Why greatness cannot be planned
Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In [this book], Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity. Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.
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23recommend
47mentions
38people
2016–2026years
55% recommend45% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > If anyone knows of any work towards more open-ended fitness functions, I'd love to read it.
There is research in open-ended learning, see "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" by Kenneth O. Stanley. The core idea is that in open-ended scenarios you don't know what action was good except in hindsight because your path is deceptive. So the idea is to replace fitness with novelty search which provides more stepping stones towards the goal.
There's a neat book about this: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (The Myth of the Objective")> "We find that agents who choose new experiments at random develop the most informative and predictive theories of the world. "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c...
Incidentally, the author works at OpenAI these days.
- This remind me of [Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned](https://mythoftheobjective.com). When looking at scientific discovery there many examples of happy accidents. The researchers were not intending to find the breakthrough that they did. It was the willingness to change course and explore a new and interesting thing that they just stumbled onto. Examples: penicillin, superglue, radioactivity, cosmic background radiation etc. I loved the example of Robert Williams who pointed the HST at an empty patch of sky for 10 days. He had his time allocated and no one could stop him but the other astronomers thought it a poor use of resources. It resulted in the famous Hubble Deep Field image.
Counter example is the decades that amyloid cascade hypothesis was the only allowed / funded research of Alzheimer disease.
- > I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.
Oooh, thats a good one. Next read the Architects paradox, Why Greatness cannot be planned and Understanding Variation and your views of the world will be forever altered. Or pick up "Architecture Modernization" by Nick Tune if you want more tools to do stuff and if you do not want to achieve enligntenment.
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Where did you acquire cheap ancient coins? ebay? May be cool to get some for my dnd group
- There's a guy, Ken Stanley, who wrote the NEAT[0]/HyperNEAT[1] algorithms.
His big idea is that evolution/advancements don't happen incrementally, but rather in unpredictable large leaps.
He wrote a whole book about it that's pretty solid IMO: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution_of_augmenting_t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNEAT
- That's also the beauty of evolution–there's no goal in that search algorithm, just open-ended incremental exploration which eventually grows beautiful things.
See Kenneth Stanley's book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c...
