YouSaid · the spoken record

Kenneth Stanley

lines on the record: 70
first: 2022-06-28
most recent: 2022-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And we have to somehow create those connections, it's not going to be consensus matter. It's going to be like a niche thing when there's something incredible. It's not going to be like tons of people see. It's going to be like one out of a hundred see it. And that has to be honored somehow. We have to find a way to do that”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investing. But then you say, well, how can that be? Then every idea would have to be invested because somebody might want to invest in everything. The reason I think it can make sense is if there's skin in the game for the people who are validating the ideas. If I see something that is so exciting to me that I'm personally willing to pursue it that I didn't come up with myself, just like the alien face that led to the car and pick breeder, then I'm actually willing to spend my time on what you did. I'm actually giving something away. I could have had that time. I could have invested in something else. What should make the confirmation of something meaningful and really worth investment is if the person who's confirming it is giving something away. Maybe they lose their right for some period of time to have their idea even considered or they give away the resources that they were given for some project that they had. There's obviously finite resources. But if someone's willing to do that, that means that this thing means a lot to them. And it only takes one person, magic connection, electric connection to happen.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that thing. What we should do is greatly broaden the filters that go from idea to exposure to the people who could run with the ideas and then also change the criteria for what should be pursued. You have to recognize that if you pursue something, it requires investment, so it costs money. So we're not talking about decisions that can be made lightly. Nobody can say, well, everything will pursue because now we're all going to be open-minded. We're just going to do everything everybody wants. That cannot happen. Some things have to not happen. But the way that we decide what happens, I think the criteria should be quite different. It should not be trying to move to consensus, get a committee to agree with something, get the most vote, something like that. It should be many people within the context of the organization, whatever many means, many people are exposed to the ideas that are being generated and that basically only one or two need to trigger the success of that idea or to say like this is worth.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversations. So get the courage to have the conversations and really fight because it's not going to happen if you don't. You're just going to shut down. You're going to think, I want to do this, but on the other hand, my boss wants this. His boss wants that. Like there's a funding agency out there or we have investors or like, forget it. Like it's too complicated. Somehow you've got to fight this. Now, in terms of actually practical, like implementation, what should you do? What I would say is you should be maximizing stepping stones in the pursuit of innovation, not maximizing an objective performance. There's two things. Maximizing stepping stones and maximizing exposure to stepping stones. The thing that makes innovation work is that the people who could run with something are exposed to the thing that they could run with. And that is what's missing, I think, from a lot of these organizations, is that we have these filters which are extremely narrow, which decide what comes through. And they end up pruning out things. It's the converging consensus problem. Things don't get exposed to a person who would react dramatically if they were exposed.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if you're in a position like that you're a gatekeeper, so you are responsible for the perpetuation or not of this objective culture. It's especially relevant if you're purportedly involved in fostering innovation because that's where this kind of gatekeeper has a huge influence. Yeah, I would recommend doing things differently. You probably exist within a framework where that's very difficult because you answered to somebody. They don't understand what you're suddenly like saying, well, I'm not assessing things in this normal, objective way anymore. They're like, what the heck are you doing? How do we know this is working? So this takes some courage, I think. The first thing I would say get the courage because there's nothing we can do about that. You have to explain to them, like, if we're not going to follow the usual security blanket route and things, the people in the chain are going to have to be convinced. And that's like hard work. That's why I think it's worth having a conversation like this show. That's why we wrote the book. It's like, we wanted to start people having.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, let me just thank you because I really appreciate being on this show, and also I really had a great time at Capitol Camp. Such a hard question, but I think I'll just cite my friend, his name was Ed, who gave me money to do research out of his personal bank account. That's a very unusual thing, and he really affected my career. Usually people in science, at least in academia, will get money from agencies or the government or like from a company or something. He's not related to me or anything. He's just started to give money to our research. That's just amazing the generosity there. And he kept giving more. He was very encouraging to me. I was like a father figure. He said I was going to be a great scientist. And I was like, why are you doing this with your money? He actually, unfortunately, died. He was 68 years old and he had cancer. I always felt extremely grateful to him for helping me get started with my career. I actually gave my son's middle name, Ed or Edward, to recognize him.