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Have you read or watched what the picbreeder author is actually about? It's not about a greater horizon. It's that you only get "valuable results" by using a he
by manmal 9y ago
Have you read or watched what the picbreeder author is actually about? It's not about a greater horizon. It's that you only get "valuable results" by using a heuristic that only looks at the very next steps, and completely ignoring any goals that would lie further ahead. You could say that he's promoting a greedy search with very broad success parameters.
An example: You plan to be a millionaire, and you currently have nothing in the bank. How do you get there? Any plan would most probably not work, if executed in a rigid manner (or we would all look up the recipe on the internet and be millionaires). You end up trying all kinds of jobs, investments, take opportunities when they arise, etc.. and finally you realize that you probably will not ever make it. Or you get lucky and make your million - who knows. Picbreeder showed that it's quite rare to hit the very desired result you wanted.
However, if you were more flexible regarding your goal, at every step, then you might take the job that agrees the most with you, meet a lot of great people, travel if you are able, start a family.. and end up without a million in the bank but with a satisfying life situation. With pic breeder, certain shapes and beautiful pictures emerged that were not intended or planned from the start. The algorithm went along with whatever was there, and optimized on that.
Looking at the millionaire example again - if you already had 500k, then doubling that might not be that hard (?), or not that many steps away. People keep saying that the more money you have, the easier it is to earn - think opportunities like buying an apartment in a firesale and reselling it for 1.5 as much.
For me, it's a very counter intuitive way of looking at things. It goes very deep against the wanting of goals or things in our current society. OTOH, it somehow makes sense that things work this way, because every step in our step-by-step plans is SO dependent on things beyond our control. Agile development methods remind me of this very much: Try telling a customer not familiar with agile that the software she orders might look completely different than she imagines it right now - most will think you are crazy or want to cheat them. But you might recognize problems in every sprint, and adapt the end goal accordingly.
- orclev 9y agoI find an interesting parallel with hill-climbing and local optima. In your example, the reason everyone isn't a millionaire is mostly to do with the fact that that's a very noisy problem space, there are far far too many random variables at play, not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a million dollars is nearly worthless, but that's just playing semantic games). To me, one of the big takeaways here is that it's important not to be so hyper-focused on the local problem space that you overlook potentially better solutions and end up at a local optimum to your overall detriment. As for the rest of the article, it's mostly hand-wavy garbage.
- nostrademons 9y ago> not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a million dollars is nearly worthless, but that's just playing semantic games). Most people who are millionaires don't get there by holding a million dollars in currency, they get there by holding assets worth a million dollars. This is not zero sum - assets can be created (and destroyed), and their value is assigned only at the time of transaction. The total value of all assets in the U.S. is significantly larger (by orders of magnitude) than the total amount of U.S. dollars available.
- orclev 9y agoIt isn't a question of actual dollars in circulation, you can always print more after all, it's a question of total economic value. All goods in circulation in the U.S. have a finite value, and it definitely is a zero sum game. You can add more goods and therefore value, but that can only happen at a certain rate (this would be tied into population growth, employment rate, and profit margins among other things). There are also close ties with median income as the value of goods tends to be tied directly to wealth distribution. Ultimately at any given time there is a finite amount of "wealth" to go around, if one person gets a bigger slice, then that means someone else has to take a smaller slice. People don't want to be millionaires because they have some unhealthy attraction to U.S. currency, they want to be millionaires because of the goods and services that they can trade that money for (or in many cases because they can use it for rent seeking to generate unearned income). The actual amount of currency in question is irrelevant, it's a question of access to those goods and services, and those goods and services are finite, therefore wealth is finite.
- chrisweekly 9y agopg (and many, many other entrepreneurs and investors) disagree vehemently, positing that startups are about wealth _creation_. if wealth isn't created, how has humanity's global standard of living so radically improved?