Why greatness cannot be planned
by Kenneth O. Stanley · first published 2015
61% recommend39% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Argues that rigid goals can block real breakthroughs and that following what's interesting through open-ended exploration works better. Suits creatives, researchers and AI people questioning objective-driven planning.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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;
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This is a good book on the subject: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" https://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-Objectiv...
on “Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google” ↗"Why greatness cannot be planned" by Kenneth Stanley It's a bit depressing that academia works the way it does, but in a twisted way it gives me hope that I could make a significant contribution somewhere by just tinkering or following…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗…in high dimensional spaces? Can AI creatively prove a new limit to mathematics? There are 2 researchers in AI who deserve more attention: Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. They wrote a great book: Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. They look at the limits of utility functions and explain the importance of novelty. As an antidote to some of the hype around AI, I strongly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-Objectiv...
on “Why transformative artificial intelligence is hard to achieve” ↗Somewhat related to this is the excellent presentation "Why greatness cannot be planned: myth of the objective" by Kenneth Stanley which I highly recommend! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI
on “Letting Go of Random” ↗Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman. This book was a fascinating read for anyone with ambitious objectives (or an interest in optimization algorithms). Ken is such a deep thinker,…
on “Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?” ↗Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (The Myth of the Objective) by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman was excellent.
on “Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?” ↗…mavericks, long-shot bets on contrarian ideas, and speculative gambling on profound, but expensive and difficult, inventions from atoms (see Peter Thiel - "courage is in far shorter supply than genius" ). Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned is Stanley's latest book (2015). Here are some excellent long-form podcast interviews with Stanley on MLST: Is getting a pay rise a step to becoming a billionaire? #38 Prof. KENNETH STANLEY - Why…
on “Abandoning Objectives: Evolution with the Search for Novelty Alone (2011) [pdf]” ↗If you want to know more about open endedness I recommend Kenneth Stanley’s book: why greatness cannot be planned
on “Automated Capability Discovery via Foundation Model Self-Exploration” ↗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...
on “The Power and Beauty of Incrementalism” ↗…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
on “Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back” ↗> "We find that agents who choose new experiments at random develop the most informative and predictive theories of the world. " There's a neat book about this: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (The Myth of the Objective") https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c... Incidentally, the author works at OpenAI these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Stanley
on “Against Theory-Motivated Experimentation” ↗> 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…
on “Rich Sutton on AI creativity and discovery” ↗There's an interesting book on the topic discussed in these emails, entitled "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned": http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR There's a YouTube talk by the author on the subject here: https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI The rough idea is this: - creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem…
on “Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails” ↗…is software engineering. Since then I couldn't stop thinking on my next "idea". Rationally I know there is nothing that kills creativity like trying to be creative, one of my reference on the topic is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25670869. That being said, this entrepreneurial goal has polluted everything in my life and the way I see the world. I stopped to genuinely…
on “How do you deal with entrepreneurial obsession?” ↗…something simply because it's interesting to you is a valid choice. But you do need to be aware that that's what you're doing, and not expect some reward to materialize other than the knowledge itself. "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" is a very good book on this topic.
on “Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?” ↗