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My 20% time, like it's like this is where I get to do what I really want to do or something. It's not really productive that's completely upside down. Actually, this is the principal thing to do. Now recall, we're talking about when you're doing like blue sky discovery. It's not principled if you're just trying to lose weight or like drive, for example. Like the last thing I would want is drivers exploring methods of driving. That's not the kind of stuff you want to go on the road. You don't want exploration there. So it's not like all of life we should just be curious and explore. Let's see what happens if I veer into another lane or something like that. That's not always good. But yeah, if you're trying to do things that involve discovery, innovation, like fulfilling yourself for your life, then this is actually principled. And I think that is new for most people because it's thought of as such an indulgence.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could say that in some sense that suggests well, there's nothing new here. I would maybe add deception, it's like curiosity, exploration, the idea of deception, which is like when you're moving towards something and you seem to be going, things seem to be going well, often they're not, actually. These are like old ideas. It's like, we know about Curacy exploration. Everybody loves those things and deception is like not a new idea. What have we learned over here? And I would say at some level, what you're saying is true, that like, yeah, this isn't new at all. But at another level, I think what is new is just the recognition, both that there is a horrible pathology because of deception. We don't recognize how pathological deception is. It's just absolutely pathological. And also, curiosity and exploration are principled algorithmically principled. We often think of them as indulgences, I think. And so the new thing is they're not indulgences. They're principled thing to do is to follow curiosity and explore. Somehow it's”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that. That's great. What would be the obvious thing for me to do next? And then anyway, these are all just heuristics. There's no easy answer, obviously. The truth is in the richness, not in these simple rules of thumb. I have sensitivity to like millions of dimensions of things that are just unique to my personality, and so do you and everybody. And you have to be honest with that and loyal to that, even when it kind of repudiates you in those directions”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what often people do, they just find that area and then they're just comfortable there. They basically exploit it and then it's over, but it doesn't matter because they're world famous and rich by then. And there's no need to keep moving. But if you want to keep moving, you have to leave eventually. That's now a comfort zone. It's been exploited. The hanging fruit has been picked and now you have to go somewhere else. And that's really tough, I think. Because now you're like famous for that little area. You don't want to leave. For myself, I try to just rebel against my own self, basically. I try to look at like, where would people predict if they were me they would go and then not go there?”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And excusably, but it happens because it's just very tiring to keep up with really the cutting edge of interest in this, which is this ability to kind of see where's the potential now as opposed to 20 years ago. And of course, being young is an advantage because you're coming up to this cutting edge for the first time. Everybody has their own heuristics, but I think I try to be kind of rebellious. I try to repudiate what I previously thought constantly to push myself in another direction. That kind of in a way keeps me from just getting into a comfortable corner that gets fully exploited. It's true that if you're really smart, you can find like a little corner of the search space that is currently unoccupied. It's full of low-hanging fruit. And you will get into that part of the search space and you will just prune everything quickly. You'll be famous after that. And then that'll look really good. And you can live out your whole life based on that. But that little encounter with that part of the circle.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that to stay on the cutting edge of anything, it requires continually refining your sense of interestingness. It is, I think, for everybody, including me, a very complicated and a very exhausting process to really continually be sensitive to what's interesting. Because the thing is it changes over time because novelty is, of course, like you mentioned, novelty. And I haven't mentioned it a lot here, but I often talk about it when I'm talking about this in the field of AI. Because novelty is an intrinsic aspect of interesting, it's a very important factor in what's interesting. What is interesting is changing constantly. If you kind of rest on your laurels and you think about what was interesting 20 years ago and maybe you were a really good at identifying those things, it's not going to be true 20 years later. That same heuristic will no longer apply because the world has moved on and that's no longer going to lead to novelty the way it did 20 years ago. And I think this is why like people fall off their game understand.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can if it's a field that's your field like if you spend years and years in a field you're qualified to understand what's interesting and that's different than having an objective that's a constraint”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's the Rube Goldberg machine proliferation, like the Rub Goldberg generator is basically the metaphor, I think I would think of is like what the constraint offers. It basically ensures that everything is contains a level of complexity that keeps the potential going for the next generation of cool stuff to come out. And you have to decide for yourself what that constraint is. It doesn't have to be a walk and Xerox machine. I mean, that's evolution. For you, it's something else. Your constraints have to do with what you're interested in, but you have to keep it honest. If you put your standards down and you're not really keeping things interesting, then yeah, things will devolve towards the inner blobs covering the earth. The constraints matter a lot and they're what keep the stepping stones interesting. So the leading edge of pick breeder are things that look like stuff. They're not all, by the way. There's some things that are just really cool wallpaper pattern. So there's more to interestingness than meets the eye sometimes, but they're basically all really interesting stuff. Whatever your field is, you got to look at it from that perspective and just make sure that you understand what interesting is.