Not if you are still capable of respecting yourself while reflecting on who you are. If so, it was worth it.
I think I was unclear, I was actually agreeing with you. It was the OP muddying the waters and ruminating unnecessarily…
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Somehow I think the well-heeled “haves” respect themselves quite highly, and would argue that it was absolutely worth it; even if they destroyed everything for everyone else, as long as they got what they wanted.
Respecting yourself is not dependent on doing good with your life.
But thank you for the encouraging words.
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And because others’ “original” contributions to your ideas come about from the same process, it’s “filing serial numbers off of others’ contributions” all the way down, ad infinitum. It’s the Great Chain of Being Stolen From. So if that is the case, are others’ contributions really their contributions? What does it mean to have a contribution without a contributor?
I agree with the sentiment, but when one frames “originality” as just taking ideas from others, one is actually committing the fallacy that such framing is intended to correct; that fallacy is the attribution of ideas to people altogether. To say that " ‘originality’ isn’t individual genius, it is collective genius" is to miss the point; the point is that originality isn’t anything; it just isn’t.
Originality, whether seemingly individual or collective, is a myth that we ascribe to manufacturers of artifacts, performances, rituals, etc., which, when encountered, generate the sensation of “novelty”. Unfortunately, it’s easy to mistake the feeling that something is new to oneself with the judgement that something is new to the universe; few folks take into consideration their lack of omniscience, and don’t bother pondering all the possible instances of the seemingly new thing that could have existed earlier; hence, we have the myth of originality.
I must apologize, but I find it annoying when lay people act like they know how the mind works, when folks who work in mind-fields will readily admit they have absolutely no idea how they work. I myself am quite familiar with neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of mind, and I can assure you that the matters mentioned in the above quote are not settled issues.
The way this is written, it sounds like you are absolutely sure of these conclusions. So I shall try to convince you to not be so sure. For example, are you absolutely sure that minds do no operate differently for different people? Are you really telling me that Hellen Keller’s mind worked that same way that yours does?
In 1908, Keller wrote:
Are we really supposed to deny that Keller’s mind worked differently than others’ before she met Anne Sullivan (her teacher)? Indeed, I bet her mind continued to work differently than others’ after she acquired language. Or are we to deny the existence of her mind pre-Sullivan? Or deny her personhood?
If mind’s don’t operate differently for different people, do they operate different for different species? How did that happen? If all human minds operate identically, and all chimpanzee minds operate identically, but we don’t have chimpanzee minds, and they don’t have human minds, but we share a common ancestor, how did the operations of ours minds come to be differentiated by species, if it is the case that mind-operation cannot vary from individual to individual? Individual variation is absolutely necessary for evolution to work (that’s basic evolutionary biology); to claim that minds don’t vary across individuals is to claim that minds couldn’t have evolved. Is that what you are claiming? I could be wrong, but I’m almost certain you wouldn’t make that claim.
As for the video, I do not think it approaches its subject with rigor. Take this quote:
This question casts a theory as a strawman, labelling it’s explanations as extraordinary, and asking if extraordinary explanations are useful. Well, if you’re familiar with Western epistemology and philosophy of science, you would say “By Occam’s Razor! We don’t need extraordinary explanations! We need parsimonious explanations!”, regardless of the content of the second clause. You would probably question why anyone would ask that, given that that the answer seems obvious. Now, look at the second clause. Do you see it? It’s tautological! “Everything about thinking can already be explained by thinking”, i.e. thinking explains thinking, i.e. the explained is the explanation. So true! Like all tautologies. How does one create an unnecessary strawman, then fail to knock it down by providing circular reasoning? I really don’t know, but I do know some rigor could have helped. Too bad much of the audience won’t recognize these rhetorical tricks, and will just accept what’s fed to them.
One thing I find particularly annoying about this video is that that it’s founded on assumptions not made explicit, and it ignores millenia-old discourses from various philosophical traditions that could provide insight and useful perspectives, which would enrich the discussion. For example, it’s kind of ridiculous, if you ask me, to start a discussion of creativity and ideas with Whitehead; just because he coined that English word “creativity” doesn’t mean that the discourse of the concept starts with him (it doesn’t!).
Furthermore, the video makes use of an authoritative voice, but it’s not in the least bit authoritative, and it uses that voice to make claims as if they are facts, without hinting to the audience that there is a deeper, older, more nuanced and complicated discussion that the video has chosen to gloss over. Maybe I’m asking too much from people.
I understand, it has to be a short video, so you don’t include everything, but that still doesn’t mean you must make it so that it misleads and miseducates! So many youtube videos are like this: all the trappings of authority, and all the traps of naïveté. The medium needs more works that help the audience think for themselves, rather than works that attempt to do all the thinking for them. Such works are generally those that raise questions, rather than those, like this one, that are convinced they have answers when they don’t.
Now that I think about it, I don’t think these types of videos are actually made with the intent of educating people. I think they are intended instead to make people feel educated. Especially bibliophobes.
Everyone, please excuse my ridiculously long post. Sorry. I must say, however, that gadflies are an important part of any healthy intellectual ecosystem.
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Skill is not the same thing as creativity or talent. I was a creative but unskilled drummer, my wife is a skilled but uncreative cook. I have explained to my kids many times that most people mistake craft for talent. Almost anyone can learn to be competent at a craft by working at it, the talented can take it to another level.
Ex: Anyone can learn to draw competently, but may never be Michelangelo. In fact drawing was once taught in military academies, it was considered a vital skill if you were to scout out terrain and enemy positions and clearly communicate what you saw.
FWIW, my only patent was totally derivative, I was startled my client patented it.
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I would argue that they are not capable of the self reflection part, though. At least not honest self reflection. You seem like the reflective sort to me.
Yeeeaaaahhhh. I do more than my fair share of navel-gazing.
I can’t speak for the rich and powerful of course. If I could I would say, “Rise up and tear me from my throne!” … if only to see the looks on their faces after I said it.
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Bonus points if you said it from your golden toilet.
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I don’t think this is always true. My perspective on this is musical, and I’ve thought about this a lot. I think one thing that needs to be considered is: is it any good? Anyone can be creative and sound like shit. Anyone can perform a rote impersonation of an established sound. It’s another matter entirely to come up with something both new and good. Taste and perspective muddy the waters but it’s still an important question.
The last band I was in had a core of two members, me and another guy. He was good at coming out of the gate with an interesting idea, and I was good at building a composition around that idea.
It seems likely that I was inhibited by theory; anytime I would engage in creative play, I’d immediately identify a series of notes or chords by the scale or mode they corresponded to. When he’d come to me with a musical phrase, a lot of times it was fucking brilliant but didn’t make any musical sense. I mean, of course it did, because it was brilliant, but it would take me awhile to get my head around.
So, I had more technical skill and far more time spent practicing but as far as I’m concerned I was the inferior musician creatively speaking.
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