Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned Quotes

“Objectives are well and good when they are sufficiently modest, but things get a lot more complicated when they’re more ambitious. In fact, objectives actually become obstacles towards more exciting achievements, like those involving discovery, creativity, invention, or innovation—or even achieving true happiness. In other words (and here is the paradox), the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives. Not only that, but this paradox leads to a very strange conclusion—if the paradox is really
true then the best way to achieve greatness, the truest path to “blue sky” discovery or to fulfill boundless ambition, is to have no objective at all.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“you have to acquire some kind of knowledge to continue to produce novelty, it means that novelty search is a kind of information accumulator about the world in which it takes place. The longer the search progresses, the more information about the world it ends up accumulating. And of course information and complexity go hand in hand—more complex behaviors require more information.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“Objectives might sometimes provide meaning or direction, but they also limit our freedom and become straitjackets around our desire to explore. After all, when everything we do is measured against its contribution to achieving one objective or another, it robs us of the chance for playful discovery.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“The idea that all our pursuits can be distilled into neatly-defined objectives and then almost mechanically pursued offers a kind of comfort against the harsh unpredictability of life.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“Instead of judging every activity for its potential to succeed, we should judge our projects for their potential to spawn more projects.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

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― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“But while scientists aren’t eaten by cannibals and don’t typically freeze to death when their experiments fail, the truths they uncover still hold real potential to turn the world upside-down.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“The same reasoning explains why “novelty” is a lot like “survive and reproduce” in natural evolution (which is also a kind of non-objective search): Both are constraints on what is possible that might be satisfied from the very beginning (just as single-celled organisms satisfied the “objective” of surviving and reproducing), both make discoveries that were never set as their initial objective, and both have no clear objective at all. Those are the telltale signs of non-objective search.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“This view of non-objective search also explains the fact that Picbreeder is a mirror reflecting back at us something about the world of humans. After all, humans are the world through which Picbreeder progresses. So”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“The problem with the intelligence test approach is that it entirely fails to detect such monumentally important discoveries. Instead it wastes precious effort measuring a property that will not come into play in any important way until eons in the future. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan said, “I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish.” Or in the words of the scientist Chuck Thacker, “You can’t build railroads before it is railroad time.” Neither should you administer intelligence tests to single-celled organisms if you want to evolve intelligence.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“To arrive somewhere remarkable we must be willing to hold many paths open without knowing where they might lead.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“It’s no magic bullet and cannot solve every problem. In further experiments in the maze domain, we generated hundreds of random mazes of different difficulties and applied both novelty search and objective-based search to solving them. The trend that resulted from the data was that as mazes grow increasingly complicated, both novelty search and objective-based search can fail to solve them. However, objective-based search’s abilities taper off much faster [55].”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that invention in mind.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“When we set out to achieve our dreams, we’re supposed to know what our dreams are, and to strive for them with passion and commitment. But this philosophy leads to absurdities if taken literally. You can’t evolve intelligence in a Petri dish based on measuring intelligence. You can’t build a computer simply through determination and intellect—you need the stepping stones.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“As Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out in evolution, once all the simple ways to live are exhausted, the only way to create a new species or niche is to become more complex [48]. In other words, there are only so many ways of being a bacteria. That’s why increasing complexity is almost inevitable if evolution is to continue. But these increases in complexity are not arbitrary. Rather, they reflect the properties of the world in which evolution takes place: Eyes represent the presence of light in the universe. Ears signify mechanical vibration. Legs are reflections of gravity, and lungs of oxygen.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“In the usual interpretation of evolution, innovations like eyes or lungs might be considered objective improvements, increasing a creature’s ability to survive. But they can also be viewed as the inevitable tendency of a search with no final objective to accumulate information about its world. After all, there was nothing particularly wrong with the original single-celled organisms that possessed none of these fancy additions. They were surviving just fine. The only problem was that to do something new required reflecting some aspect of the natural world back into the DNA. Sight-driven behavior isn’t strictly necessary—it’s just that if you keep trying new designs through mutation, even though there’s no objective, eventually you will hit upon the fact that light exists. Then it will become a part of evolution’s accumulated inventory of information.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“discovery in novelty search is deeper than simply trying every behavior you can think of. The reason it’s more interesting than that is that novelty search tends to produce behaviors in a certain order. Order is a critical factor in search and discovery. In fact, the main reason we have faith in any kind of search is that we expect it to encounter stepping stones in a certain sensible order. For objective-driven search, what we usually expect is bad behavior before good behavior. In other words, we expect the quality of the behaviors to improve over the course of the search.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“There remains one a priori fallacy or natural prejudice, the most deeply-rooted, perhaps, of all which we have enumerated: one which not only reigned supreme in the ancient world, but still possesses almost undisputed dominion over many of the most cultivated minds… This is, that the conditions of a phenomenon must, or at least probably will, resemble the phenomenon itself.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective