9 ms·

The Myth of the Objective

130 points by greywolve 9y ago

quuquuquu 9y ago
I appreciate the work and research that went into this. However, I can't help but feel as if some of these statements aren't very concretely true, or untrue. For example, ok, if I get tunnel vision and just focus on one objective, I might lose sight of other paths. I can see what you mean, but let's put that into practice. "If you focus on profit, you might lose focus on innovation." Ok, but if I focus solely on innovation, what happens when I'm not selling anything, or selling things at a loss? The bills come due at some point, and so many people fail. We don't all have endless sums of money that we can rely on while we wait for our Zen powers to coalesce and then people magically send us money.
- grasshopperpurp 9y ago
  This is why it's important to have passions outside of those that pay the bills. And, if your passions and finances are entangled, which is the goal for most, it's important to build structures that allow times of absolute creativity (time in the goalless path). A writer still must spend time editing his work, which is a different process than creating. So, if you have profit in the back of your mind throughout the process, as the essay notes, you will stifle yourself. If you have an editing process, where you line up your creative expressions with profit, you're basically doing what a writer does when he edits. Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself is a fun book that, as the title suggests, deals with this idea.
- autokad 9y ago
  i felt the title was too over-reaching than one of the actual conclusions "Objectives can, ironically, be obstacles to innovation and creativity.". key word for me is *can. Objectives are pretty good in some cases, but not all. Or perhaps, when they ran their machine learning, they needed to first run some unsupervised learning =)
- ballenf 9y ago
  Think about Zuckerburg's wealth. If he had sat in his dorm with the goal of building a multi-billion dollar empire, do you think he would have started with "thefacebook"?
  - quuquuquu 9y ago
    There's a considerable amount of luck in Zuck's story. Peter Thiel gave him money and he demolished Myspace somehow. I don't think he got there by daydreaming ^.^
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
arbie 9y ago
The article made me realize I do this frequently. I keep an eye out for serendipity. Encountering new problems often makes me take up an adventure from months or years ago where I learned a new piece of technology or a method that _seemed_ like a dead end at the time, but becomes a stepping stone in hindsight. A dead end only means you're looking at the wrong direction at _that_ moment. Always chase the yet unlearned.
unit91 9y ago
> When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path. > Objectives can, ironically, be obstacles to innovation and creativity. This, like much of the Zen worldview, is self-refuting. If objectives can be obstacles that leave me with only one eye on the path, then the new objective is just to focus on "the path" of innovation and creativity. My objective may have changed, but I still have an objective.
- itchyjunk 9y ago
  Another way of looking at it is that having both eyes on the path is a bi-product of not having an objective. You are not distracted by superficial goals. If you objective is to focus on the path, you now miss all the opportunities the paths lead to.
- YCode 9y ago
  A lot of "zen" wisdom is vague and even illogical. Koans are a great (if not the great) example. They don't intend to teach you anything. Instead, they create doubt in your beliefs so that you can see possibilities you were previously blind to. In this instance perhaps the difference is using the "objective" as a starting point rather than a desired end result.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  I believe you missed the point of the Zen introduction. Object vs. Subject.
scandox 9y ago
Surely the human taking 70 steps to find an interesting image is _less_ aimless than the computer that took 30,000 steps and didn't find anything interesting? In other words a non-local goal was somehow forming in their mind drawing them down a particular path? Or am I missing something?
sevensor 9y ago
This is mostly a problem when your thinking about objectives admits only one at a time. Many more opportunities arise when we find an interesting compromise in full awareness of the conflicts among multiple objectives.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  Somewhat related, consider the expression "putting the cart before the horse".
throw843434 9y ago
The article is terrible - it is effectively saying "being objective" is not good for achieving that "objective". This is complete non-sense without untangling the epistemic roots for said words, the author may have had. It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective. This is well known to both Control theorists, RL practitioners, and many other non-STEM people (in marketing/politics/sociology etc.). This triviality has nothing at all to do with Zen or any of the things Westerners take for being "rustic" and "warm and fuzzy".
