The Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with oneself is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, The Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
The Outworker
#050 - Kenneth Stanley - Why You Don’t Need Goals Or Purpose To Be Successful
What if the key to success isn’t setting goals, but letting go of them? AI scientist and author Kenneth Stanley challenges everything we’ve been taught about achievement, revealing why strict objectives hold us back. He explains why purpose can be overrated, why looking to the past is more valuable than focusing on the future, and how true innovation emerges from curiosity and unexpected stepping stones. This conversation redefines how we approach progress, creativity, and the pursuit of meaning.
Timestamps:
00:00 From AI To Self-Help
18:36 Good Objectives vs. Bad Objectives
23:09 Input Objectives vs. Output Objectives
26:46 Focus On Stepping Stones
30:58 Do We Actually Know What's Best For Us?
38:18 Ideal Life Without Objectives
45:31 Focusing On The Past Instead Of The Future
50:33 Relationship Between Greatness & Deception
1:01:22 Returning To Childlike Self & Unstructured Play
1:05:46 Is Purpose Overrated?
1:10:45 Be A Treasure Hunter
1:22:36 Connect With Ken
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What's up outworkers. What if the key to success isn’t setting goals, but letting go of them? AI scientist and author Kenneth Stanley challenges everything we’ve been taught about achievement, revealing why strict objectives hold us back. He explains why purpose can be overrated, why looking to the past is more valuable than focusing on the future, and how true innovation emerges from curiosity and unexpected stepping stones. This conversation redefines how we approach progress, creativity, and the pursuit of meaning.
Tim Doyle (00:09.052)
How does an artificial intelligence scientist end up writing a book which, to a large degree, feels like a self-help book on why we shouldn't have goals or objectives in life?
Ken Stanley (00:22.45)
Well, it's not what I was expecting to do, that's for sure. I never had a goal in mind of writing a self-help book or something that could be partly self-help oriented. It's sort of a really circuitous story about how I ended up doing that, even though that wasn't what I was expecting to do, which is kind of surprisingly similar to the theme of the book itself, which is saying that greatness cannot be planned. So it definitely wasn't planned.
And I guess the reason it happened is because we were doing artificial intelligence experiments and they revealed some underlying principles, which I probably get into, which are very, counterintuitive, but that I realized and started to be more and more aware of how relevant they were to people outside of artificial intelligence.
And it's honestly completely surprising because if you think about it, if you're studying intelligence, you would expect at some point to learn something about what it means to be human. I mean, you should, or else maybe you should question what you're really learning. And so that kind of did happen in this case. And then over time I realized, and it wasn't just like my thinking about it, it's also talking to people and having them ask me questions about how some of these underlying principles relate to their personal life or their professional life.
started to get me thinking that, this actually is really relevant socially outside of AI. And so it was a of a weird revelation that like, maybe I should try to talk to like a broader audience. There's not just AI researchers, but by the time I got there, was like just completely obvious. I felt like there's no choice. Like I have to, we have to write this thing, me and my co-author, Joel Lehman. Like it's just, it's just, there's like this whole unaddressed
set of insights that like people just don't know about or discuss, which they should be discussing and probably would be helpful to people, we realized. So, it kind of led us to, let's just do this very risky thing. And I just, one of the points I think is just interesting is that I don't know a lot of stories like this. Like I said that, you you'd think that we would learn things about ourselves that are important just from the perspective of humanity, but I'm not aware of anything else ever happening like this in AI, which I think is quite weird.
Ken Stanley (02:45.07)
So at the moment, I think this is a unique story where social critique comes out of an algorithmic insight.
Tim Doyle (02:52.252)
Can you explain exactly what the work is that you were doing with the AI and what the initial reason was for the work and then what the process was like of, wow, look at this realization that we had now.
Ken Stanley (03:04.758)
Yeah, so the work within AI had to do with the field that I'm interested in, which is called open-endedness. And what that refers to is processes of discovery, basically innovation, creativity, things like that, how that kind of process can unfold. And I was really, you know, I'm interested because this is AI, I'm interested in how do I program the computer to do things like that, you know, and people do do things like that. That's like the story of civilization.
