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

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“Exactly. It's like what would be obvious what to do. We'd always just choose the thing that's getting closer to the golem, and it would eventually get there.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want, don't look like the things that you want. There's actually a name for this in philosophy, it's called the Light Causes Like Fallacy. I think it's from Mills. We all seem to assume it seems to be like almost like built into us biologically, that the things that lead to what we want are going to resemble what we want. I don't know why we all believe this, but it's not how the world works. And if you think about it, that makes total sense. If the world actually worked that way, if the like causes like fallacy was actually true, actually things do resemble where you want to go, we would solve all our problems.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discovery by a human. Now we're giving an automated algorithm 30,000 steps just for fun, just in case, I don't know, like it needs extra time. We'll give it extra way extra time. Orders of magnitude. What happens? Failure every single time. We ran this dozens of times. It's every single time failure. It's also fun to look at the failures because you can see it's trying. You see these kind of shadows. It's like somebody's stumbling, almost getting there, but not quite. Well, it's not even close, but it's like getting a silhouette shadow of what it wants. But it can't get even close. And it's just fascinating. That's like much more compute. Like it should be able to eventually overcome it. But the thing is that it sort of highlights the reason that this is happening in picture. Like, why are all discoveries happening this way in Pick Breeder is actually because the world is deceptive, which means that the things that lead to skulls don't look like skulls. And this is the fundamental insight, which is not being recognized across society, is that the things that lead to the thing...”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really simple. And then every iteration can be done now by the computer instead of by a human. And so we can automate it. Good old-fashioned machine learning here, like we just automate pick breeder. No more humans in the loop. And we'll just automate it to go to the skull. I think to me, this sounds like a worthy adversary. Like I would be worried this might actually work. It shouldn't work though if our hypothesis is correct, because our hypothesis here is that you can only find things by not looking for them. Now, this is explicitly looking for the scope. This is a metaphor for how we do things in our culture. So we say, this is our goal, this is our OKR, like this is what we're going to achieve this quarter. And then we're going to work towards it. You're going to give me a metric. In this case, it's skull matching, let's match the skull picture. And then you're going to cut off branches that don't seem to be maximizing that metric and go by the branches that do seem to be maximizing the metric and just move towards the skull. And we're going to do that now explicitly. We gave it 30,000 steps. This takes about 74 steps, say, for the first.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the fact, if I just randomly choose blobs in blob space, like in the space of the pick breader, you'll never find anything. 99.9999% of space is just garbage blobs. So these are still needles and haystack. But what's weird is that the needles in the haystack are discoverable within a few dozen steps. One conclusion you might draw naively would be that, oh, they can't be that hard to find. The skull 70, let's say 74 steps, trivial, basically, from a computers. So let's set up an experiment and see. And so what we can do is we can say, let's get an image matching algorithm, which are available, which basically tells me if I show this algorithm a blob, like I input this blob and I ask it to compare it to the skull, it'll tell me how far away we are. How close is this image to a skull? That comparison will help me because when I show a bunch of blobs, I can just have it automatically pick the one that's closest to the skull.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we basically took this. We said, let's try to drive the point home and also just see if we can validate this hypothesis that you can only find things by not looking for them, by actually looking for them explicitly. Just to make it fun, I think this twist makes it fun. Let's look for things that we already saw were discovered that makes this crazy because it's like we know that these can be discovered in this space. And like you said, I think it is an important point that these things were not discovered with a lot of compute, so to speak. If I recall it is, I think it's a 72 generation, it might be 74, 72, 74 steps or iterations. That is just ridiculously low. When you think about it in terms of compute, of course, these are humans making these selection steps, but can machine learning, modern machine learning, it's pretty reasonable to have millions of iterations to get to something meaningful. Here we're talking about dozens. In some way, that says these are easy. These are not hard discoveries. In some sense, they're still impressive because”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The connection that I need to make, I think, beyond that is to justify why I would extend from that discovery to real life.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“wouldn't have chosen the ones they chose if they were trying to get the final product for example you have a case where there was an alien face that led to a car who would choose an alien face if they want a car that would not be a good idea but what happened was the wheels of the car which was depicted from the side actually derived from the eyes of the alien face again and again and again you see this phenomenon that in hindsight you can see what happened but looking forward you would never imagine that these connections could be made and this shows in fact it's true in pick breeder that you can only find things in the long run by not looking for them you need to take your eyes off the ball in order to be able to accept the stepping stones that ultimately make finding the ball possible which i think is totally contrary to our culture to our way of making discovery the way we think things should be done which is always objectively driven”
