I recently watched a lecture series on Machine Learning and the speaker talked about how one of the deeper principles is balancing exploration and exploitation.

I recently watched a lecture series on Machine Learning and the speaker talked about how one of the deeper principles is balancing exploration and exploitation. Spend all your time doing one or the other and you'll never get anywhere, but the optimal balance depends on the problem and the environment (no free lunch etc.) Forager ants, Galileos and people who just boil their cassava are the explorers I guess, and probably humanity needs a proportion of them because every now and then one of them will find a herb with amazing medicinal properties or something. That may be an evolutionary advantage even if 90% of explorers die eating something poisonous before they've found anything useful. Maybe startups are today's explorers? Being very generous to VC-backed startups, possibly 90% of them fail, but on average they're still a good investment - just ask Paul Graham. I'm less sure about the full veil as an example because there's a lot of debate about what exactly the Prophet's instruction for women to cover their head meant; it's certainly interpreted differently across different Islamic cultures (a hijab is not an abaya is not a burqa etc.); and covering of the face as opposed to the hair is definitely not universal in Islam (the headscarf/hijab leaves the face free for example).