It starts with very simple things like a wheel or fire. And then you wait thousands of years and you have things like computers and space stations or even like the proto AI that we have now. And so over the course of millennia, you have increasingly complex and increasingly divergent inventions. And it's not just about technology. It includes literature and the arts and music and all the things that we do.
and political types of structures as well. So we're very creative, obviously. I'd say that's like our most salient legacy as human beings, is like the ideas that we have. And so, know, it's worth mentioning, it's a little bit of a digression, but it's also evident in nature and in natural evolution. You also see open-endedness, like starting with like single-celled organisms. And then in this case, you wait hundreds of millions of years, but eventually you get nervous systems and brains.
in humans even, but you also get things like the flight of birds or photosynthesis. So enormously inventive and divergent creativity over millions and millions of years. And it's another example of an open-ended system. And so I was trying to understand algorithmically how do things like that work so we could actually make computers do stuff like that, which would be amazing if computers could be creative like that in an open-ended way. there's a distinction that's important between just open-endedness and just regular creativity.
He's like, regular creativity is like, just came up with an idea. It was a creative idea. But open-endedness is about that kind of thing happening basically forever and getting more interesting the longer it goes. Thousands of years of it or millions or hundreds of millions of years of open-ended discovery, that's an open-ended system. And also even a single human lifetime can be open-ended as you explore your own opportunities divergently and come up with your own ideas or just mature and develop as a person. So I was interested, yeah, well, how do we...
Ken Stanley (05:27.214)
how do we formalize these kinds of things into algorithms? Because I figure, you know, when people talk about AGI these days, like you don't have a full package of AGI if it doesn't have the creativity component. Like it's missing something big and I think it's still true today. And so we were looking at how do you do that kind of a thing? This is a very ambitious thing to be doing from a computer science perspective. And so one thing that we thought was,
Well, we don't know how to get the computer to have this kind of open-ended creativity at this point in time, but humans do have this ability. It's intrinsic somehow to our intellect that we can do that. So let's try, maybe what we can do is we can cheat and we can create a system that's a hybrid between the computer and people so we can facilitate an exploration of some space that's artificial, but by people.
And so we would actually see an artificial open-ended process unfold. And then you might say, well, why would you do that? It was just cheating. Like you haven't learned anything. Like all you did is just cheat and have the humans do the hard work. But the reason to do it is because if you create an artificial system like this, which I think is unprecedented, has never been done before, it causes you to have the data that shows how it happened. Like every point, every link in the chain would be known. So that's not true in the natural counterparts.
Like in evolution, you have to dig fossils out of the ground to find the missing links. How did this lead to that? Or like people and where the legacy of ideas and where they came from, a lot of it is lost in history and time. It wasn't written down, it was in somebody's brain. And even the person who had the ideas doesn't know how they had the ideas. So they couldn't tell you even if you asked. And so by creating an artificial world where people are searching and finding things,
we can capture every single decision that was made. And the hope is that inside of that somehow we would learn something. I didn't know what we would learn, but I was pretty convinced we'd learn something, hopefully something fundamental about what makes these kinds of systems tick. And so the system that we created was called Pick Breeder. And that describes a system where people are breeding pictures.
Ken Stanley (07:40.206)
And so what we did, we created like you could call it a space. It's like a big artificial space of images. And the idea is that people would be searching or exploring within that space to find new images. And so it's really when the word breeding comes up, it really describing a process of breeding, like the way you would breed dogs or breed horses. That's the nature of the exploration. So like early on in Pickbreeder, people would just see
lots of blobs, like you see blobs, random blobs. You could pick your favorite blob and it would have children, just like if you picked a horse, you know, you could have children. And the blobs that it has, the children or the offspring, they resemble their parent, just like if you had children, they would resemble you, but they're not exact duplicates. And so there's mutations happening. And then you could pick your favorite from that. And then, you know, that would be the next generation. And then that would have children and so forth. And so iteratively, as you breed and breed and breed,
things are slowly changing in a direction that you control. So you're exploring in this space. And amazingly, at least I think it's amazing, like from these blobs, which look very unpromising at first, like you would think this is gonna go nowhere, or probably you'd think, well, this might be fun to breed some wallpaper patterns for a few minutes and then I'll go do something more interesting. But actually people eventually bred these into incredibly lifelike artifacts. Like they look like things in the real world. So they look like things like butterflies or skulls or.
cars. This was a non-trivial achievement. It might seem that, well, maybe that should be possible because you just breed towards what you want, which is basically starting to get towards the point that we discovered. If you were trying to get something, like say a butterfly, you would call that a goal or an objective. Then you would say, well, I'll just pick the thing that looks more like what I want. Then eventually I'll get to my goal.
