Stanley, Kenneth O., and Joel Lehman. _Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective_. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2015. --- # Progressive Summary Stanley and Lehman are two AI researchers who created a website called Picbreeder. Through the lens of AI "search", they discovered that objective-driven search falls into traps of deception, where moving closer towards your objective actually makes it less likely for you to reach it. As an alternative, they suggest forms of non-objective search. Evolution is a perfect example of non-objective search. Nature comes up with variations without any specific goal in mind. "Novelty search" is another one. Novelty is a good proxy for interestingness. The book is surprisingly well-written for a pair of AI researchers. They argue passionately and eloquently for the merits of pursuing interestingness for its own sake. It is a little repetitive in its use of the "stepping stone" and "treasure hunter" metaphors, but there are lots of other colorful ones. One of my favorites is comparing objectives to nothing more than good luck charms that we wear around our necks. They do a good job showing how pervasive "objective thinking" is. Their target is not the modest objectives of building houses, designing software, cooking a meal, or trying to get fit. They are talking about our most ambitious objectives. The book could have been nothing more than platitudes about the journey being the destination, but what saves it is its grounding in specific examples from the field of AI. # Key Points Objectives make sense when the problem is simple. But for complex problems, deception is a factor. Deception - "the steps that lead to great invention aren't likely to resemble great invention." An example of this is how vacuum tubes led to personal computers. If we had set out with the objective of inventing personal computers, we would never have stumbled upon vacuum tubes as a stepping stone to computers. Another example of the Chinese finger trap, where you insert your finger into a tube, and the only way to get it out is to push it further in. We want to assess people on where they are (the treasure hunter's apporach) not where we want them to be (the objective fallacy). ## Campbell's Law > The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. Standardised testing in education only leads to students who are better at memorising and taking tests. An extreme form of this is "perverse incentives": - British gov in colonial India tried to eradicate poisonous snakes by paying locals for every dead snake they handed over. Instead, this incentivised locals to breed cobras to get more bounty. In the end, India had more venomous snakes. The same thing in Hanoi with rats - instead of less rats, there were rat farms. - Paying workers for every fragment of dinosaur bone led to them smashing whole bones. - Paying executives bonuses for higher earnings leads to short-term profits but long-term disaster. ## Evolution Most people would explain that the goal of evolution is fitness, ie survival and reproduction. But survival and reproduction were starting points of evolution. They were already there at the beginning. It doesn't make sense to suggest that they are goals. They are more like constraints. Even if survival and reproduction were goals, the simplest and most direct way of achieving them would be bacterial reproduction, one cell producing another. Instead, we have many complicated Rube Goldberg type ways of doing it. Humans are a trillion-cell tower of inefficiency. Nature is creative in spite of competition, which tends to make everything converge towards sameness (ie a single notion of best). The objectives of surviving and reproducing is less important than escaping from competition into new niches. Competition is kept in check because it is only local competition. A bird in Australia doesn't compete with a bird in North America. With local competition, there is room to expand into creative new niches. If competition were global, then there would be too much pressure towards sameness. (An example might be Jaron Lanier's observation that the accessibility of Youtube suddenly eroded the walls behind which distinct subcultures could evolve.) # Resonances Personal Kanban as a productivity system. [[Subtract]] - removing objectives from a system is a subtractive move that we are unlikely to think of. Letting go of "shoulds". We create to-do lists for ourselves, but then the tasks often lose relevance as the context changes. "Shoulds" are a form of internalised objectives. The Buddhist insight that labels are just a map, and not reality itself. To increase the overall freedom of a system, we sometimes have to restrict freedom. The example of people in a rowboat. By locking the oar, we increase its effectiveness. By synchronizing our strokes, thereby restricting freedom, we increase our forward momentum. Aiming for growth leads to less prosperity, rather than more. Degrowth is the more interesting path. Stuart Kauffman's idea of [[The adjacent possible is a shadow future]] is a powerful reason for novelty-based search. [[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/Emergent Strategy]] Nonviolent communication. Don't get fixed on specific strategies. Be creative with them. Explore interesting ones. Using needs as constraints. There is an important difference between constraints and objectives. Evolution requires organisms to survive. Survival is a constraint, not an objective. Once the constraints are met, there are many interesting variations possible. Zettelkasten style of note taking. Each note is a "stepping stone", valued for its own interestingness. There is no objective for taking notes. The song about "not finding what you want, but what you need." Another way of saying the journey is the destination. David Whyte's poem Start Close In: https://medium.com/poem-of-the-day/david-whyte-start-close-in-32210af0e820 - the idea of focusing on the most interesting stepping stone within reach, rather than some ambitious goal Suits, Bernard. _The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia_. Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1978. - life is not about objectives (winning, reproducing, etc), but is about finding the most interesting way to get there This is like a more accessible version of Paul Feyarabend's Against Method: - "The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes." Paul Feyerabend, Against Method # Oppositions # Questions / Comments Is there any room for teleology in this framework? What if I had the objective of creating a novelty-generating team or environment? Is that a paradox? Are they saying that we should navigate mostly through negative constraints, rather than positive goals? # Quotes #### 1 Questioning Objectives *Highlight [10]:* Over the remainder of this book an important principle will begin to emerge: Sometimes the best way to achieve something great is to stop trying to achieve a particular great thing. *Highlight [10]:* Our world has become saturated with objectives and metrics for success that mechanize our lives and distract us from our passions. But there are other paths to happiness and success. We’ll show you why not only can you trust your gut instinct when it tells you something important is around the corner, but you should trust it, even if you can’t explain what that something is. You don’t need to make up a tortured reason to justify every little impulse you feel. And not only is this attitude more healthy for us as humans anyway, but it’s backed up by solid scientific evidence that this book will present. We’re missing out on a lot by clinging to objectives. *Highlight [11]:* objectives are a pillar of our culture, but they’re also a prison around our potential. #### 2 Victory for the Aimless *Highlight [13]:* It’s just that anticipating what might lead to the most fulfilling outcomes is difficult. As with all open-ended problems in life, the stepping stones are unknown. So when you go out into the uncertain world sometimes it may be wise to hitch a ride with serendipity. Being open and flexible to opportunity is sometimes more important than knowing what you’re trying to do. After all, any path might lead to happiness, even the most unexpected. Some people seem to have an uncanny knack for spotting such opportunities, even if they conflict outright with their original aims. #### 4 The False Compass *Highlight [36]:* The best way to get computation is not to force great minds to waste their lives pondering a distant dream, but to let the great minds pursue their own interests in their present reality. Some will go in a direction that centuries later might lead to computation, and some will go in other directions, but at least they will be marching forward, stepping stone by stepping stone, which is ultimately the only realistic path to the future. *Highlight [36]:* Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that invention in mind *Highlight [37]:* Picbreeder is just one example of a fascinating class of phenomena that we might call non-objective search processes, or perhaps stepping stone collectors. The prolific creativity of these kinds of processes is difficult to overstate. After all, these are the same processes that created us, and through which we conquered the skies and networked the world. Non-objective search is the true source of much that gives value to our lives. When we unleash search from the trap of the objective, liberating it from the requirement to move only towards where we hope to arrive, it becomes a kind of treasure-hunter that finds needles in the haystack of what’s possible. So then why are so many of our efforts still dominated by the mythical objective? Whatever your goals are, from finding the perfect partner to creating the next great invention, when objectives are ambitious, the only reward you’re likely to receive is deception. That’s what you get for traveling by the false compass. *Highlight [37]:* Deception applies to becoming rich just as everywhere else. For example, what sense would it make to decline an unpaid internship doing something you love simply because it doesn’t make you any more rich? In fact, if you