Ohio StateUniversity’s law school, grew increasingly puzzled by the seeming inability ofhis bright, hardworking students to absorb basic tenets of legal thinking and toapply them in writing. He came to believe that the manner of his instruction wasdemanding more from them than their mental bandwidth would allow. Studentswere being asked to employ a whole new vocabulary and a whole new suite ofconcepts, even as they were attempting to write in an unaccustomed style and anunaccustomed form. It was too much, and they had too few mental resources leftover to actually learn.
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?
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This act of imitation relieves students of some of theirmental burden, Robinson notes, allowing them to devote the bulk of theircognitive bandwidth to the content of the assignment
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.
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One of the field’sleading textbooks was authored by literature scholar Edward P. J. Corbett, whonever relinquished the notion that emulating the work of the masters was the firststep toward developing one’s own distinctive style. “Imitate, that you may bedifferent!” Corbett thundered.
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.
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Seeing examples of outstanding work motivates students by givingthem a vision of the possible. How can we expect students to produce first-ratework, he asks, when they have no idea what first-rate work looks like?
Showing students examples of work and processes that they can imitate will fuel their imaginations and capabilities rather than stifle them.
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In studies comparing European American children withMayan children from Guatemala, psychologists Maricela Correa-Chávez andBarbara Rogoff asked children from each culture to wait while an adultperformed a demonstration—folding an origami shape—for another childnearby. The Mayan youth paid far more sustained attention to the demonstration—and therefore learned more—than the American kids, who were oftendistracted or inattentive. Correa-Chávez and Rogoff note that in Mayan homes,children are encouraged to carefully observe older family members so that theycan learn how to carry out the tasks of the household, even at very young ages.
American children aren't encouraged to as attentive imitators as their foreign counterparts and this can effect their learning processes.
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why do weclap at the end of a performance
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.
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Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.
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.
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Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.
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?
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While it was once regarded as a low-level, “primitive” instinct, researchers arecoming to recognize that imitation—at least as practiced by humans, includingvery young ones—is a complex and sophisticated capacity. Although non-humananimals do imitate, their mimicry differs in important ways from ours. Forexample, young humans’ copying is unique in that children are quite selectiveabout whom they choose to imitate. Even preschoolers prefer to imitate peoplewho have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent. Researchshows that while toddlers will choose to copy their mothers rather than a personthey’ve just met, as children grow older they become increasingly willing tocopy a stranger if the stranger appears to have special expertise. By the time achild reaches age seven, Mom no longer knows best.
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.
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three steps required to solve the all-importantcorrespondence problem. Step one, according to Shenkar: specify one’s ownproblem and identify an analogous problem that has been solved successfully.Step two: rigorously analyze why the solution is successful. Jobs and hisengineers at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, immediately got towork deconstructing the marvels they’d seen at the Xerox facility. Soon theywere on to the third and most challenging step: identify how one’s owncircumstances differ, then figure out how to adapt the original solution to thenew setting.
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.
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Shenkar wouldlike to see students in business schools and other graduate programs taking
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?
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In her 2002 dissertation, and then in a series of articles published in medicaljournals, Pape made a case for imitating this practice. “The key to preventingmedication errors lies with adopting protocols from other safety-focusedindustries,” Pape wrote in the journal MEDSURG Nursing in 2003. “The airlineindustry, for example, has methods in place that improve pilots’ focus andprovide a milieu of safety when human life is at stake.”
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.
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It’s paradoxical but true: imitating well demands a considerable degree ofcreativity.
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Researchshows that the imitator’s costs are typically 60 to 75 percent of those borne by
the innovator—and yet it is the imitator who consistently captures the lion’s share of financial returns.
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Jan-Michael Ross and Dmitry Sharapov, both business professors at ImperialCollege London, studied the competitive interactions among yachts engaged inhead-to-head races in the America’s Cup World Series. The researchers foundthat sailors often engaged in “covering,” or copying, the moves made by theirrivals—especially when their boat was in the lead. It might seem surprising thatsailors at the front of the pack would imitate those who are trailing, but Rossnotes that such emulation makes sense: as long as the leaders do as their rivalsbehind them do, their lead will remain locked in place. Says Ross, “Our researchchallenges the common view that it’s only the laggards, the also-rans, whoimitate.”
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Fourth, imitators are able to avoid being swayed by deception or secrecy: byworking directly off of what others do, copiers get access to the best strategies inothers’ repertoires. Competitors have no choice but to display what socialscientists call “honest signals,” as they make decisions for themselves based ontheir own best interests.
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Gerard Tellis and Peter Golder, both professors of marketing, conducted ahistorical analysis of fifty consumer product categories (including diapers, fromwhich the Pampers versus Chux example was taken). Their results showed thatthe failure rate of “market pioneers” is an alarming 47 percent, while the meanmarket share they capture is only 10 percent. Far better than being first, Tellisand Golder concluded, is being what some have called a “fast second”: an agileimitator. Companies that capitalize on others’ innovations have “a minimalfailure rate” and “an average market share almost three times that of marketpioneers,” they found. In this category they include Timex, Gillette, and Ford,firms that are often recalled—wrongly—as being first in their field.
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Under the Romantics’ influence, imitation did not merely become less favoredthan previously. It came to be actively disdained and disparaged—an attitudethat was carried forward into succeeding decades. The naturalists of the latenineteenth century described imitation as the habit of children, women, and“savages,” and held up original expression as the preserve of European men.Innovation climbed to the top of the cultural value system, while imitation sankto an unaccustomed low.
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The third advantage of imitation: copiers can evade mistakes by steering clearof the errors made by others who went before them, while innovators have nosuch guide to potential pitfalls.
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Second: imitators can draw from a wide variety of solutions instead of beingtied to just one.