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For why evolution works. It's not that it has targets like a trying to create a brain. This guy is really hard constrained that everything has to be this complex machine. I think it was a Rube Goldberg machine generator. Every time you vary the Rube Goldberg machine, which is like this crazy convoluted thing that like makes a copy of itself, can you imagine Rube Goldberg machine that copies its own self into another Rube Goldberg machine? They're all going to be insanely complex and insanely functional forever, but they'll vary like they'll basically fill the space within that constraint of every possible.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can just be a walking Xerox machine. In your stomach, there's like a Xerox, which I can make a pretty good copy of here. That's like a machine inside of you. And then the copy you make also has a machine inside of it. That's a pretty tough constraint to build something that can make a copy of itself is crazy hard. And actually, I think that's what keeps the process honest in some sense. That's why it doesn't devolve into just a bunch of inert blobs lying on the ground, because it would if that wasn't required. Basically imagine like this is a thought experiment, but if you intervened in evolution and said that everybody gets to reproduce, we're not going to have constraints. So it doesn't matter what you have, we'll make a copy of you some like entity. This is total thought experiment, but we'll just give you a child, even though you don't even have general organs, we'll just give you a child, make one that's a little like you. Well, the world would evolve into all kinds of inert blobs covering the earth. The constraint is basically a way of keeping things interesting. And that's actually what I think is really the”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insanely powerful one, but it accounts for the emergence of all of living nature. That means every single creature that you see out your window is part of one search process, which is evolution. And there is clearly a constraint there. Actually, I should clarify why is it not objectively driven? People say, but it is objective. Survival of the fittest, it's an objective. What I mean by not an objective here is that there isn't a creature that it's aiming for. The actual products, the concrete products of the process, like a human, like a bird, like a plant photosynthesis, the bird represents flight, the human represents intelligence, you're going to think of these all like really important discoveries from a single process of discovery. None of them are the objective. None of them are written into the rules. If you just look at try to survive, you cannot predict bird. That is just impossible. And so these are not objectives in the usual sense. I think the survive and reproducing is a constraint. It's a strict constraint. It means that basically it's a very weird constraint if you think about it. It's not usually said this way.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constraints do play a role. It's very important that they play a role. If you don't have constraints, you are sort of veering more towards randomness. Constraints are what make the collection of interesting stepping stones less random. It means that there's some principle that's still selective. The word interesting is very important playing a big role here. It's a hard to define thing, which is sort of intentional here because it's supposed to encompass everything that matters in life. So it's very broad concept of what's interesting and it's different for you and me. But it's certainly a constrained concept. If you were constrained, then you would archive things that are of no interest. You would be keeping around stepping stones that are basically insane and have no potential. And so clearly you have constraints. But what do these constraints mean and what's a valid kind of a constraint? I think it's really good to point to evolution because we haven't done that yet. The evolution is an instructive example because natural evolution is an example of an open-ended process of stepping stone collection as well.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To work out. That's why it's good to kind of have a portfolio, investment perspective, some things will pay off, not all things. So it's good to have your own little portfolio of things you're pursuing. But even then, we should acknowledge that there's a legitimate approach to life, which is just to have modest aims, which is less risky. You should choose things for your life that make sense for you and you're not obligated to take risks. If you do want to have sort of a process of self-discovery or just discovery generally, do things that are really remarkable from your point of view, then you'll have to take risks. There's no choice. The whole idea of our interestingness, repertoire, stepping stones, like it's all about risk. So you have to be willing to take risks in order to have like amazing ends.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rich, whatever it is that you're worried about. But there's a big caveat, which I think is very important at the individual level to acknowledge, which is that there's risk involved. Everything we've been talking about, this entire conversation involves risk, and it's very important, I think, when you're talking to individuals especially, but even at institutionals, we have to acknowledge we're talking about taking risks. It's like having a portfolio, having a repertoire, having an archive of things. Some won't pay off. And it's very important at the individual level, I think, to understand if this advice is appealing, you have to understand that what you're getting into is a system of taking risks. I mean, you're taking informed risks. Like you understand the risks you're taking, but it's obviously true that if you follow a path because it's interesting, there's no guarantees of anything whatsoever. And it could end up failing. You're doing this, hopefully, with the awareness that it might not pay off in the end, and you think it's worth it. That's why you would do it. Not all interesting things turn out to work.