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, so you'll get a chance to see it. And they found all this stuff after like a couple years of watching this. And then what we found was that underneath the hood, we were able to look at how. If you think about just for a second, just think about why Pick Reader is fascinating. Like at first, it might seem like toy or something. Like, what is it actually for? People are playing around and breeding images which have no purpose other than just that they're images. But actually what is I think profound about having something like that is that it is basically a history of discovery and all of its minute detail. Every little thing that everybody decided to do throughout the history is recorded. And we don't have artifacts like that. We don't know every step of every invention that's ever been made. You know, a lot of it just happened inside of someone's head. So this is not recorded. But pick breeder is like one of the few things, maybe the only thing where every single step of everything is recorded.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Predecessors, which is again, it's a really nice analogy, I think, to how human innovation proceeds in general, where someone invents something, discovers something, comes up with an idea, and then someone else that they may not even know later in the future goes back in history and sees that thing and realizes this could be used for that and then transfers that idea over and it becomes a stepping stone to something else. This has been going on for as long as civilization basically is civilization. That's what basically causes civilization to happen. And so pip reader is a kind of a microcosm of that. But here's where the thing that leads to the insight that's profound and to me was shocking was that after running this site for a couple years, so this is like a long time and letting people just breed and discover things and they discovered all kinds of things, butterflies and cars and planets”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metaphor here. And what's cool about this site, what made it, I think, compelling to me was that because it's crowdsourced, what we allowed people to do was to come in and look at what other people had bred. So there's like this big database and it's being displayed in a kind of a natural way, like a way that makes it easy for people to see what's been discovered, to surface things that are interesting. So you can think of as stepping stones. You might see a butterfly or a face or something like that. And then someone who sees that is allowed to, instead of starting from scratch, instead of starting from blobs like you would if you were starting from scratch, they can start from your discovery. If you found a butterfly and somebody wants to breed new butterflies, then no problem. They don't have to start from scratch and get to a butterfly. They can start from your butterfly and then breed from there. It's called branching. And so that means that people are building off of the discoveries of their predecessors, or you could think of as sort of standing on the shoulders of their.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can look at the children, and then you can pick from those children which one you like the best, and you can see that this is in effect breeding. So then out of those, you pick their favorite there, it has children, and then you get to choose from those. And then so on and so forth, you're basically iterating generations of breeding, where it goes depends on what you choose up to you to tie this back quickly so it sort of makes it what does this have to do with anything if you think about those images are basically like a metaphor for discovery in general you know like if you think about like what you said about vacuum tubes and computers computers are discovery vacuum tubes are a stepping stone on the road to that discovery and so somebody chose to use those vacuum tubes to try to build a computer like when it comes to image breeding if i see an image that looks like something interesting and then i choose to breed it further and then i get something else maybe a picture of a skull which actually was discovered then i basically use that stepping stone to get to a discovery so there's somehow there's a metaphor that can analyze”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wanted to do was to crowdsource people to kind of search through the space of images or pictures. And what that meant, and we used breeding. So basically what it meant was that you could take an image, say a blob or something. And in fact, the site would start you off with random blobs if you started from scratch. And you could say, look at some blobs and you could pick the one you like the best, just like you might if you were breeding horses or dogs, pick the one you like the best. You might have different reasons or criteria, but whatever your criteria is fine. And then it would have children. And so it's a little strange. It sounds strange. And a picture has children, but this