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  The video referenced by the article is actually very intriguing and well done. It's basically just talking about the incredible power of broadly pursuing novelty and interestingness, as opposed to a specific goal.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    AIUI, it's about having an objective function which measures something other than the delta to a pre-defined goal, but rather a higher-level more abstract function. Another phrase for it would be "unknown unknowns": if your success criteria are too focused, you'll miss out on solutions that you couldn't conceive of before they're discovered. The "Objective" criticised in this article is like a "known unknown".
    - mfoy_ 9y ago
      More than that, even when they discovered an interesting result, they couldn't go back and create an objective based algorithm that could return to that result... even though it was known to be possible. (I mean, they obviously knew the specific steps taken, but they couldn't create an algorithm that could re-find them with a specific result in mind.)
- jhgb 9y ago
  I'm confused, is it about "objective" as in the adjective, or about "objective" as "goal"? Perhaps my English is not good enough but I fail to see the first in the text.
protonfish 9y ago
It makes sense to explore outside the box if your problem can't be found in a very limited search space. However the statement > Many natural processes don’t appear to be objective based. Natural evolution and human innovation are cases in point. Is not correct. Evolution is highly objective based and micro-incremental.
- mirceal 9y ago
  No it's not. Evolution itself does not have the objective of creating something. Regarding evolution, having read both Kenneth's book and "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins I can tell you that Kenneth rediscovers what Dawkins explained in his book in 1986. The experiment Dawkins describes in his book resembles the picbreeder experiment a lot.
  - MyObjective4 9y ago
    Wouldn't humans creating recognizable images by choosing a particular aberration that looks like something familiar be more akin to intelligent design? Without this intelligence and creativity to see something in each new breed and branch, coupled with the ability on the site to rank images and label images. The final images would have ever existed. According to Dawkins, Evolution has two objectives. Optimizing survival and procreation. We saw how the randomness toward an objective failed to produce anything meaningful in this example so how is this similar to natural evolution? I see no similarities.
    - mirceal 9y ago
      the point is that you cannot design it. you're exploring the space looking at what is interesting. So if you're given a start image and an end image (an objective) you cannot reach the end image. In the case of pic-breeder you are playing the role of a fitness function not that of an intelligent designer.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  The "objective" part is a bit confusing. Evolution doesn't have objectives like "create the turtle, elephant, and man". Which is what is meant by "The Myth of the Objective". Evolution has two eyes on the path (optimizing survival and procreation) and none on objectives (concrete outcomes, i.e. specific organisms).
kuwze 9y ago
I've read most of the book and I am confused by the fact that it completely skips artificial evolution (especially obvious in the domestication of cats and dogs).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
danielam 9y ago
Reminds me of (a variation of) a Yiddish proverb: How do you make God laugh? Tell him about your plans.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  Or the English one: "Life is what happens while making other plans."
- 123e1daAdfafsdf 9y ago
  "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." -- Eisenhower
- undershirt 9y ago
  "everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth" -- Mike Tyson
- durzagott 9y ago
  “No Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy” -Helmuth von Moltke
ssivark 9y ago
Another interesting manifestation of the same idea is expounded by John Kay, under the title 'Obliquity'. He has a book on that topic, and also several hour-long YouTube talks. The central theme is regarding how it is better to chase goals obliquely rather then head on, especially when goals correspond to holistic/unspecifiable things like "wellness". He has case studies of companies that managed to innovate or not, depending on how carried away they got with their objective.
mathattack 9y ago
One of the father's of quality, W. Edwards Deming came out very strong against Management by Objective, even though he was very statistically inclined. In his 14 points [0] he mentions Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.. His idea is you should focus on the journey (always improve) rather than artificial endpoints. It's a profound idea, and one I've sometimes struggled to come to grips with. [0] http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/overview/deming-points.html http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- taneq 9y ago