do become rich, it’s probably because you did pursue your passion, not because you pursued money per se. Passion is what drives you to that point, and then one day you might realize that you are only one stepping stone away from being rich. And that is the moment, when you are one stepping stone away, when you make the move you need to make and become rich. But becoming rich didn’t guide every life decision up to that point. On the contrary, a single-minded preoccupation with money is likely exactly the wrong road to abundant wealth. *Highlight [38]:* So it’s important to recall that the concern here is with ambitious objectives—if they are only a stepping stone away, then setting and following objectives still makes good sense. The problem is that the ambitious objectives are the interesting ones, and the idea that the best way to achieve them is by ignoring them flies in the face of common intuition and conventional wisdom. #### 5 The Interesting and the Novel *Highlight [40]:* The point is that novelty can often act as a stepping stone detector because anything novel is a potential stepping stone to something even more novel. In other words, novelty is a rough shortcut for identifying interestingness: Interesting ideas are those that open up new possibilities. And while it might sound wishy-washy to go looking for “interesting” things, interestingness is a surprisingly deep and important concept. In the words of the famous philosopher Alfred Whitehead [42]: “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true.” *Highlight [41]:* In short, objectives mean sailing to a distant destination with an unknown path while novelty requires only steering away from where we’ve been already. Deviating from the past is simpler and richer with information because we can look at the whole history of past discoveries to inform our judgment of current novelty. So it’s not unreasonable to believe that novelty is a meaningful engine for progress. *Highlight [47]:* In a sense, over eons our bodies have become a kind of encyclopedia of facts about the universe in which they exist. Not only are many physical aspects of reality reflected in our bodies’ structure (for example, light, sound, gravity, heat, air, etc.), but evolution has continued for so long that we now actually encode incredibly specific details of the universe somewhere within us: Our brains remember which planets revolve around the sun and even the price of a bagel at the corner shop. The ability to learn and adapt over our lifetime has propelled the evolutionary information accumulator to a recent extreme. Of course, that doesn’t mean the process will stop with us. But what we observe again is that a search without a clear objective (evolution in this case) accumulates information as it moves from the most simple single-celled organisms to the most complex animals. That’s why the creatures of Earth have become a kind of mirror held up to the world that reflects back in tremendous diversity the physical possibilities enabled by our universe. *Highlight [49]:* Whenever a new theory challenges the dominant worldview, it’s natural to seek to reestablish the original order. One way to do that is to reinterpret the new theory to fit the old way of thinking, to avoid having to start all over again. *Highlight [50]:* Objectives are the traditional engines of achievement. *Highlight [50]:* Another important and powerful property of these kinds of non-objective processes is their connection to the idea of divergence and divergent search. Objectives by their nature cause a search process to converge—towards the objective. And convergence means that many potentially interesting directions will not be explored. However, without the burden of the objective the search is free to branch in many directions and thereby diverge while collecting new stepping stones along the way. #### 6 Long Live the Treasure Hunter *Highlight [56]:* The more ambitious our objectives, the more deceptive they become as well. Deception is just a very nasty beast. And when you’re dealing with deception, by definition the objective is a false compass. So no matter how much you do to convince yourself that you can keep your objective as long as you’re still open-minded, that doesn’t undo the fact that the objective is pointing in the wrong direction. *Highlight [59]:* The treasure hunter is an opportunistic explorer—searching for anything and everything of value, without a care for what might be found. To be a treasure hunter, you have to collect as many stepping stones as you can, because you never know which one might lead somewhere valuable. *Highlight [60]:* One implication of Picbreeder and novelty search is that we can actually build systems based on the non-objective principle. That’s not something we’ve done very often in the past, but once we escape the myth of the objective, the possibility of building treasure-hunting systems becomes intriguing. *Highlight [60]:* The best way to harness the power of a group of people in the non-objective world isn’t through brainstorming sessions or meetings or big ambitious projects. It’s not about sitting down and coming to a consensus on what to do. That’s not the treasure hunter—consensus is exactly the cultural tendency that we need to escape. We don’t want “Top 40” lists where everyone tries to agree what the best songs are, nor “design by committee” where any interesting vision for a new product is watered down by consensus. No, the way to unleash the treasure hunter is actually through separating people from each other, like in Picbreeder, where people only interact by taking off from where someone else left. While many participants in such a treasure-hunting system might arrive with their own personal objectives, the system as a whole ends up lacking a unified objective because people’s objectives differ. #### 7 Unshackling Education *Highlight [68]:* The aimless youth can play the treasure hunger, liberated to survey the stepping stones and choose the most interesting. *Highlight [73]:* Uniformity is much like accuracy. It’s a warm companion of assessment and measurement, but a strong adversary of the treasure hunter. *Highlight [74]:* the insight is not that encouraging diversity can solve any particular ambitious problem—that would only be falling into the myth of the objective from a different angle. Instead, the lesson is that silencing diversity is a sure-fire way to slow down progress. So ultimately we’re left with the conclusion that uniformity may be as meaningless an ideal as accuracy, especially when you have a specific ambitious problem in mind like improving education. *Highlight [76]:* From the perspective of avoiding deception, the appeal of this peer-driven assessment approach is that people and schools are not being compared to where we want them to be (which is the objective fallacy), but rather are assessed based on where they are (which is the philosophy of the treasure hunter). *Highlight [76]:* Great things are accomplished in the long run not because they were the objective, but because they were not. For those who wish to enforce progress, this insight is demoralizing; for the rest it can be liberating. #### 8 Unchaining Innovation *Highlight [80]:* One main difference between science and education is that we would never be happy with a school that is a complete and utter failure, but in science it is commonplace and expected for individual projects to fail. However, while there will be many individual failures, overall we’d like to expand scientific knowledge as much as possible. *Highlight [82]:* when consensus is sought in exploration, the result is a generic washout effect. Instead of allowing each person to discover their own chains of stepping stones, the system squashes a diversity of opinions into a generic average. *Highlight [82]:* At the border between our present knowledge and the unknown are questions whose answers remain uncertain. That’s why the opinions of experts should diverge in such uncharted territory. It’s in this wild borderland between the known and the unknown that we should want our greatest minds probing, rather than within the comfortable vacation-spot of maximal consensus. *Highlight [85]:* it can be short-sighted to judge an individual stepping stone by a criterion better suited to the whole system. *Highlight [87]:* you might ask how we can so smugly idolize stepping stones without knowing where they lead. But that’s just the fading whisper of objective thinking. As we’ve seen, there’s good reason to believe that not knowing where we’re going is perfectly fine—and can actually lead to a brighter future of discovery. Not knowing where we’re going is the way of the information accumulator, it’s the treasure hunter, it’s the stepping-stone collector, it’s the path to everywhere and nowhere, it’s the tunnel to the future. We don’t know where we’re going and that’s why we produce great things. Consensus, perceived importance, alignment with national intereststhese are “objective” parachutes for escaping the great unknown when we should be rocketing further into it. *Highlight [88]:* Realistic objectives, which tend to be the province of investing, tend to be exactly those that are one stepping stone away. This fact is reflected in how most people invest—a solid business plan guides us only to the next stepping stone. But that doesn’t mean that business can’t be innovative—an innovative business idea reveals a nearby stepping stone that we didn’t previously realize was there. *Highlight [88]:* how many predicted that advances in commodity consumer electronics would lead to the first mass-produced fully-electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster? Yet by bundling together what are in effect thousands of lithium ion laptop batteries, it became possible to create practical electric cars that were both lighter and more powerful [99]. There’s nothing like suddenly realizing that we’re one stepping stone away from some yet unrealized potential. *Highlight [89]:* the businessperson tends to look for nearby stepping stones before seeking funding, while the scientist ideally requests funding to follow a hunch that an interesting stepping stone is nearby. In neither