But what's really interesting is that it doesn't work. Like if that worked, none of this would be that shocking. It's like, I mean, that's what you do and it works the way you expect. And so what's the really big discovery here? But the thing is that the people who found those things, they were not following that heuristic. And the people who were following that heuristic, which is actually most people, because that's the way most people think, they would get stuck. And the reason for that is because the world and pick breeder also like the larger world is deceptive.
Ken Stanley (10:03.64)
which means that the things that lead to things that you want don't actually look like them because the world is actually complex. The space that they're in in Pickbreeder is actually complex. And in complex spaces and with hard problems, stepping stones that you need to cross are deceptive. And so you can't simply say, I'm gonna try to look more and more and more like my objective and then I'll get there because the space is not structured that way. It's sort of like, you know,
what led to us in natural evolution, if you go back far enough, is a flatworm. So we have an ancestor that's a flatworm, like your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother. If you go back far enough, you have a flatworm. Well, like there's no indication in that that we're going to have eventually Shakespeare and Einstein. Like you wouldn't think. There is an innovation in flatworm, which is the first bilateral symmetry. So it got bilateral symmetry. But what does bilateral symmetry have to do with writing sonnets? You know, it's like it's completely an unobvious connection. That's deception.
So like if you wanted poetry, you wouldn't pick flatworms. But actually you should pick them because they actually do lead to it. And so this was evident in Pick Reader as well. Well, this insight was something that we noticed. We noticed that when people found interesting stuff like a butterfly, most of the steps along the way, the person whoever was responsible for doing it was not looking for a butterfly.
And so it was like to find things there, you had to not be looking for them. And so there are all these like catchphrases that came from that, like to achieve your highest goals, you must be willing to abandon them. And this insight, just initially about the system, it really just shocked me. Like I was completely obsessed with this insight when we first noticed it. I don't know if like everybody would have picked up that this is really interesting.
For me, it was just like an absolute shock to the system because like I was like, I was trained, you know, as a computer scientist, as an engineer, the like the way that you do things, the way you achieve things is you set objectives and then you move towards them. Again, there's all these methods that people describe like top-down design, bottom-up design, optimization, following the gradient, like whatever you call it, it's all about like, know where I'm going and I just need to get there. So I'm going to try to do it with determination and skill. And I'm just going to do this.
Ken Stanley (12:22.382)
going to do this systematically. But here we have this example in the system that like it is just the exact opposite. Like all the achievements is from people who are not doing that. And I was trying to square that in my head like, what does this mean? Of course, originally I was thinking algorithmically, what does it mean? Because I didn't think of myself as a social scientist. I'm like basically just trying to figure out how do you write algorithms. But even in algorithms, this is shocking because like computer science and machine learning reflects the larger culture.
which is this assumption that everything should be objectively driven. That's how achievement works. And so the algorithms work that way. Like they're optimization algorithms. They have objectives. Like there's even words like objective function. Like you follow the objective function. And that's how you get to, that's how you eventually get to the solution that you're looking for. And so within the field, it also looked very counterintuitive. And I was trying to think like, well, what could this mean? Like it must mean something deep that like this doesn't work. And it led to this whole theory like that we came out with, which was originally just an AI.
