An Unoriginal Idea

17/10/2026

This is my first blog post in a while. I feel like the concept of "this isn't my typical blog post" is becoming too common for this to actually be uncommon. Yes, though. This isn't my typical blog post.

I Had an Unoriginal Idea

And you did, too. Many, many times. You thought you were a genius for it. Then, you saw it somewhere; it could have been online, or someone just telling you about it: a philosophical insight that you had that turned out to be some famous dead guy's work, a startup idea that someone else reached Series A with, or just a cool thing that someone beat you to.

You can probably think of some more places where this would apply to. I can't. Not right now, but be a bit imaginative here.

It was this

This. This blog post. My unoriginal idea to succeed all its predecessors is this blog post.

I mean for this post to be representative of an idea that I had. Specifically, a self-referential idea, that I assume I'm not the first to have.

The idea is that the idea is unoriginal, if you didn't get it yet. It doesn't matter who it was: someone thought of this before. I can't prove it empirically (definitely a shame), but now whoever has it again definitely can. I encourage you to do your own research on repeat discovery (Robert K. Merton is a really good reference here)

The most famous self-referential statement is "this statement is false". You can see how "my" (note the quotation marks) idea is reminiscent of that (and behaves strangely under self-reference):

• If the idea is original, that's false... for everyone after me
• If it isn't, it's true

Which means that the idea is true for everyone who has it except for the "inventor", and (WLOG) this "inventor" was wrong. The first person to say it thought that they were making an unoriginal statement, when it was actually original. Everyone after that was correct in their assumption that the idea was unoriginal. The idea is only true after it's been false once.

Unironically, me being the inventor would make me look kind of stupid.

Moral of the Story

tbh I think this speaks volumes about how originality really works; more than I can put into words here. If this blog post does well enough, I'll probably post some more philosophy-adjactent stuff (and maybe a part 2 to this)

jess out ✌️

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