case is setting a longterm ambitious objective the best choice, while in both cases innovation comes from the unexpected. *Highlight [89]:* In the long run, it’s the accumulation of stepping stones that leads to the greatest innovations. When each small step is a revelation, the chain itself is nothing less than a revolution. *Highlight [90]:* If even artists suffer the pressure to provide objectives for their works, what more for the rest of us? It’s a testament to the power of objective thinking in our culture that young art students would be hesitating on their path simply because they can’t say where it leads. *Highlight [90]:* We hope we don’t sound like we’re offering the universal solution to every great problem. That would be naive, and far too grandiose to take seriously. Rather, what we hope you gained is an appreciation for just how omnipresent objectives can be. Their tentacles entangle every facet of our lives. From the most critical societal initiatives to the more mundane rituals of daily life and even the milestones of youth, objectives run almost everything. *Highlight [91]:* It is possible sometimes that the entrenchment of stagnant ways can be escaped by abandoning their false security. In some cases, the power of non-objective discovery and divergent exploration could indeed create a better future. And though non-objective search itself is not a universal solution, we’re still better off seeing with sober eyes that slavish faith in objective exploration and assessment is often a formula for mediocrity and conformist stagnation. Although the world doesn’t work in easy ways, at least we know that there’s a path not limited by the shackles of a mandated outcome. #### 9 Farewell to the Mirage *Highlight [95]:* There never really was a compass to great discovery or to ambitious outcomes. Perhaps that’s why those who do succeed brilliantly are often cloaked in mystery and rewarded with devoted respect. We must at least have had an inkling that our compass is broken, or great achievements would not so easily become mythology. The objective is often little more than a good luck charm hung around our necks. *Highlight [97]:* following the scent of interestingness is justified precisely because we don’t know the structure of the search space. *Highlight [97]:* The successful inventor asks where we can get from here rather than how we can get there. It’s a subtle yet profound difference. Instead of wasting effort on far-off grandiose visions, they concentrate on the edge of what’s possible today. *Highlight [98]:* It’s tempting to think of progress as a set of projects, some of them on the wrong path and some on the right. If you see the world this way, it’s natural to defend the path you believe is right and to confront those who seem misguided. But here’s the strange thing: When there’s no destination there can’t be a right path. *Highlight [99]:* Instead of judging every activity for its potential to succeed, we should judge our projects for their potential to spawn more projects. If we really behave as treasure hunters and stepping stone collectors, then the only important thing about a stepping stone is that it leads to more stepping stones, period. *Highlight [99]:* So if you’re wondering how to escape the myth of the objective, just do things because they’re interesting. Not everything needs to be guided by rigid objectives. If you have a strong feeling, go with it. If you don’t have a clear objective, then you can’t be wrong, because wherever you end up is okay. Assessment only goes so far. A great achievement is one that leads to more great achievements. If you set out to program computers but you’re now making movies, you’re probably doing something right. If you wanted to create AI but you’re now evolving pictures, you’re probably doing something right. If you imagined yourself painting but you’re now writing poetry, you’re probably doing something right. If the path you’re on does not resemble where you thought you’d be, you’re probably doing something right. In the long run, stepping stones lead to other stepping stones and eventually to great discoveries. #### 10 Case Study 1: Reinterpreting Natural Evolution *Highlight [104]:* The stepping stones to intelligence aren’t intelligent themselves. For example, without the benefit of hindsight, it isn’t clear that flatworms are a better path towards high-level intelligence than insects. But we didn’t descend from insects. *Highlight [109]:* Interestingly, it’s not by competition that natural evolution leads to diversity, but often by avoiding competition. In particular, if an organism can make a living in a new way, then it has effectively founded its own niche. Because it then becomes the first organism to live in this new way, the competition is less intense for the lucky newcomer and it can reproduce more easily. For example, if a chance mutation gives a creature the ability to digest a previously inedible compound, it could claim a whole new class of food entirely for itself. *Highlight [109]:* Nature is always seeking to expand. *Highlight [109]:* Just as the invention