Like it starts with the novelty search algorithm was one of the first algorithms to come out of this. But then this funny thing started to happen that like, you know, people started to notice the obvious point that like, well, wait a second, this is, this is relevant to me too. Like if you're telling me that like the algorithm often will do better by not actually knowing where it's going and not having an explicit objective, well, I have objectives. My company has objectives. Like there's OKRs, like objectives and key results at my company.
like, so does this apply to me? Like, should I be doing things differently? And people start asking questions like that at AI conferences, which is really weird. like questions like this, they're not really about AI. And then like, eventually I got invited to speak to some artists. So that's, that's when it really hit me, that this is beyond just AI because like somebody happened to be in the audience of one of these computer science conferences where I speaking about this.
because I gave a lot of talks about this because it was so contrarian and people like contrarian stuff. So I started getting invited to speak a lot, but someone in the audience was from this design school, the Rhode Island School of Design, which is like artists and designers. And he happened to be at this computer science conference and he said, you know, he said, I think that the people at my school would really find this message interesting. Like, could you talk to them? And I thought that was really interesting immediately because I never talked to audiences like artists.
Ken Stanley (14:38.606)
I wasn't sure what would come out of it at all, but I just thought, yeah, let's, of course, this will be fun. Let's see what happens. don't know what kind of outcome you get from this, but I could see, least there's pictures, know, a pick reader, there's pictures. So maybe at least there's that for the artist to look at. There's something there. And so I came there, I sort of explained the insight and the lesson and what we saw in the system and like the reaction, what was really interesting about it, because I had the opportunity to meet these students.
privately afterwards, like they gave me an office and let people sign up. So they could come in privately. And what was really interesting was like they were, many of them were on the verge of tears, like almost crying from the insight. And that was really, really a revelation, you know, because like when has anyone ever cried from an algorithmic insight? Like that must be the first time in history. And I'm not a therapist, you know, and that these started turning to therapy sessions. And the thing was the reason is because what they were telling me was that no one
I've never been able to explain to anyone why I'm doing what I'm doing. Like my parents want to know like how are you going to make money? Like what is your objective? Why are you doing all of this pointless stuff in your life? And like a lot of these people have this burden that they're carrying at this school and they described it to me in all kinds of interesting, know, unique and personal ways, like stories they gave me. Like there's one guy whose thing was he took a piece of metal, like he would
you would smash it with an ax and then throw it in the ocean and then take it and put it on the beach overnight and let it harden. And that's his thing. He's like the world expert on doing whatever that is. And he's like, I can never explain, like everybody wants to know what the point is, but there is no point to it. It's just a thing. It's a stepping stone though. Like I saw it like, okay, like according to this framework of thinking,
It doesn't matter where it leads. What matters is that it's interesting and it opens up new paths of thinking. Like it's something about, you know, like violence and then mellowing, but it doesn't have to have an objective. It just is what it is. And so he felt a lot better after hearing me talk and it just, that's when it hit me that, you know what, like, this is like changing people, could change people's lives to hear this message. it's weird that it comes out of an AI research project, but that's what it is.
Ken Stanley (17:00.864)
So, you know, let's see what happens if we got to get the message out. I think it's a larger social discussion that we should have. Like why are objectives pervasive across society preventing us from doing playful exploration, which is essential to all kinds of innovation. And so I thought it was an important, at least discussion to get started.
Tim Doyle (17:22.544)
That's what I find so fascinating because I'm not in the computer science space. I'm not within artificial intelligence, but you have these deductions that you made from this work that really resonate with me and resonate with people just on a macro level scale, no matter what type of work or you know what their life looks like, which I find so fascinating. And also to set the stage, you say as well that all objectives aren't bad. Where do you draw?
that line between good and bad objectives.
Ken Stanley (17:54.626)
Yeah, I do say that and concede that it is an important point because if you do come out of the book or just interview like this thinking I should never have an objective again in my life, mean, that's like a crank level conclusion. So that would be a perversion of what I'm saying. Of course you need some objectives sometimes. But what I generally will say is that the objectives that are likely to succeed are valid or worth having tend to be modest.
And I mean a specific thing by modest. I don't mean easy. That's not what I mean. What I mean is that you know what the stepping stones are that you need to traverse to get there. Then it can be principled and valuable to have an objective. So for example, one thing could be like that you want to major in some field, like you want to major in computer science. So you're coming out of high school. Well, we do know what you need to do. So the stepping stones are known. looks like you need to, first you need to get into college. You need to get good grades.
You need to send out your application, then you need to choose your major, then you need to do well in the classes. There's a long kind of train of things you need to do. But the thing is that although it's not easy, that's not to say it's easy, it's known. So you do know what you need to do and you can simply try to follow it. And those kinds of things are often worth doing. There are much more modest things like I want lunch. the refrigerator is a stepping stone on that road.