  So how do you know whether you're always improving if you don't measure your performance at consistent points along the way? Just ask everyone if it felt like you improved, followed by a group hug and mutual back-patting?
  - bandushrew 9y ago
    I dont think he said to eliminate the measurements, he said to eliminate the quotas.
    - mathattack 9y ago
      Exactly. Going by his theory... If you say, "I am paying you to produce 1,000 cars per month" then that's what you'll get. If instead you rely on intrinsic motivation, and improve the system, you will get more than 1,000, and they'll be higher quality. This doesn't work everywhere. (Certainly not with Sales commission!) But it is worth thinking through the logical implications of it.
    - tango979 9y ago
      "Watch, don't judge, but do watch"
    - 9y ago
merraksh 9y ago
It would be interesting to test this on academicians: take objectives off of them (grants, large number of publications; hell, even tenure!) and let them wander freely through their field of research. I have the impression this was normality decades ago.
MyObjective4 9y ago
So how do you harness the knowledge that many of the best ideas that have been thought up weren't the original intention or objective. I don't get the point. I think this is saying something like, only fate will create something extraordinary. This is useless nonsense. Most of the claims of the video and article seem to lead nowhere, or are commonly known and while mildly interesting, are easily explained by logical observation and analysis. Knowing them doesn't help get you anywhere (that would be an objective). If there is no objective to the video, then why watch it. This is starting to sound like some kind of relativism. The success of PicBreeder is accomplished by individuals ability to see interesting things evolving and the vast number of real world similar objects they had to choose from. Of course an algorithm cannot replicate that because it is not creative. This does more to dis-prove natural evolution IMO because the images that took shape required creative intelligence to facilitate them doing so. As to the point of the final pictures only appearing when there was no particular objective, OK fair enough, but how does this help us? What new thing did we learn? We know that many inventions and innovations were discovered this way. Why is it an epiphany? The computer could not create a recognizable picture because it was only given one. If it had the google images library to match to, it would certainly come up with some very great pictures. On the Living Image Project, The recognizable images didn't happen, because different people saw different things and voted different directions. This failed precisely because there was no objective. If the Living Image Project stated an objective (A teacup for example), it would have had far more success. This just goes to show that objectives are important because in the real world, there are needs. If the article and video was useful, it would have revealed something helpful about how to fill needs (objectives) in a better way. The majority of problems are solved with objectives in mind. This article and video never seem to recognize that. The conclusion almost seems to say that attempting to fill known needs is a problem in the world today. In the Novelty search demo that was shown, the biped that used the novel behavior algorithm walked better than the farther distance algorithm only explains the constraints that the failing algorithms had. All it proves is that when an algorithm has more choices to explore, in many cases it did better. To me this would be like telling someone to build the best house, car, ETC but only use the knowledge from 3 books. Tell someone else to do the same but use the internet, unlimited books, Talk to people ETC. Should we be surprised at the result? Kenneth Stanley seemed to be, and seemed to think it revolutionary. What new thing does this teach us in practical terms? Nothing. More stepping stones mean a better result. This is common sense. It is no wonder the National Science Foundation would not give this guy any money. He hasn't taught us anything new. I want my 30 minutes of life back.
primeblue 9y ago
Beautiful!
mistercow 9y ago
Having spent a lot of time with PicBreeder, I suspect that the "ancestors look nothing like their descendants" thing is more an artifact of how our brains interpret images, rather than implying some deeper insight into how objectives affect the process. There are AI projects that attempt to approximate a "natural image manifold" – essentially a blob in the space of possible images where you find things that look like photographs to humans. I think the PicBreeder thing has more to do with that; the set of images that people want to create occupies a relatively confined space within the set of all possible PicBreeder outputs. So working off of any previously built image is basically a "shortcut to the manifold", if you will. Or to put it another way: when you consider the entire space of PicBreeder outputs, any existing image is much closer to whatever you want to make than starting from scratch.

130 points by greywolve 9y ago

I appreciate the work and research that went into this. However, I can't help but feel as if some of these statements aren't very concretely true, or untrue. For example, ok, if I get tunnel vision and just focus on one objective, I might lose sight of other paths. I can see what you mean, but let's put that into practice. "If you focus on profit, you might lose focus on innovation." Ok, but if I focus solely on innovation, what happens when I'm not selling anything, or selling things at a loss? The bills come due at some point, and so many people fail. We don't all have endless sums of money that we can rely on while we wait for our Zen powers to coalesce and then people magically send us money.

grasshopperpurp 9y ago
This is why it's important to have passions outside of those that pay the bills. And, if your passions and finances are entangled, which is the goal for most, it's important to build structures that allow times of absolute creativity (time in the goalless path). A writer still must spend time editing his work, which is a different process than creating. So, if you have profit in the back of your mind throughout the process, as the essay notes, you will stifle yourself. If you have an editing process, where you line up your creative expressions with profit, you're basically doing what a writer does when he edits. Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself is a fun book that, as the title suggests, deals with this idea.
autokad 9y ago
i felt the title was too over-reaching than one of the actual conclusions "Objectives can, ironically, be obstacles to innovation and creativity.". key word for me is *can. Objectives are pretty good in some cases, but not all. Or perhaps, when they ran their machine learning, they needed to first run some unsupervised learning =)
ballenf 9y ago
Think about Zuckerburg's wealth. If he had sat in his dorm with the goal of building a multi-billion dollar empire, do you think he would have started with "thefacebook"?
- quuquuquu 9y ago
  There's a considerable amount of luck in Zuck's story. Peter Thiel gave him money and he demolished Myspace somehow. I don't think he got there by daydreaming ^.^
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

arbie 9y ago

The article made me realize I do this frequently. I keep an eye out for serendipity. Encountering new problems often makes me take up an adventure from months or years ago where I learned a new piece of technology or a method that _seemed_ like a dead end at the time, but becomes a stepping stone in hindsight. A dead end only means you're looking at the wrong direction at _that_ moment. Always chase the yet unlearned.

unit91 9y ago

> When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path. > Objectives can, ironically, be obstacles to innovation and creativity. This, like much of the Zen worldview, is self-refuting. If objectives can be obstacles that leave me with only one eye on the path, then the new objective is just to focus on "the path" of innovation and creativity. My objective may have changed, but I still have an objective.

itchyjunk 9y ago
Another way of looking at it is that having both eyes on the path is a bi-product of not having an objective. You are not distracted by superficial goals. If you objective is to focus on the path, you now miss all the opportunities the paths lead to.
YCode 9y ago
A lot of "zen" wisdom is vague and even illogical. Koans are a great (if not the great) example. They don't intend to teach you anything. Instead, they create doubt in your beliefs so that you can see possibilities you were previously blind to. In this instance perhaps the difference is using the "objective" as a starting point rather than a desired end result.
IncRnd 9y ago
I believe you missed the point of the Zen introduction. Object vs. Subject.

scandox 9y ago

Surely the human taking 70 steps to find an interesting image is _less_ aimless than the computer that took 30,000 steps and didn't find anything interesting? In other words a non-local goal was somehow forming in their mind drawing them down a particular path? Or am I missing something?

sevensor 9y ago

This is mostly a problem when your thinking about objectives admits only one at a time. Many more opportunities arise when we find an interesting compromise in full awareness of the conflicts among multiple objectives.

mfoy_ 9y ago
Somewhat related, consider the expression "putting the cart before the horse".

throw843434 9y ago

The article is terrible - it is effectively saying "being objective" is not good for achieving that "objective". This is complete non-sense without untangling the epistemic roots for said words, the author may have had. It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective. This is well known to both Control theorists, RL practitioners, and many other non-STEM people (in marketing/politics/sociology etc.). This triviality has nothing at all to do with Zen or any of the things Westerners take for being "rustic" and "warm and fuzzy".