of the computer formed the foundation of an entire ecosystem of software that couldn’t have existed without it, the discovery of grass by natural evolution provides a platform for herbivores to make a living. Those herbivores in turn enable the carnivores that feed upon them, the scavengers that clean up the scraps, and the parasites who live within the animals themselves [113]. The chain reaction that the first cellular niche set off billions of years ago shows that evolution in nature belongs in the same club as human innovation, Picbreeder, and novelty search: Evolution is also an everexpanding collection of stepping stones that build upon each other, not because they improve in any objective sense, but because they explore beyond the stepping stones of the past. *Highlight [110]:* mutations that don’t much affect fitness have more uncertain fates, because natural selection will be mostly indifferent towards them. These kinds of neutral genetic changes evolve not by natural selection, but according to aimless genetic drift *Highlight [110]:* Another force that allows serendipity to act in evolution is exaptation, which occurs when a feature of an organism evolved for one function proves useful in an entirely different context. For example, birds’ feathers first evolved in dinosaurs, where they helped to regulate temperature. Only later did evolution exploit them as a stepping stone to flight. Closer to home, the precursors to our bones merely stored minerals needed for other bodily functions. Later on, evolution repurposed them to give our bodies solid structure *Highlight [112]:* Nearly all organisms begin life as a single cell and pass on their genes to their offspring. And their offspring are also at first just a single cell. This single-cell “bottleneck,” as Richard Dawkins calls it, is ubiquitous in nature [117]. It’s interesting to look at evolution through the perspective of this bottleneck: It leads to the idea that nature has found an incredible diversity of methods to start from one cell to do nothing more than ultimately produce another. What happens in between is life. All animals are unified through this bottleneck although they may cross it in strikingly different ways. *Highlight [112]:* If all organisms begin their life as single cells and end up reproducing to create offspring who also start as single cellsand this simple strategy for reproduction is effective—what objective utility is there in doing the same thing, but in more and more complicated ways? Bacteria make the leap between generations of bacteria in a relatively simple way, like cracking the egg directly against a surface. But some organisms take a more roundabout path: They might first spawn a trillion excess cells and perform an elaborate well-choreographed Rube-Goldbergian dance for two decades. Finally, they will reproduce the next generation as single cells. Humans take this more roundabout path. In fact, a single sperm cell and a single egg cell united years ago to form the original single-celled version of you. And now, years later, you stand as a trillion-celled tower of reproductive inefficiency. When viewed this way, a human is curiously like a complicated outgrowth of a bacteria’s reproductive process. We proliferate trillions of cells to produce our offspring where only one is needed to do the job. *Highlight [113]:* What we’re noticing here is that there’s a difference between what we find interesting in evolution and what is only necessary to survive and reproduce. The most interesting developments are digressions from the objective of maximizing reproductive fitness. These digressions persist not because of competition but through other mechanisms in evolution (like drift and exaptation) that encourage creativity. Even though we create trillions of cells where only one would do, our evolutionary niche supports such unbridled extravagance, allowing the beautiful Rube-Goldbergian dance that we humans do. There are many ways to meet the minimal criteria of life, whether a beetle, a bird, a buffalo, a barnacle, or a businessman. But when we view these diverse creatures from a high level of abstraction, they’re all at heart doing the same thing—they survive and they reproduce. The difference is just that they do it in radically different ways. Instead of competition, in this view the engine behind evolution’s creativity is searching for many ways to do the same thing. Evolution may be the original Rube Goldberg, endlessly riffing on the same simple theme. *Highlight [114]:* evolution is a special kind of non-objective search: a minimal criteria search. It isn’t heading anywhere in particular, but it heads everywhere that passes the minimal criteria of survival and reproduction, which was satisfied from the very start of evolution by the first reproducing cell. Evolution is just accumulating all the different ways to survive and reproduce. And as all the simple means of living are exhausted by the search, gradually more complex ones are uncovered. But they aren’t discovered because they are better or more optimalthey are simply the stepping stones reachable