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The Myth of the Objective

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Re: The Myth of the Objective

#21

Post by ballenf »

quuquuquu wrote: post #2

I appreciate the work and research that went into this. However, I can't help but feel as if some of these statements aren't very concretely true, or untrue. For example, ok, if I get tunnel vision and just focus on one objective, I might lose sight of other paths. I can see what you mean, but let's put that into practice. "If you focus on profit, you might lose focus on innovation." Ok, but if I focus solely on inno…

Think about Zuckerburg's wealth. If he had sat in his dorm with the goal of building a multi-billion dollar empire, do you think he would have started with "thefacebook"?

Re: The Myth of the Objective

#22

Post by orclev »

manmal wrote: post #20
throw843434 wrote: post #10

The article is terrible - it is effectively saying "being objective" is not good for achieving that "objective". This is complete non-sense without untangling the epistemic roots for said words, the author may have had. It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective. This is well known to both Control theorists, RL practitioners, and many…

Have you read or watched what the picbreeder author is actually about? It's not about a greater horizon. It's that you only get "valuable results" by using a heuristic that only looks at the very next steps, and completely ignoring any goals that would lie further ahead. You could say that he's promoting a greedy search with very broad success parameters. An example: You plan to be a millionaire, and you currently ha…

I find an interesting parallel with hill-climbing and local optima. In your example, the reason everyone isn't a millionaire is mostly to do with the fact that that's a very noisy problem space, there are far far too many random variables at play, not to mention there's a finite supply of money, it's literally impossible for everyone to be a millionaire (well, you could inflate the currency to the point where a million dollars is nearly worthless, but that's just playing semantic games).

To me, one of the big takeaways here is that it's important not to be so hyper-focused on the local problem space that you overlook potentially better solutions and end up at a local optimum to your overall detriment.

As for the rest of the article, it's mostly hand-wavy garbage.

Re: The Myth of the Objective

#23

Post by mirceal »

protonfish wrote: post #13

It makes sense to explore outside the box if your problem can't be found in a very limited search space. However the statement > Many natural processes don’t appear to be objective based. Natural evolution and human innovation are cases in point. Is not correct. Evolution is highly objective based and micro-incremental.

No it's not. Evolution itself does not have the objective of creating something.

Regarding evolution, having read both Kenneth's book and "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins I can tell you that Kenneth rediscovers what Dawkins explained in his book in 1986. The experiment Dawkins describes in his book resembles the picbreeder experiment a lot.

Re: The Myth of the Objective

#25

Post by visarga »

throw843434 wrote: post #10

The article is terrible - it is effectively saying "being objective" is not good for achieving that "objective". This is complete non-sense without untangling the epistemic roots for said words, the author may have had. It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective. This is well known to both Control theorists, RL practitioners, and many…

> It's apparent that it's actually saying that being too "greedy" (i.e too low a horizon) can be bad for achieving an objective.

As in Reinforcement Learning, it's an exploration vs exploitation tradeoff.

Re: The Myth of the Objective

#26

Post by mfoy_ »

protonfish wrote: post #13

It makes sense to explore outside the box if your problem can't be found in a very limited search space. However the statement > Many natural processes don’t appear to be objective based. Natural evolution and human innovation are cases in point. Is not correct. Evolution is highly objective based and micro-incremental.

The "objective" part is a bit confusing. Evolution doesn't have objectives like "create the turtle, elephant, and man". Which is what is meant by "The Myth of the Objective".

Evolution has two eyes on the path (optimizing survival and procreation) and none on objectives (concrete outcomes, i.e. specific organisms).

Re: The Myth of the Objective

#28

Post by ssivark »

Another interesting manifestation of the same idea is expounded by John Kay, under the title 'Obliquity'. He has a book on that topic, and also several hour-long YouTube talks.

The central theme is regarding how it is better to chase goals obliquely rather then head on, especially when goals correspond to holistic/unspecifiable things like "wellness". He has case studies of companies that managed to innovate or not, depending on how carried away they got with their objective.

Re: The Myth of the Objective

#29

Post by mathattack »

One of the father's of quality, W. Edwards Deming came out very strong against Management by Objective, even though he was very statistically inclined. In his 14 points [0] he mentions Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management..

His idea is you should focus on the journey (always improve) rather than artificial endpoints. It's a profound idea, and one I've sometimes struggled to come to grips with.

[0] http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/...

Re: The Myth of the Objective

#30

Post by mfoy_ »

sevensor wrote: post #9

This is mostly a problem when your thinking about objectives admits only one at a time. Many more opportunities arise when we find an interesting compromise in full awareness of the conflicts among multiple objectives.

Somewhat related, consider the expression "putting the cart before the horse".
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