Objectives Are Bad Review Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Objectives Are Bad? Review: “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned” #

Excerpt #

Stanley’s thesis about objectives involves this idea: intermediate discoveries may seem unrelated to an ultimate goal but are crucial.

I recently read Kenneth O. Stanley’s 2015 book “ Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective.” In it, Stanley argues that many great discoveries and innovations throughout history were not the result of planned, objective-driven processes, but rather emerged from open-ended exploration and serendipity. It presents an intriguing hypothesis: can a book successfully challenge conventional ideas around achieving greatness while itself being a tedious, uninspired personal research thesis?

Objectives limit potential? #

Stanley’s central thesis revolves around this idea: intermediate discoveries may seem unrelated to an ultimate goal but are crucial in reaching it. Stanley uses the metaphor of stepping stones across a wide river whose far bank is shrouded in fog. The true path cannot be seen beforehand but must be crossed one stone at a time.

Stanley contends that fixating on predetermined objectives is deceptive, such as always choosing the stone that carries us further from the starting riverbank. In fact, the path across may require a side- or even back-step. (This metaphor falls short if you ask why we’re trying to cross the river in the first place). Objectives thus limit our potential for truly groundbreaking achievements.

Stanley uses specific examples to illustrate his point. He argues that some of the most significant breakthroughs in human history, such as the discovery of penicillin or the invention of computers, were not the result of goal-oriented research but rather unexpected outcomes of open-ended exploration. Stanley doesn’t try to validate these assertions, though, instead relying on hand-wavy arguments like “a scientist in the 1600’s with the goal of inventing a modern computer would never succeed.”

Stanley loses me here. #

While the core ideas presented in “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned” are thought-provoking, their presentation could have used a bit more open-ended research. Stanley’s writing is often verbose and repetitive, bashing the readers over the head again and again to make a point. For such a short book (135 pages), it often reads like a college student desperately trying to stretch the seed of an idea into a full-length term paper.

The most glaring example is Stanley’s obsession with his own research project, Picbreeder: a collaborative art application that allows users to evolve images through an iterative selection process. While Picbreeder serves as an interesting example of open-ended exploration, Stanley treats it with reverence far beyond its merit. He repeatedly cites Picbreeder as a prime example of his theory right alongside the Internet and Evolution. Truly, nobody could have predicted that “Alien Face” would come from “Car,” and that’s why Objectives are a Myth!

Stanley’s fixation on Picbreeder feels self-indulgent and diminishes the impact of his ideas. At some point, you’d expect him to give additional examples supporting the theory, but when it’s just Picbreeder and evolution again and again, the reader is left to wonder if maybe the author just stumbled on one specific neat thing and then indiscriminately generalized.

Remember the Zero Effect? #

There’s a delicious irony here because this core tenet isn’t even that novel. While reading, I was reminded of a favorite movie of mine: The Zero Effect. It’s a goofy mystery comedy from 1998 that stars Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero, the world’s greatest detective (and Ben Stiller as his Watsonesque straight man sidekick!). In one particular scene he describes a detective methodology:

“When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad, because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good, because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.”

The Zero Effect was certainly not the first instance of this strain of philosophical thought. In fact, if I were lodging a counterargument to “The Myth of the Objective,” I would point to the parable of the the monkey typing on a typewriter for infinity, who will inevitably produce the complete works of Shakespeare (as well as “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned” and this blog post). This typing monkey will also end up composing some truly epic, beautiful, and unique works that no human has yet discovered!

But a problem arises when you have to sift through the infinite pile of random garbage to find something actually worth reading. As humans, we have neither infinite time nor resources to try all possible stepping stones. It’s fun to let a robot following a novelty search algorithm continually crash into walls to eventually “solve” a maze, but a human still needs to identify that the valuable thing—exiting the maze—was achieved. Intelligent motivated people taking their shot at greatness don’t behave this way and never have.

If not objectives, then what? #

If not objectives, what north star can we point ourselves toward to guide our progress? Here again Stanley leaves me wanting. Novelty, interestingness, excitement! I think there’s potentially a lot to unpack here, but besides an appendix “case study” of evolution as operating inside certain constraints, Stanley is pretty quiet on the subject. He’d rather talk about Picbreeder again.

Despite these shortcomings, I actually think the core message of “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned” remains valuable. By highlighting the deeply ingrained notion that progress must be measured and purposeful, and showing that there are indeed cases where great progress comes despite explicit goals, it gives us readers the chance to consider when and how we can free ourselves of certain limiting expectations.

This perspective seems particularly valuable in today’s increasingly confusing world of AI-monkeys typing out so much uninspired dreck (the irony, again, is not lost on me that Stanley is an AI researcher writing about the promise of limitless creation). How else can we, as humans, proceed in all our humanity, except by doing the one thing our digital creations truly cannot: actually identify the next path worth exploring. If goal-oriented thinking can’t lead us to the next frontier, we at least need to decide where to point the ship.

Here I’m reminded of another favorite detective character of mine, this time Douglas Adams’ Holistic Detective Dirk Gently in the 1987 novel The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. I’ll leave you with this quote, in which Adams eloquently captures in a few sentences what I think Stanley was trying to get at with his whole book:

“He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of “Zen” navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.”