It makes sense to go to the refrigerator and you have a goal of making your sandwich. And so you can get the turkey out of the refrigerator. This is like better than just all just explore around and see what's interesting. Like that might not be a good idea in that situation. So there are these cases because the stepping stones are known, which are probably the majority of cases. Like most things in life are actually like that. But the important thing is the cases where it's not like that are all the cases where innovation is involved.
So there's a huge class of problems where we don't know how we're gonna get to where we want to go. That includes things like curing diseases, like unlimited energy, even AGI, like all these things. We don't know what the stepping stones are. Then this lesson harshly applies that actually setting the objective can get in your way because it distracts you from the stepping stones that don't look like the objective that you still need to traverse to get there.
Ken Stanley (20:15.194)
It would be better for you to just forget about where you're going and just explore and try to find interesting things. Of course, if you do that, you may not ever solve the problem that originally inspired you, but you'll collect stepping stones that will lead to solving some problems. We just don't know what they are yet or discovering new interesting things. it's just sort of saying you can have a different way of doing things which is to not be trying to accomplish a specific thing, but just be open to opportunity in general and thereby
make some kind of interesting discovery but not know what it is in advance. so, yes, like when you have known modest objectives, often makes sense to set them like a company that needs to meet certain targets. Like these things often you know what you need to do. And so you just set them and you do them. And that's most stuff in life. And I think that's why we've become misled into believing that it applies to everything because most stuff in life does work that way.
And so somewhere along the way we got this idea that everything in the universe works that way and it just does not work that way Complex spaces don't work that way. They're all deceptive. That's because it's a truism That's why they're complex like if it wasn't complex or hard then you would know the stepping stones So it would no longer be defined as a hard problem. All the hard problems have the property We don't know what the stepping stones are. So they're all deceptive
And so this is a huge problem that we think that this objective principle applies to literally everything because it doesn't. And so it does suggest a large scale restructuring of many, many institutions and how we run them, including your own personal life. Even though it is often the case and most often the case that having an objective is principled and perfectly fine.
Tim Doyle (21:55.792)
I'd be curious to know your thoughts on my philosophy when it comes to objectives, because I would say, and most people, because it's just the way that we're programmed, they're just very objective driven people. And when I was reading your book and thinking about this more, I kind of broke it down into input, input based objectives versus output based objectives. Like if we're going to use this podcast for an example, like I set my, I set the objective for myself of like,
I want to put out an episode once a week, every single week, every Wednesday, there's going to be an episode. I see that as an objective. That's a goal that I'm setting for myself. Whereas an output based objective, I guess I could say is, well, I want to put out an episode every single week because I want XYZ to happen from that. Whereas like I have no control over that. So I'm just going to focus on the input based and
Ken Stanley (22:52.398)
Hmm.
Tim Doyle (22:53.104)
whatever happens happens. What are your thoughts on
Ken Stanley (22:56.258)
Hmm. Yeah, so,
I think that's a unique way to think about objectives. There's the input-based and the output-based. Because the idea of just holding a podcast, that is what would classify as a modest objective. Again, it doesn't mean it's easy. Just to say, you know what to do. You get the microphone, you get the camera, you invite a guest. That can be done objectively.
But what comes out of the podcast, that's not necessarily objective. Of course, like you say, you could try to make it objective, but that probably wouldn't work because that is an ambitious, that's not modest. Like to have a really interesting podcast, for example. so I think, I'd say that there's basically more than one objective involved there, and the ones that you're embracing are the modest ones, but you're calling them input objectives.
And so maybe that's a way of thinking about some modest objectives that do set the stage for other kinds of non-objective exploration. That seems principled to me. I think I could look at the world that way, but I'd still ultimately just classify them as modest objectives. But it's like when you're running a company and you do need some objectives, but you still want to innovate. the objectives that you need to do, like you need to do your accounting correctly.
