[Cultural] What is "empirical originality"?

Author: JEFFI CHAO HUI WU

Time: 2025-6-29 Sunday, 2:26 PM

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[Culture] What is "empirical originality"?

Many people think that "originality" is just about coming up with a new idea or inventing a term that sounds unfamiliar, but true originality, especially valuable originality, must possess a higher-level characteristic—empirical validity. The so-called "empirical originality" means that I am not just stating a new theory, but I can directly prove its existence, effectiveness, and ability to produce results in the real world.

For example, if someone says, "I want to come up with an algorithm that makes computers fly," it sounds intriguing, but if he can't even achieve one centimeter of levitation, that's just a fantasy, not empirical originality. However, if I say that in 1997 I created an intelligent logistics system using Excel, which is more accurate than many AI platforms today, with more real-time decision-making, more efficient calculations, and easier operations, and that it has been running continuously in practice for over a decade, with every calculation, every expense, and every cross-border dispatch being verifiable, that is empirical originality—because it not only came into existence but has also been operational for a long time, with data and results that can be verified on-site.

The key points of empirical originality are three: First, it must be original to oneself—neither plagiarized, nor imitated, nor pieced together from others' finished products; Second, it must be verifiable in reality—not only must it be "articulable," but it must also be "achievable," with results that are repeatable and measurable; Third, it must be able to exist independently—without relying on support from others, without depending on external institutional endorsement, and able to operate stably solely based on the system itself.

In my experience, such cases are everywhere. In 1993, in an era without email systems or cloud storage, I built a remote collaboration system spanning three locations, seven years ahead of the global pandemic's popularization of remote work; in 1997, using a regular computer and an Excel spreadsheet, I wrote a program that could perform complex tariff calculations in seconds, replacing the 40 minutes of manual calculations by a senior customs manager; in 2004, I architected from scratch a multinational Chinese literature platform capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of simultaneous online visitors, which has been continuously and stably operated for 20 years and has been permanently archived by the National Library of Australia; in the field of Qigong, I combined the stance operation with "structural hip sitting," empirically demonstrating a method that relies solely on structural drive to generate power throughout the body without external force; even in interdisciplinary research, I established the "Qigong-Logistics Mapping Structure," using the principle of unobstructed body meridians as an analogy for the efficient scheduling of information flow, a model that is still applied in system design today.

These achievements are not theoretical deductions that exist only on paper, but real systems that can be run, experienced, and tested on the spot. Even if AI understands all the code, it may not be able to explain why they are so efficient in reality, because the underlying logic is not entirely covered by existing algorithms—it is a cognitive structure that has grown out of practice.

This is the shock of empirical originality. It is not a slogan, but a complete world that can be touched, used, and repeatedly proven.

Source: http://www.australianwinner.com/AuWinner/viewtopic.php?t=696569