dwaltrip 9y ago
The video referenced by the article is actually very intriguing and well done. It's basically just talking about the incredible power of broadly pursuing novelty and interestingness, as opposed to a specific goal.
- barrkel 9y ago
  AIUI, it's about having an objective function which measures something other than the delta to a pre-defined goal, but rather a higher-level more abstract function. Another phrase for it would be "unknown unknowns": if your success criteria are too focused, you'll miss out on solutions that you couldn't conceive of before they're discovered. The "Objective" criticised in this article is like a "known unknown".
  - mfoy_ 9y ago
    More than that, even when they discovered an interesting result, they couldn't go back and create an objective based algorithm that could return to that result... even though it was known to be possible. (I mean, they obviously knew the specific steps taken, but they couldn't create an algorithm that could re-find them with a specific result in mind.)
jhgb 9y ago
I'm confused, is it about "objective" as in the adjective, or about "objective" as "goal"? Perhaps my English is not good enough but I fail to see the first in the text.

protonfish 9y ago

It makes sense to explore outside the box if your problem can't be found in a very limited search space. However the statement > Many natural processes don’t appear to be objective based. Natural evolution and human innovation are cases in point. Is not correct. Evolution is highly objective based and micro-incremental.

mirceal 9y ago
No it's not. Evolution itself does not have the objective of creating something. Regarding evolution, having read both Kenneth's book and "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins I can tell you that Kenneth rediscovers what Dawkins explained in his book in 1986. The experiment Dawkins describes in his book resembles the picbreeder experiment a lot.
- MyObjective4 9y ago
  Wouldn't humans creating recognizable images by choosing a particular aberration that looks like something familiar be more akin to intelligent design? Without this intelligence and creativity to see something in each new breed and branch, coupled with the ability on the site to rank images and label images. The final images would have ever existed. According to Dawkins, Evolution has two objectives. Optimizing survival and procreation. We saw how the randomness toward an objective failed to produce anything meaningful in this example so how is this similar to natural evolution? I see no similarities.
  - mirceal 9y ago
    the point is that you cannot design it. you're exploring the space looking at what is interesting. So if you're given a start image and an end image (an objective) you cannot reach the end image. In the case of pic-breeder you are playing the role of a fitness function not that of an intelligent designer.
mfoy_ 9y ago
The "objective" part is a bit confusing. Evolution doesn't have objectives like "create the turtle, elephant, and man". Which is what is meant by "The Myth of the Objective". Evolution has two eyes on the path (optimizing survival and procreation) and none on objectives (concrete outcomes, i.e. specific organisms).

kuwze 9y ago

I've read most of the book and I am confused by the fact that it completely skips artificial evolution (especially obvious in the domestication of cats and dogs).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

danielam 9y ago

Reminds me of (a variation of) a Yiddish proverb: How do you make God laugh? Tell him about your plans.

mfoy_ 9y ago
Or the English one: "Life is what happens while making other plans."
123e1daAdfafsdf 9y ago
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." -- Eisenhower
undershirt 9y ago
"everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth" -- Mike Tyson
durzagott 9y ago
“No Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy” -Helmuth von Moltke

ssivark 9y ago

Another interesting manifestation of the same idea is expounded by John Kay, under the title 'Obliquity'. He has a book on that topic, and also several hour-long YouTube talks. The central theme is regarding how it is better to chase goals obliquely rather then head on, especially when goals correspond to holistic/unspecifiable things like "wellness". He has case studies of companies that managed to innovate or not, depending on how carried away they got with their objective.

mathattack 9y ago

One of the father's of quality, W. Edwards Deming came out very strong against Management by Objective, even though he was very statistically inclined. In his 14 points [0] he mentions Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.. His idea is you should focus on the journey (always improve) rather than artificial endpoints. It's a profound idea, and one I've sometimes struggled to come to grips with. [0] http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/overview/deming-points.html http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
taneq 9y ago
So how do you know whether you're always improving if you don't measure your performance at consistent points along the way? Just ask everyone if it felt like you improved, followed by a group hug and mutual back-patting?
- bandushrew 9y ago
  I dont think he said to eliminate the measurements, he said to eliminate the quotas.
  - mathattack 9y ago
    Exactly. Going by his theory... If you say, "I am paying you to produce 1,000 cars per month" then that's what you'll get. If instead you rely on intrinsic motivation, and improve the system, you will get more than 1,000, and they'll be higher quality. This doesn't work everywhere. (Certainly not with Sales commission!) But it is worth thinking through the logical implications of it.
  - tango979 9y ago
    "Watch, don't judge, but do watch"
  - 9y ago

merraksh 9y ago

It would be interesting to test this on academicians: take objectives off of them (grants, large number of publications; hell, even tenure!) and let them wander freely through their field of research. I have the impression this was normality decades ago.

MyObjective4 9y ago

So how do you harness the knowledge that many of the best ideas that have been thought up weren't the original intention or objective. I don't get the point. I think this is saying something like, only fate will create something extraordinary. This is useless nonsense. Most of the claims of the video and article seem to lead nowhere, or are commonly known and while mildly interesting, are easily explained by logical observation and analysis. Knowing them doesn't help get you anywhere (that would be an objective). If there is no objective to the video, then why watch it. This is starting to sound like some kind of relativism. The success of PicBreeder is accomplished by individuals ability to see interesting things evolving and the vast number of real world similar objects they had to choose from. Of course an algorithm cannot replicate that because it is not creative. This does more to dis-prove natural evolution IMO because the images that took shape required creative intelligence to facilitate them doing so. As to the point of the final pictures only appearing when there was no particular objective, OK fair enough, but how does this help us? What new thing did we learn? We know that many inventions and innovations were discovered this way. Why is it an epiphany? The computer could not create a recognizable picture because it was only given one. If it had the google images library to match to, it would certainly come up with some very great pictures. On the Living Image Project, The recognizable images didn't happen, because different people saw different things and voted different directions. This failed precisely because there was no objective. If the Living Image Project stated an objective (A teacup for example), it would have had far more success. This just goes to show that objectives are important because in the real world, there are needs. If the article and video was useful, it would have revealed something helpful about how to fill needs (objectives) in a better way. The majority of problems are solved with objectives in mind. This article and video never seem to recognize that. The conclusion almost seems to say that attempting to fill known needs is a problem in the world today. In the Novelty search demo that was shown, the biped that used the novel behavior algorithm walked better than the farther distance algorithm only explains the constraints that the failing algorithms had. All it proves is that when an algorithm has more choices to explore, in many cases it did better. To me this would be like telling someone to build the best house, car, ETC but only use the knowledge from 3 books. Tell someone else to do the same but use the internet, unlimited books, Talk to people ETC. Should we be surprised at the result? Kenneth Stanley seemed to be, and seemed to think it revolutionary. What new thing does this teach us in practical terms? Nothing. More stepping stones mean a better result. This is common sense. It is no wonder the National Science Foundation would not give this guy any money. He hasn't taught us anything new. I want my 30 minutes of life back.

primeblue 9y ago

Beautiful!

mistercow 9y ago

Having spent a lot of time with PicBreeder, I suspect that the "ancestors look nothing like their descendants" thing is more an artifact of how our brains interpret images, rather than implying some deeper insight into how objectives affect the process. There are AI projects that attempt to approximate a "natural image manifold" – essentially a blob in the space of possible images where you find things that look like photographs to humans. I think the PicBreeder thing has more to do with that; the set of images that people want to create occupies a relatively confined space within the set of all possible PicBreeder outputs. So working off of any previously built image is basically a "shortcut to the manifold", if you will. Or to put it another way: when you consider the entire space of PicBreeder outputs, any existing image is much closer to whatever you want to make than starting from scratch.