And so you need somebody who knows about accounting and they need to fill in the forms correctly. And this is what I would call modest objective. Again, not necessarily easy, but modest. Because we know what we need to do. That supports the innovation. Like you still need to do things to support the innovation. The things you need to do are objective. And so that's a principal thing, I think. It's kind of similar that like you need to put the microphone in front of your face and you need to actually invite a guest. If you're to have the podcast.
Ken Stanley (24:54.926)
It's kind of like the accounting that supports the company. Like those are modest objectives. But I think it's still important to realize that the big picture thing, like the hard thing is the kind of amorphous thing that comes out of all of this. Like what is the innovation or the thing that you're really trying to get? Like that's the thing that really would be exciting to get. That's the non-objective.
factor in this. And so I think that's still the important ingredient to what actually is going to make this really magical.
Tim Doyle (25:35.74)
phrase that you used there earlier, which I know plays a big component into this entire philosophy is this understanding of stepping stones. Where did that come?
Ken Stanley (25:47.458)
Well, stepping stones are just a metaphor, but it's really because there needs to be a word for the ideas or discoveries or inventions that you need to traverse to get to where you're going. so, in Pick Breeder, like I mentioned, this picture breeding service is very explicit, these things you're crossing.
because each one is an image. So like, if you want to know how did we get the butterfly image, you could see that there is a history of every image that was chosen along that path. And so, you know, but it's true. And so there it's very concrete. Let me know what we're talking about, like what those points are that were visited along the path. But in some cases it's less concrete. It's like if you had a really interesting idea or something and then you just like, what were the steps that led to that?
It's not as obvious or explicit that like, well, there is this, this, this, this, but there still are, there still are, there's always steps. Some of them are steps that you didn't take. Some predecessor may have taken them, but they lead to you doing something. But how do I have a terminology that would encompass all of that concept of these steps that you traverse? Stepping stones just make sense. That's the way you get to places.
So like the stepping stones that you cross to get across the lake. Sometimes there's a fog there. We use the metaphor in the book. Like you're on stepping stones over a foggy lake. So what do you do then? Like when you see stepping stones in front of you, but you don't know where they lead. I mean, you obviously could turn back and give up or you would just make a decision based on what looks interesting. Like you can't predict where it's going to lead.
So this is often something that humans do is it's like, it's, you're at a, you're like a branch point in a forest path. You don't know where anything goes, but you'll choose the one that looks the most interesting. People are really good at choosing interesting things. And so the stepping stone metaphor allows us to talk about that, I think just more easily and efficiently, because you can say, you want to choose the most interesting stepping stone as opposed to the one that seems to be leading to your objective.
Ken Stanley (28:00.11)
which would be like a very objective approach. like, it looks more like the thing I want, but if we agree that the world is deceptive, then that's an unprincipled thing and you're likely to just hit a local optimum or basically get stuck is what it means. Because like you'll, you'll, you'll seem to be improving for a while and then you'll hit something where there's no stepping stones nearby. They get you anywhere closer to where you want to go. And that's, that's the brick wall or the dead end. And this comes up all throughout life. Like that, like you think about the field of, of AI right now where it appears that things are improving rapidly.
We don't know where we're going for sure. And a lot of the leaders say it's AGI, that's where we're going, but it's very possible it's deceptive, which is unknown. It could be though, like we're on deceptive stepping stones and we will come to a point where it's not clear what the next stepping stone should be from an objective perspective. It's not actually better on any benchmarks. And then we're basically in this non-objective paradigm.
And so stepping stones are just a way of making it easier to talk about that, like the next thing you need to do on the road to where you want to go, because often there's many, many links in the chain. It's like someone may be just, you know, investigating tree sap, who eventually leads to curing some disease. But so the discovery of this particular kind of sap or the chemicals in the sap, it's a stepping stone, but it's not clear it's going to lead to the curing of a disease, but still it's on that road and it's part of a collection. That's another important point. I think of stepping stones as a collection.
It's like the more you have, the more places you can go, even though you don't know where you're going. And so you want to have lot of optionality, you know, and that's what stepping stones create. It's like there's more paths that opened up and if one of them is a dead end, you could go back and go to another one. Maybe that'll lead somewhere interesting. And so you're trying to collect stepping stones in this philosophy, like throughout life or even as an institution or a company.
