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"Why greatness cannot be planned" by Kenneth Stanley It's a bit depressing that academia works the way it does, but in a twisted way it gives me hope that I co
by martindbp 5y ago
"Why greatness cannot be planned" by Kenneth Stanley
It's a bit depressing that academia works the way it does, but in a twisted way it gives me hope that I could make a significant contribution somewhere by just tinkering or following what feels interesting. Even if there are tens of thousands of people working in an area like AI, most of them are just making incremental improvements to what already exists, so there could be an opening for independent people to do something interesting still.
- Strom 5y agoI've also read this book, but unfortunately I found that whenever the authors talk about things beyond their immediate research - it gets bad. The good parts are the descriptions of their research and discussion of the findings as far as it directly interacts with their research. Fortunately you don't have to read the whole book to get to the good parts. There is a 40 minute presentation/talk on YouTube that covers the good parts. [1] This talk is what originally got me to read the book. The bad parts are where the authors take their AI algorithm quirks and jump to insane conclusions, going as far as to claim that setting goals for your own life is a bad idea. The fundamental misstep that the authors take is that they conflate goals with measurement of goals. They keep giving examples of naive ways one could measure progress towards goals - basically the functions they write for their AI program. These functions suck. Instead of just admiting that the functions they wrote suck, the authors conclude that one shouldn't have goals at all, because they couldn't come up with a good way to measure progress. -- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI