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Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - Stanley and Lehman

notes.andymatuschak.org · 2,540 words · saved by 1 readers

The authors argue that objective-oriented mindsets are often deceptive guides when the goal is more than one “stepping stone” away. The path of discovery is often surprising in hindsight; you can’t identify in advance which stepping stones are good to pursue. They advocate instead for pursuing novelty/interestingness (Get curious, Process over product) instead, as a “treasure hunter”. A sort of greedy algorithm. The trick with this approach is that you must give up any sense of control over the destination, the outcome. You just chase interestingness and find yourself delighted by what comes out. One of their key secondary points is that many social arrangements are objective-oriented, even if they don’t use that wording. For instance, because peer review for scientific grants requires the reviewers to predict the prospective value of a particular project, or to predict whether a proposal is likely to achieve a particular objective, it falls prey to the same objections. Page 1, an inte

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - Stanley and Lehman Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - Stanley and Lehman The authors argue that objective-oriented mindsets are often deceptive guides when the goal is more than one “stepping stone” away. The path of discovery is often surprising in hindsight; you can’t identify in advance which stepping stones are good to pursue. They advocate instead for pursuing novelty/interestingness ( Get curious , Process over product ) instead, as a “treasure hunter”. A sort of greedy algorithm. The trick with this approach is that you must give up any sense of control

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