Tim Doyle (29:47.866)
Greatness is possible if you are willing to stop demanding what that greatness should be. Do you think it's fair to say that we have no idea what's truly best for us?
Ken Stanley (30:01.533)
So, well, that's an interesting, so we have no idea what's best for us. Well, I guess it's, what's the context? if it's like saying we don't know, if we may think there's a best outcome, but we don't know how to get there, well, I definitely agree with that. I mean, generally, that's basically what I'm saying literally. There's also a sense in which we don't even know what the best outcome is. So don't even know what we would want to happen. That's a more tricky question.
But I think it's probably true. Yeah, it seems generally probably true, which is another, you know, it's a more higher kind of meta more abstract reason that this is an important principle, you know, which is like beyond just the fact that there are like a set of things you want to accomplish, there's the problem that you don't even really know what you want to accomplish is a problem. You don't really know what would be good for you or for us.
It's like you see examples of this all over the place, especially things like dating. It's like you think you know this is everything I've ever wanted and then you find out you actually don't want that. You're totally wrong because you're objectively driven. This is the way a dating site is set up actually to see what are you looking for, like hair color, education level, blah, blah. It's like you know what you want, supposedly. You're supposed to.
Well, that's just because our culture is very objective. We always think we know what we want and that's how we do things. But obviously, if you don't really know what you want, it's very hard to set any objectives. And you probably shouldn't. Instead, you should be exploring and learning more about what you want. And it will just dynamically change over time.
Tim Doyle (31:39.888)
I guess the reason why I was asking that component of do we know what's truly best for us is because I'm looking at it also from the vantage point of unwilling challenges and unwilling suffering and these things that can unwillingly come into our lives. and to use your framework of being in the search space, like within my own life, I was
Introduced to certain rooms within my search base that I would have never even known existed or I would have never willingly Entered into if these unwilling challenges and this unwilling suffering came into my life Where do you see that playing a role within this entire ecosystem of things like that?
Ken Stanley (32:23.022)
Yeah, yeah. mean, it's a good point that, mean, lot of implicit in what I'm saying is that basically sometimes you have to take a step back to take a step forward or sort of one step back, two step forwards. And so when you're in a situation like that, you basically will not make any progress if things keep getting better. Because by definition, like there's some kind of deceptive
Deceptive branch in the space so you've got to look like things are getting worse in order for things to eventually get better And you can imagine how like big institutional things could be like this like the education system for example Like we want everybody to score a hundred on every test which is never gonna happen, but if that's the objective Well, it's very possible that like along the road to discovering how we're gonna get close to that Maybe test scores might have to go down and everybody's gonna suffer But like if you demand that everything is always going up
you'll never find that stepping stone. And so in that sense, like of course there's gonna be disappointing stepping stones, stepping stones that entail suffering that do eventually lead to something better in the world or for you personally. That's gonna be the case. That's just the structure of reality. The question though is, does that somehow imply that you should be suffering or is that like, am I saying that? I mean, I don't, I wouldn't go that far because one caveat to everything that I'm saying is that it's kind of up to you what
kind of risk you're willing to take. So like a very objective life is a very safe life. It's gonna be modest because of the fact, like I said, you can achieve modest objectives. So like if you don't want to suffer, then I think it's a valid choice because it is true that if you're taking risks, one of the risks is suffering. And so like if you don't wanna take any risks, then you minimize the probability of suffering. Obviously you can't completely eliminate it as the world is too chaotic.
but you can minimize it, but then you'll live a modest life. And again, I don't mean easy or shameful or anything like that. I just mean that it's a life where we can predict what's going to happen. So in other words, you won't do anything interesting, because like interesting things are things that you're not gonna be able to predict or anticipate. So you're basically deciding not to do interesting things, but again, it's not like it still can be perfectly noble. Like you're gonna take care of your family, you're gonna put food on the table, you're gonna roof over your head.
