the clean room and spooky action at a distance

As a consumer of tremendous amounts of online information, I find it a challenge to write opinion pieces for publication - in order to ensure that my thoughts are actually my own, I use a "clean room" approach.

By this I mean I do the writing basically straight out of my head, only using the net if I need to check a reference for something I have come up with.

What I find surpassing strange is the spooky action at a distance, where I write down an idea and send it in for publication, thinking how clever I am... and then surf around a bit, to find people saying the same bloody things as me.  But, at the same time, I experience a sense of relief, as I would have been reluctant to use the ideas spawned from my head, had I known beforehand that synchronicity had them emerging elsewhere.

For example, I patted myself on the back for crafting a brilliant phrase to the effect that Wikipedia is a system for evolving articles that are resistant to ideological attack.  And I invoked the Wisdom of Crowds along with its collective penetrating gaze.  Such insight.  Then afterwards, I read the Economist

A common assumption, expressed most cuttingly by Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is that Wikipedians trust in “some unspecified quasi-Darwinian” process, whereby accuracy “evolves” as more and more “eyeballs” examine an item.

Aieeeee.  Get out of my head!