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this kind of self discovery, or like, what am I going to do with my life type of stuff? I think that's kind of analogous to kind of blue sky discovery at a society level. You're trying to discover something that's meaningful to you. That includes even love or cliche, things like that. It's like it does apply to those kinds of things. How am I going to like find that thing, like that thing that makes me satisfied is even possible? What does it even mean to be like truly satisfied for your entire life? That's very blue sky. I think the stepping stones are totally unclear. And then of course the same principles will apply and the same uneasiness will apply because you're like, oh, but I have this whole plan for myself and I'm going to set an objective and what am I going to do? I'm going to have to be random. But again, you don't have to worry about being random again. You can look at this as like, we just do things that are interesting, collect those stepping stones for yourself now. Those are individual stepping stones. Give yourself multiple opportunities and you use those as jumping off points to find what makes you satisfied interest.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it like stifling over time? It seems to grip you from like a really early age, from like six or seven years old or something. You're just like in this constant objective vice and can't get out of it. It makes you sweat. I think it must be satisfying to hear an argument against that. Why would it be personally helpful to hear this algorithmic argument is probably because at some level we know that this is not natural. Like this isn't how the world works. That's why there's cognitive dissonance, I think, in life. It's so objective like Western culture, maybe more culture than Western culture, so many objectives pervading everything. And we somehow, I think it's.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it does apply to your individual lives. To me, it's fascinating because it starts with experiments in artificial intelligence that are very dry and not impersonal in any ways. It is about AI. But eventually, it seems like the insights here do extend, I think, profoundly into when I think about it. We do run our individual lives this way. And I agree with you, toxic, psychologically toxic, which is really interesting, isn't it? It does feel like something about society, something about all these goals. percolating through life.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's actually happening that's in aggregate important is the exposure of those stepping stones across society. Society is diminished in its ability to innovate when stepping stone exposure is also diminished, which is ironic if you think about it. Our committees are basically designed to diminish the exposure to stepping stones. Like I sent my proposal to the NSF, some committee looks at it. They say, no, nobody hears about it ever again. Like maybe out of thousands or millions of people, one person would have seen this as interesting and it would have changed that person's life. This is not the design of how our society works at all. But what you have to understand is that these connections happen this way. It's like one in a million type of things. That one person sees the potential. No one else sees it before that person. A committee of five people is crazy in that case. Even if they're like experts in the fields, whatever, they just basically represent the status quo. You need the person that's off there on the side who can see the potential. So I think we should.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting sense is what we should be, I think, talking about in the context of what I'm saying leads to innovation because it's the thing that registers the stepping stones. It's like, how are you collecting this repertoire or this archive of stuff that you can jump off from? And the archive gets more powerful the longer it runs, the more stepping stones we have. That's why from today, like the year 2022, we can get to more places than we could in 1922 because our archive is more powerful. And this word interesting is basically what explains the expansion of the archive and the registration of those stepping stones. It's like basically a publication event and pick breeder. It's like when I discover something in pick breeder that I think is worth sharing, basically what I'm saying is this is interesting. I think other people might care about this. And then it's out there for other people to see. And that is the point of connection, the point of collaboration that actually matters. It's not like an assessment by a committee. It's just airing it to the world. Everybody can look and decide for themselves, is this a stepping stone worth our salt?”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about that. I think that is too many stepping stones away to realistically invest in. We have no idea what the stepping stones are that are going to be leading to AGI. It doesn't mean we'll never see them. We just don't know what they are yet. As an investment target from an objective perspective, I think it's not very principled, but it still makes sense to be interested in the area of AI. The view of AI, and I am personally interested in it, so not hypocritical for me to say it, but the reason it's interesting is because it's pretty clear to me if you look at things that are AI adjacent, things that relate to computers doing computations that have some kind of alignment with what humans do in their own heads. There's like millions of applications there that are just extremely valuable and interesting. Those are the next stepping stones, like in the chain. And so opening those up is going to be cool whether or not it leads to AGI, this far-off thing, by thinking that this is an important subject area, I'm actually refining my interestingness sense.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do, we understand during a war there are certain types of things that really matter. It's like a whole rich tapestry of things. It's kind of hard to even articulate exactly what those things are, but they're this large set of things that are related to war, helping people who have been injured related to destroying things, whatever it might be, which then like just become more interesting than they were just because of necessity. But it's not the same as having an objective, I think. And I think that we can focus on areas artificial intelligence, for example, the fact that there's a lot of investment going into artificial intelligence right now, obviously billions of dollars because we recognize it's really interesting. That's different to me. Although other people wouldn't interpret this this way, but this is against the conventional interpretation. But to me, we're investing in the interestingness, not the objective. Artificial intelligence has like a far-off goal, like AGI is what people in the field would call artificial general intelligence, this human level, like amazing machine or something.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't necessary to think of them. It's not just that there was this cool thing you could have done, but you didn't think of it. It's like you really didn't need to think of it. There's no need to think of it. If there isn't some kind of catastrophe on the space shuttle or something, then you don't need to think about being innovative about how to get oxygen. Like it's not like a problem. The stepping stones are there. And we can do this. And if they weren't there, forget it. It doesn't matter how many geniuses were in the room. I could use that. And that's part of it. That's where we get some of these narratives from because it's actually the stepping stones are there. So it's actually not that far down the horizon to get to these things. But the other side is I think interestingness as a really important topic for us to get deeper into and address. When you think about something like war or like the necessity of invention in war, I think what is happening that is still instructive there is that we recalibrate the things that we find interesting depending on like what's going on in the world around us. And that is a valid thing.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's maybe two things. Basically, the first thing is that sometimes when you're in a desperate situation, the stepping stones are there to do what you need to do.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Available suddenly, and it wasn't 10 years earlier. That is another thing keeping an eye on the stepping stones. And I think both are things that we can do, maximizing stepping stones and proliferating them intentionally based on interestingness and also keeping an eye on when things snap into possibility that weren't before.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're actually not. It's going to take a while. I'm not saying we'll never get a self driving car, but I'm saying they weren't there. The stepping stones weren't there in 2016. If you invest a huge amount of money and so forth, then at that point in time, you are looking at some serious risk and loss potentially. And people did. I mean, there were a whole self-driving divisions that were created in the later sold off because they didn't pay off. And it's because there was this kind of false objective narrative. Could we have had computers in 1840 something instead of 1940 something? No, it'd be insane to launch a project like that at that time. Or could the space program have been in 1900? It's like, well, these people were so great and so patriotic and so thoughtful, like to launch this thing in like the 1960s and they succeeded. But you're missing the fact that that would have been an idiotic, insane thing to do in 1900. What was really genius about it was that this was something that was just timed perfectly when all the technology was available.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like it combines a phone with a computer and blah blah blah sits in your hand. This genius you just saw, like this far off vision of doing something like that. That's the narrative we usually get for something like that. But I don't think that's the actual truth. The real thing that happened there was she was the first person to recognize that all the stepping stones had suddenly been laid to make that actually objective possibility. Things that were objectively unrealistic suddenly become possible when the stepping stones are laid. But you need to keep an eye on the stepping stones to know when that moment happens. And we see this mistake happen over and over again, which is when vision trumps stepping stones. It's like self-driving cars. We heard as far back as I don't know, 2016 or so, right around the corner next year. That is the false visionary type of situation where it's like somebody's being really ambitious, but the stepping stones haven't been laid. You have a false understanding of where we are. And you think that the stepping stones are...”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New world that we don't know about. That is a powerful stepping stone. Human beings understand stepping stones. That's one of the things, reasons we shouldn't be so scared at the message that I'm giving here. This is actually one of our special skills. So there's basically two pieces of advice I would give. One is collect stepping stones and honor interestingness. That is a system that we need to establish. You can do that as an individual and we can do that as an institution. We can actually try to explicitly do this institutionally and we don't. And it's a very interesting opportunity, I think, because it's so little studied. It's kind of like a low-hanging fruit, I think, that's ripe for exploitation. But the second piece of advice is the more visionary angle, which is to recognize stepping stones when they snap into view for the first time. This is what I think happens in the misleading narratives that usually are characterized as objective triumphs. Think like the iPhone. It's like, did Steve Jobs just sit there and say, okay, we're going to build this crazy.