from where the search last stood. *Highlight [114]:* competition may be the least interesting of the evolutionary forces because it tends to diminish diversity. Unlike the accumulation of different ways of living that results from discovering new niches, competition isn’t a purely creative force. It’s more a honing force that optimizes creatures within a particular niche, or in limited ways across niches, like when gazelles adapt to run from lions. So if we’re interested in the creativity of the process, it’s not unreasonable to abstract competition entirely out of evolution. The problem with competition is that it introduces the concept of objective pressure to be better, which as we’ve seen can lead both to convergence and deception. Put another way, evolution is creative despite the competition it tolerates—not because of competition. *Highlight [116]:* A key insight from thinking non-objectively in this chapter is that although evolution can be seen as a competition, out-competing other creatures on the “objective” of surviving and reproducing is less important than escaping from competition to form new niches. That’s how diversity grows and why natural evolution overall diverges rather than converges. *Highlight [116]:* it’s when the reigns of optimization are thrown off that discovery finally takes over. *Highlight [117]:* It’s precisely because evolution has no overriding objective that it was able to discover something like humanity, precisely because it wasn’t looking for us that humanity was found. The paradox of objectives unifies all large-scale open-ended creative systems—from human innovation that’s driven by our own intelligence and exploration of the interesting, to natural evolution with its notable lack of human guidance or design. *Highlight [117]:* Evolution is the ultimate treasure hunter, searching for nothing and finding everything as it spills through the space of all possible organisms. It’s the world’s most prolific inventor. Even so, everything it ever produced was done without thinking about where it might someday lead. That’s why it becomes possible to understand evolution largely without the ideas of competition and fitness, perhaps providing a new perspective that doesn’t appeal to the myth of the objective. #### 11 Case Study 2: Objectives and the Quest for AI *Highlight [119]:* The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method *Highlight [122]:* objectives are a favorite tool of society’s gatekeepers—the people in power who decide where to invest resources and what to ignore. *Highlight [124]:* the key idea behind search is to follow a gradient: A bread-crumb trail of some kind, a path of increasing intensity. In objective-driven search, the gradient is moving from bad to good on some performance measure. In novelty search, it’s the gradient of novelty. *Highlight [127]:* An objective heuristic like measuring a new algorithm on a battery of benchmark tasks may feel comforting—it’s backed by a clear principle and makes it easy to mindlessly judge new algorithms. But benchmarks do little to illuminate why one research direction is more or less interesting than another. *Highlight [128]:* it’s important to consider the difference between AI researchers and AI practitioners. While researchers blaze trails toward future innovation, the practitioner wants to solve real-world problems right now. Instead of trying to make new algorithms, a practitioner looks at the algorithms available today and then decides which to apply to a present problem. It’s like the difference between inventing new experimental types of cars and choosing which car to buy from a dealership. The practitioner is more an AI customer than an AI inventor. The important distinction is that the practitioner doesn’t participate in the search for new algorithms. For her a solution is needed today, and the best algorithm available will just have to do. *Highlight [129]:* So what’s interesting for the practitioner—who is frozen at one moment in time—isn’t the right compass for an innovator looking towards the future. Perhaps the confusion between these two roles (practitioner and researcher) might help explain how the experimentalist heuristic came to dominate AI (and how similar rules of thumb became popular in many other fields). Judging by performance is a good idea for practitioners but is shaky at best for researchers—because of deception. *Highlight [135]:* In case it’s hard to think of alternatives to arguing about performance or guarantees, there are in fact many other important clues we can consider: inspiration, elegance, potential to provoke further creativity, thought-provoking construction, challenge to the status quo, novelty, analogy to nature, beauty, simplicity, and imagination. All of these are possible for a new algorithm or any other kind of new idea. While they may lack objectivity, perhaps that is exactly what can liberate the field of AI, and many other fields at that. Anyone can say that performance should improve, but who has the courage to see the beauty of an idea? We could use a few more brave experts like that.