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An individual whosimply buys what Buffett is buying, the researchers found, will earn an averageof more than 10 percent above market returns.
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by copying others, imitators allow other individuals to act asfilters, efficiently sorting through available options.
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Researchers from thesevaried disciplines are using models and simulations, as well as historicalanalyses and real-world case studies, to show that imitation is often the mostefficient and effective route to successful performance.
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As for which strategy worked best, there was really no contest: copying wasfar and away the most successful approach. The winning entry exclusivelycopied others—it never innovated. By comparison, a player-bot whose strategyrelied almost entirely on innovation finished ninety-fifth out of the one hundredcontestants.
Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 50.
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Derivative writers seem versa-tile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artisticoriginality has only its own self to copy.
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- Nov 2021
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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In fact, if Paul is correct (and I think she is, and have thought so for years when teaching writing), we should build imitation into many more of our lesson plans.
Anyone use imitation-type exercises for learning, whether for yourself, for students, or another learning situation?
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site.pennpress.org site.pennpress.org
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While scholars have long identified an early modern tendency to borrow and redeploy texts, Bound to Read reveals that these strategies of imitation and appropriation were rooted in concrete ways of engaging with books.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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fiet even today note taking generally remains an areaof tacit knowledgeW acquired by imitation rather than formal instructionWand about which there is little explicit discussionY
This is still too often the case in the general public as evinced by watching the Obsidian and Roam Research spaces.
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- Sep 2021
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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Encourage imitation. By seeing imitation as intellectually empty and even fraudulent, we neglect one of the most powerful learning tools we have. How might we build imitation more deliberately into our pedagogy? How might we use an intentionally-designed apprenticeship model for more types of learning?
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
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Imitation, Paul says, allows us to think with other people’s brains. It is a key technique — globally and transhistorically — for learning, from babies imitating parents to apprentices imitating masters. And yet imitation is seen in contemporary US society, and schooling especially, as so debased that it is frequently punished. In fact, if Paul is correct (and I think she is, and have thought so for years when teaching writing), we should build imitation into many more of our lesson plans.
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."
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- Aug 2021
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Local file Local file
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Imitation did not mean exact reproduction; rather, words could be added or substracted, and a passage reworked in order to express the same or a contrary view (52)
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.
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- Mar 2021
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store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com
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It seems the game is trying to be similar to Monkey Island, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Imitation is sometimes considered flattery afterall.
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- Sep 2020
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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
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- May 2020
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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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
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- Feb 2019
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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Model on tl,t,t� which to form our selves. Or ruther to imitate
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).
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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imilalc,
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.
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- Apr 2017
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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reflect
Mirror, imitation?
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Plato against the poets in book X of his Republic
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- Mar 2017
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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Such iter-ability-(iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved (whether pictographical, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to cite the old categories).
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drive.google.com drive.google.com
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The commentary-principle limits the chance-element in discourse by the play of an identity which would take the form of repetition and sameness.
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The infinite rippling of commentaries is worked from the inside by the dream of a repe-tition in disguise: at its horizon there is perhaps nothing but what was at its point of departure-mere recitation.
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
- Feb 2017
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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con-struct arguments very similar to one another-
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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adapting trnditional rhetoric
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imitate
Imitation, what a wonderful tactic!
Good artists copy; great artists steal. -P.P.
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- Nov 2013
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caseyboyle.net caseyboyle.net
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That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.
Interesting.
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The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it.
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It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams
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considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man
Man sees himself in everything
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To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one
Deaf man metaphor, we can never know the original or truth, but approximate
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What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus
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This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself-in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.
We are merely trying to fill roles and hide our true selves because we recognize our insufficiency.
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- Oct 2013
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www9.georgetown.edu www9.georgetown.edu
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But if a man desire to speak not only with wisdom, but with eloquence also (and assuredly he will prove of greater service if he can do both), I would rather send him to read, and listen to, and exercise himself in imitating, eloquent men, than advise him to spend time with the teachers of rhetoric
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rhetoric.eserver.org rhetoric.eserver.org
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Therefore, the first consideration for the student is to understand what he proposes to imitate and why it is excellent.
Imitation is important and students must choose the best to imitate.
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they yet never fully attain to his force or fertility of language
Those we imitate act as the fertile soil we grow from
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rather one of those images of Epicurus, which he says are perpetually flying off from the surfaces of bodies
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Moreover, everything that resembles something else must necessarily be inferior to that of which it is a copy, as the shadow to the substance, the portrait to the natural face, and the player's acting to the real feeling
It sounds like Plato's cave metaphor
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imitation is not sufficient of itself,
Requires ingenuity and imagination. We must do something more with what we imitate
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Our minds must be directed to the imitation of all their excellences, for it cannot be doubted that a great portion of art consists in imitation, since, though to invent was first in order of time and holds the first place in merit, it is of advantage to copy what has been invented with success.
Imitation is a continual theme throughout this work
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rhetoric.eserver.org rhetoric.eserver.org
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it is evident that commencement of the art arose from speaking, followed by imitation, and, last of all, diligent exercise in writing
Writing is the last and highest in the progression
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rhetoric.eserver.org rhetoric.eserver.org
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Such is the practice of actors who do not pronounce exactly as we speak in common conversation, for such pronunciation would be devoid of art; nor do they depart far from nature, as by such a fault imitation would be destroyed; but they exalt the simplicity of familiar discourse with a certain scenic grace.
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rhetoric.eserver.org rhetoric.eserver.org
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The next symptom is imitation, for that is an indication of a teachable disposition, but with this provision: that it express merely what it is taught, and not a person's manner or walk, for instance, or whatever may be remarkable for deformity.
imitation, mimesis
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