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give power to the system because the thing is that things that are interesting are stepping stones to other things that are interesting. That is the true structure of the world. That's the structure of search spaces is that when you find something interesting, it has a potential. It's not just interesting for what it is now, but for what it leads to. And to give a concrete example of that, sometimes I think about the iPad. The iPad is clearly interesting in its own right in the sense of the things you can do with it. One of the things that to me makes the interestingness of the iPad kind of real is the fact that there were these lines snaking around the block when the first iPads came out. What I like to think about is why were lines snaking around the block for people just want to get the first iPad. And I would submit, at least I believe that it's not just because of what you could do with the iPad, which is cool enough as it is, it's because almost everybody saw that it's a stepping snow. What was interesting about the iPad wasn't what you could do with it. It's that we don't know all the things that you might do with it that we don't know yet. It just opened up an entire.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody who's open minded and willing to keep a repertoire of stepping stones around without knowing which one is going to be the payoff. You have to drop this idea that there's this one thing which is the goal and we're going to have this metric-based assessment thing and we're always going to be moving towards it. It just didn't work. But you can be principled if you're trying to maximize opportunity to have some kind of success, even though we don't know what that success will be. And the reason you can do that is because if you think about something like PickBreeder, it's basically like a stepping stone collector. That's actually what makes the system powerful. And stepping stone collecting is anything but random. Because if you think about it, it's the stepping stones themselves that lend the power to the system. And the stepping stones are there because they're interested. They're not random. If you go to PickBreader and you see a skull and a butterfly in a car, it's nothing random about any of that. Like a random thing would be like a blob. But you see these things that have meaning. And so...”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like a lot of people jump immediately to the word random. Basically, you're just saying, I should just be random. It's like I'm going to cry. Like, this sounds terrible. I don't want to be random. I'm like a smart guy. I can do things for intentional reasons. And I just want to starting that anybody should just act randomly. That's not a good strategy, obviously. It's not an alternative strategy at all. It's just as dumb as the original strategy. But let's acknowledge, though, that the original strategy is also dumb. One thing that you have to digest here, which I think is really hard to accept, is that there is no good strategy to achieve a specific thing that we don't know how to do. There's just no principled way to do that. What I can give you advice on is how to maximize the chance of achieving something useful, but not a specific thing. So this is the pivot that you have to do, I think, when you're talking about innovation. You have to understand that a successful inventor, somebody who gets to places that we haven't gotten before.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is the natural question then. How should we conduct ourselves given this kind of critique of how we generally do conduct ourselves? I just wanted to add one little point just to kind of emphasize how broadly applicable this is that we're not only talking about technology, right? Like the examples I've been giving are very technical computers or something, but this is about genres of art, what leads to what in art, what leads to what in musical genres, what economic systems, political systems, financial strategies like everything is about this. And it's not even just about things we want to accomplish. It's about things that we don't know we want to accomplish, but we would want to if we knew they could even be possible. That could be what you're going to do in your life. Like you may create something, come up with some idea that you weren't even aware it was something worth trying to do. But turns out to be awesome. And so all these things like fall under the umbrella of this idea. Okay, so how should you conduct yourself?”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Middle of their session and said, actually, I'd rather you try to breed a car, that would be more interesting. Then you have neither you have neither an alien face nor a car. And it's the same thing with the vacuum tubes and the computers. You pull the people off the vacuum tubes and you make them work on computers. Well, you just took out the stepping stone that leads to computers. And so you can't do either. So we would have neither vacuum tubes nor computers. This is, I think, like a dramatic illustration of the fact that PICBR, it does exist in real life and that not respecting that is devastating. You absolutely destroy innovation if you tried to control it in the way that we do try to control it. It's just serendipitous luck that these stepping stones got for it. Luckily, they were not part of some institutional attempt to control where we're going. Because if they were, they wouldn't have happened.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in time, go back to the year 1850, roughly around 100 years earlier before the first computers, the ENIAC computer, you can find these people who are doing that work. And what we could imagine like a thought experiment here where we could approach those people because they're super smart. They're kind of like the hackers of the day. So we could go to those people and we could say, you're doing something interesting granted, but there's actually something much more interesting you could be doing, which is you could build a computer. What the heck are you doing with this boring vacuum tube stuff? Let's build something like a computer. Like I can tell you a little bit about what the vision of the computer is. Now, why don't you think about that instead? Like let's get you guys together and do that. And if you think about this thought experiment, it would be horrible thing to do because you just pulled all the people off the stepping stone that you needed. If you think about this alien face was used to get to a car and pick breeder. If I took the person who was working on the alien phase and pulled them off of it in the middle.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A vacuum tube is a kind of electrical device. In the early computers, it was used as a small unit of computation. Early on they were trying to understand properties of like electrical devices in general. They weren't thinking about using it for computers at all. It allowed people to understand what you can do with electricity. And it goes back to, I believe, the 1700s, basically like glass tubes with vacuums where they could run electrical currents through them and learn about their properties. And if you go back to those times, which is going actually hundreds of years before you get to computers, what you find I think is very interesting, which is that you find people who are interested in electrical properties who were not thinking about computers. But these people are an essential part of the story of computation. That's the part that's left out of the narrative. The hero of the story is partly the vacuum tube researcher, but the vacuum tube researcher has not a single thought about computation. And this is where we should get worried again. Because if you go.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allegories. There was stuff that happened before that. The story doesn't start where it starts. And that makes the story extremely misleading because that's not actually the story. Because there were things that we needed to build that computer. Just as there were things we needed to build the space shuttle and so forth, all your favorite stories of human achievement, airplanes, you know, what have you, it'll be the same kind of thing. But to focus on the computer, the thing that we needed, one very key thing is a vacuum tube. Now, today computers aren't made out of vacuum tubes, but in the 1940s, the first computers had vacuum tubes in them. The first ones that actually worked and were used and produced, not mass produced, but produced and actually used for purposes. They had vacuum tubes. And so the thing that really made it possible to have this narrative about like, oh, this amazing visionary was the fact that somebody already had invented vacuum tubes.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You already brought it up, but I think it's one of my favorite examples from the real world because it's very thought provoking the vacuum tubes and computers because it goes over hundreds of years. And I think it's very helpful to illustrate what I'm talking about. I think we have this myth, this tale that we tell about almost everything that's ever been achieved by humankind, which is very objectively driven, like the narrative of achievement. It's like some amazing visionary just sat down and said, we're going to overcome like all the obstacles and just do this amazing thing, like make a computer. Let's think about that, for example. When that was done in the 1940s, there was a military motivation at the time we needed these computation machines and so forth. Like we had reasons we wanted these things. But you could tell the story like as if it's like this objective triumph. We got together the best minds, easily put their effort into it. They build this thing. It just happened. That's just the story of human achievement. What a great thing we should all celebrate. But the thing is you're leaving something out. We're leaving something out in those kinds of.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blobby pattern type of consensus. We get the mildly most pleasing blob aesthetic. And then that's going to happen at every iteration because there's another few hundred people voting at the next iteration, another few hundred. And after thousands and thousands, I think it was 25,000 votes. You can look at the top ranking. All you have are amorphous rainbow-y blobs, every single thing. I think it's just stark and shocking. Even though it's in this totally obscure genre of stuff like breeding pictures, I think it should give us all heart palpitations because we're running our culture this way.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blogs. However, the difference from pick breeder is that the choice will be made by a vote. And so over the course of a week, people It would turn out basically hundreds of people would come in and they would vote on their favorite blob and then we'll choose the one that gets the most votes. To a lot of people is like really intuitive. More opinions are better than one. Let's use the crowd to decide what to do. But consistently with what I just argued, the results are starkly different and terrible in comparison. And I don't mean to cast any aspersion on the Boving House project. I think it was a cool idea to try it. It sort of really helps to illustrate the problem here is that you get a washout effect. Imagine you come in, okay, there's hundreds of people coming. Imagine you like butterflies and I like cars. Now what's going to happen when we vote and we're just looking at blobs? The blobs don't look like butterflies yet and they don't look like cars and you want a butterfly and I want a car. What is going to happen? Complete washout is what's going to happen. There's no way you're going to get enough people on your side because they don't even know we don't even know what each other are doing or have understanding or how you even get these things. And so what's going to happen is you get this mildly as”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is super interesting, and it's funny because it's just a coincidence that this happened because there was another project that was launched around the time of PickBreeder called the Living Image Project. It had nothing to do with me other than that. It used basically the same encoding under the Hoodis Pick Bread. This is kind of nice because it creates a controlled experiment by accident because both PickBreader and there's other things, the Living Image Project, have this underlying encoding that's the same. So what that means is in principle, they can achieve the same thing. They could find similarly cool stuff. In principle, but there's this one difference which makes this very interesting as a comparison, which is this living image project did work by consensus. I mean, the reason it did is because I think it's because there's this cultural assumption, just like riding on top of that. They're like, this is a good way to do things. Let's have a vote. So basically what they said is, okay, here's what we're going to do. It's just like PickBreer, like there's like these blobs. They're like arranged on the screen. You can see all these blobs. And we're going to pick one of them. That'll be the parent of the next generation.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which tends to be dogmatic and tends to be status quo and everything that we basically want to get away from. And then all these radical stepping stones, which are the interesting things which can lead to places we're not expecting for the very reason that the things that lead want to get to don't look like them. So we need the radical stepping stones are the things that we cut out. You can see from this theory or philosophy way of looking things that a lot of the way we run collaborative systems is just totally kneecapped at the start and also should I think be rethought.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crazy things you would have done are like basically cut off at the start by this surge towards consensus, which is going to lead to what I would call convergent consensus because we're trying to move toward convergence very quickly. What you understand from pick breeder, it's the proliferation of the stepping stones that gives the power to the process. The reason that I can get to cars, there was a discovery of a car which came from an alien face was because of the discovery of the alien face. No one would ever think that you needed an alien face to get to a car. But the alien face is there not because somebody was thinking about cars, but because there is a general culture inside of PickBreeder of proliferating stepping stones. And this is not generally how we run collaborative systems because we run them by consensus, which is the exact opposite. That's about pruning out stepping stones. People start generating things and then we start saying, no, no, no, committee doesn't like this. Committee doesn't like that. We then converge to the thing, which is basically the consensus basis of current thinking.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asking for grants, science grants. That's kind of like picking an image. It's like, what project do I want to pursue? You come in and you see a butterfly and you want to pursue the butterfly. It's kind of like you're sending a grant proposal to the NSF. You think something interesting will happen if you choose this butterfly. But the thing about the NSF is now it's going to go to a committee. I am not allowed to just go off on my own and work on that butterfly now. There's going to be a committee that thinks about the decision that I'm making and I have to justify usually objectively. In the sense that I'm going to have to say where it's going to lead. What are you going to get by doing this butterfly? That is not how pick breeder is. You are on your own completely. And not only are you on your own by choosing the butterfly, you're on your own every single step of the way until you publish the thing you discovered. So there's no interference whatsoever and you're just on your own. Think about the difference between that and the way we run things where it's basically like you come into a room with all these people, you bring up these ideas, you have this discussion, you try to come to consensus.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like made available for you. So, what it means is you are seeing a history of stepping stones when you go to this site. You don't have to start from scratch. If somebody found a butterfly, you can start from their butterfly. When you come in and see that butterfly, that is a point of collaboration. It's implicit collaboration. But is collaboration because somebody else did work? They found the butterfly and now you're building off of that work. So collaboration is happening. However, the moment you choose to continue, or what we call branch from the butterfly to breed it further, you are on your own. And this is a very unique thing. At first, it sounds like, oh, well, what's the big deal? You're on your own. Okay. But think about it. We almost never allow people to do that in collaborative situations in our culture. We always bring people together and move towards consensus almost immediately. But in PickBread, it's not like that. Instead, you choose the thing you think is interesting and it was your choice and nobody else was involved in that choice. Now think about this compared to like, for example, like I was a professor for a long time. So I think a lot about”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, this is a funny thing. It's true. This is another very popular mythology, I think, in our cultures. Let's get together and collaborate, bring all the smart people into the room. It's like, let's get interdisciplinary collaboration. Let's get the computer scientists sitting there with the economist. If all these things are very exciting to us. And I just want to say, I'm not saying we shouldn't have collaboration that again would be like this crazy, cranky thing to say. What I do want to get to what you're asking about is that collaboration itself also is subject to a number of caveats because of the insight about the paradox, the objective paradox. And that means there's a right way and a wrong way to think about collaboration is quite dangerous. And we tend to do it the wrong way. The issue that comes up here is that if you look at pick breeder, I think something that's very intriguing about what happens in it is that once somebody sees a stepping stone on the site. So if you recall, like I said, all the discoveries that other people had made.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source