is inside of a computer. So if you think about it, why not? And the picture can have children. The children or the offspring of the picture are like any other children. They look kind of like it. They're not exact duplicate, just like, you know, if you have children, they look a little bit like you. They're not exact duplicates of you or your spouse either. This is the case here. And so then what's cool is that then you can see that if your picture that you chose has children, then”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of neat because, in a way, this is a story of serendipity, which is about serendipity. I mean, basically this pick breeder just serendipitously led to this insight. Pick breeder was an experiment that I was running with my lab. I was a professor at the time at the University of Central Florida where we allowed people on the internet to go and breed pictures. And I know this is like a major digression from what we were just discussing. We were discussing all these important things. Now we're talking about breeding pictures. So how do these things connect? Breeding pictures, it is a little esoteric from general societal concerns perspective, but it's basically about searching through a space in a way. This was an opportunity for us. We were doing artificial intelligence research to crowdsource. Crowdsourcing is really interesting. It's the idea that take people on the internet because you've got access to potentially thousands, millions of people, and have them try to do something collectively wouldn't have been possible in the past if you didn't have access to the internet.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks for putting in that caveat because that's really important, I think. Can lose a lot of people. I just start out with this crank like claim that we should have no objectives whatsoever in our lives. Like, let's all just do whatever we want. Okay, that's going to appeal to some very small minority, but that doesn't sound practical to a lot of people. And that's true The claim here is not that we're just going to dump all objectives. Some objectives are principled. Yeah, I would agree with the distinction you're making, like it's kind of like BHAG ideas. Those are the ones that are of concern. So, if you have what I call modest objectives in your life or if institutions”
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 nothing I can do, or the only thing I can do is just be random, and that's not really the case. There are alternatives, which is why Serendipity does happen. Chance favors the prepared mind.”
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 going to cause us to go astray over and over again. And this goes all the way from like a personal level where you have goals in your life which have been set. Since you're very young and encouraged by your parents in the educational system all the way up to institutions like corporations and top of the government itself, like all of these institutions and individuals are using goal setting as sort of the one heuristic for getting to high level achievement. And so the book tries to both say okay, here's why this is something we shouldn't believe in with such confidence that we do, and what are some of the alternatives, since that's sort of like the natural next question, because it seems almost like.”
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 no protests out on the street about getting rid of objectives. And I feel like this is kind of like a hidden problem, but I think the book we wrote, Joel Lamann and I, we felt after we ran into this principle, which comes strangely from artificial intelligence research, comes from a circuitous direction where serendipity that we fell into noticing this. That has social implications way beyond just artificial intelligence research. And when we noticed this, we felt that this is actually a really serious problem, like a serious underlying social problem. Because the mechanism that we're using in our society to deal with all of these huge challenges that we have is exactly this principle that is flawed, so severely flawed.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need and want to accomplish keep us ahead of the curve, avoid disruption, all the things that we're worried about, that this is the formula, basically for everything. And what the book is about is that it actually doesn't work. And it's kind of an interesting allegation to say that this doesn't work because it's not like most controversies. Most controversies in our culture are very controversial. There's already sides. People are debating these things and they're often very political. This one though, there's no debate right now. Nobody's talking about this. There are no sides.”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That statement is a common kind of a saying. You hear things like that sometimes. The best way to find someone you love is to stop worrying about love or do you hear these cliches sometimes? And I think that that reflects that somewhere within our culture we recognize that there's a bit of a problem with setting goals and strictly adhering to them with this belief that that's ultimately going to cause you to get what you want. And yet what the book is about is that we have a tendency in our culture, a strong tendency to basically design everything that we do around exactly that archetype, which is that let's set a goal, stay our objective, and then let's set some kind of metrics so we can decide how close we're going to that goal. And then let's put all our effort into just moving directly in the direction of the goal. And we believe somehow that this is going to lead to all the things that we”
2022-06-28 · Invest Like the Best · Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source