On imitation
Growing up with four siblings, I was deeply sensitive to copying: “Don’t copy me” was a frequent refrain. It was not just that I worried about being copied; I also worried that others would think that I’d copied them. I wanted to be original, or at least perceived as original, and — perhaps perversely — left alone in this originality.
My mother would say “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.”
“Imitation is the highest form of fatuity,” I would think.
But what if I had been the fatuous one?
I vividly remember a conversation I had with a friend during my high school years, one evening in a 24-hour diner in Southern California. He had done something outlandish and original.
“I’ve done that too!” I said
“Yeah, well, great minds think alike. Then there are idiots like you who copy us.”
I remember finding this uproariously funny, and quite painful too. I didn’t want to be known as an imitator.
But what if a commitment to originality impedes creativity?
"The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation," is a 2011 paper by the cultural evolutionary theorists Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, along with the then up-and-coming Joseph Henrich.
In it, they argue that social imitation, far more than individual ingenuity, is critical for the creation of new things.
They argue that it does so by obviating the need for causal understanding.
For example, in the development of complex sinew-backed Inuit bows:
Causal understanding is helpful because it permits the exclusion of irrelevant traits like the bow's color. However, causal understanding need not be very precise as long as the correlation is reliable. Copying irrelevant traits like thickness or color will only add noise to the process. By recombining different components of technology from different but still successful individuals, copiers can produce both novel and increasingly adaptive tools and techniques over generations, without any improvisational insights. An Inuit might copy the bow design from the best bowyer in his community but adopt the sinew plaiting used by the best hunter in a neighboring community. The result could be a better bow than anyone made in the previous generation without anyone inventing anything new.
Not only is it useful, it’s extremely common:
Consistent with this, laboratory and field evidence suggests that both children and adults are predisposed to copy a wide range of traits from successful or prestigious people (42). Advertisers clearly know this. After all, what does Michael Jordan really know about underwear? Recent work in developmental psychology shows that young children readily attend to cues of reliability, success, confidence, and attention when choosing who to learn from (43, 44). Even infants selectively attend to knowledgeable adults rather than their own mothers in novel situations (45). This feature of our cultural learning psychology fits a priori evolutionary predictions, emerges spontaneously in experiments, develops early without instruction, and operates largely outside conscious awareness.
When we see someone do something successfully, we copy it, and if we make large numbers of imperfect copies, we can (as a group) isolate which parts of a technology are important.
Partial copying provides wide variation over which we can make the selection of what works.
By combining random features, we can find out which ones work together or enhance each other, which ones are irrelevant, and which even inhibit other advantages. By combining features from different sources, we can create things that are entirely new.
The point here is that a lot of invention and innovation may not come from obstinate originality, as a naive “great man theory” might hold, but from wide-scale imitation.
“But in resolving to devote my entire energy, time and passion to the translation of a foreign work, I did myself the best of services, by assuming a moral task. My uncertain seeking and striving now began to make sense. And if today I were to counsel a young writer who is still unsure of his way, I would try to persuade him first to adapt or translate a sizable work. In all sacrificing service there is more assurance for the beginner than in his own creation, and nothing that one has ever done with devotion is done in vain.”
— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (1942)
A few months ago, I had a conversation with a new friend about her desire to start writing fiction. She said that she’s able to write scenes, but that she doesn’t think she can stitch these scenes together to form a plot the length of a novel.
“If I were you,” I said, “I’d pick my favourite novel, and copy the plot. All the characters and scenes you write will be different, so no one will be able to tell.”
Imitate. We are imperfect mirrors.
This post is one in a series which will explore the principles of Neither/Nor, in this case the importance of Trial and Error. Listen here for background.
I’ll be publishing based on entries in my Zettelkasten, which come up in Readwise. This post comes from Zettel 12/734a2, “Copying eliminates causality,” written on Monday 14 June 2021.