Ken Stanley (34:45.262)
And that's all you really wanna do. It is just a personal choice. Like there's less suffering in that. I think it is not like shameful or noble either way. And so like, you you have to understand that when we're talking about this philosophy, like innovation requires taking risks and we're taking risks requires accepting that suffering may come. And so you're willingly, you should be aware that you're willingly opening yourself up to suffering. It's like when Steve Jobs dropped out of college,
That could have led to all kinds of suffering. It didn't though, because it turns out that it was a good move for him, like in hindsight, but for a lot of people that wouldn't be an acceptable level of risk. And so there's always a question of the acceptable level of risk and risk is part of exploring stepping stones. Now, if you just fall into suffering by chance, that's like basically, you you basically might feel like you had no agency. just, something bad happened to you and it's like not your fault.
You didn't even choose it. just is the way it is. Well, it's still true that like you have been exposed to a new stepping stone. I think it's worth thinking of it that way, you know, because it's like, you know, that's the silver lining. Of course. Like it's like, well, I would have never have chosen this path or get into this situation, but I am learning something new by virtue of the fact that I never would have conceived of being in a situation like this. And what I'm learning now could lead to something good in the future. mean, that's just clearly true no matter how rock bottom you're hitting.
Like you are learning something that other people or yourself didn't know before and it might be useful. It's not to say that you necessarily want to celebrate because you hit rock bottom. It's like, it's obviously good. It's not good news, obviously, if you're like starving. But it is true that you're learning something new and novelty leads to more novelty and eventually it might lead to something interesting. And so like, yeah, if you want to take an optimistic view of suffering.
it could lead to something interesting. it's important to point out, nothing I'm saying suggests that all interesting things lead to a great discovery. So it's not like I'm saying naively that all suffering is good. Like that's not the point either. It might be, or it might just be like a complete waste of time and it would have been better for it not to happen. I mean, who knows? I can't predict it. The search space is unpredictable, but at least it's possible and sometimes necessary. It's true, sometimes necessary. Something had to get worse to get better.
Ken Stanley (37:06.347)
And so sometimes it will be necessary if innovation is what you're after or discovery.
Tim Doyle (37:12.678)
So in an ideal world, what does the objective less life look like?
Ken Stanley (37:19.31)
Well, it would look like, so, I mean, and I would say it's not an objective-less life because like I said, there's still a need for some objectives unless you're really irrational. I mean, the more extreme you go towards having absolutely zero objectives, the more radical you are. And different people align on different points in the spectrum. Like I'd say, Steve Jobs is pretty far towards that end of the spectrum. Like dropping out of college is not what most people would do. And so it's a fairly radical move.
So like, most people have the objective of completing college. And I think that's fairly rational. Even if you want to live a mostly less objective life, still, would advise personally for me, I did complete college because there's a cushion. So there's a trade off that's important to understand is that like the more cushion you have, the less objective you can be with ease, you know, because like when you don't have a cushion, the risks you're taking are higher by like just exploring. So like having that degree is a cushion, which means you might be able to least get a job.
Like for me, like the cushion that I created was like even beyond, I mean, I got a PhD. The reason to get the PhD from a cushion perspective is because that basically gives me a license to try research risks. And I was interested, I wanna do research, so I wanna take risks, which means trying things that might not work. So with the PhD, and especially eventually getting a job as a professor at one point, like that's my job is to take those risks. So I've mitigated a lot of my personal risk by creating the cushion around myself
I'm supposed to take those risks. Now, if all of the things I tried failed in the eyes of whoever's in charge, then even then, like I would be at risk. mean, there's nothing you can do to prevent all risk, but the cushion makes it a little bit easier to absorb more downside. And so it's just like a personal thing, the degree to which you personally need that cushion to be comfortable with taking the risks of being objective free. And so like if you're pretty comfortable with the idea of just like,
totally wiping out and failing and then picking yourself up again, then you don't care. You're willing to just, let's just be radical right now and live without objectives. I'll just do whatever the heck I think is interesting and to hell with it. You see a lot of younger people like that, especially like really, like teenage rebellion and things. Basically, that's what that is. It's just like, screw what society thinks I should do. I'm just going to do what I want to do. It could actually be quite interesting, the things that they're exploring.
Ken Stanley (39:43.726)
It's not usually given credit in that way, but there's a lot of interesting exploration that can happen when you're young But it's super dangerous. There's no cushion at all But some people are inclined in that direction But then people money other people wait till much later in life like when they've established all these things and then some people never get there because they're too afraid of everything That's the other end of the extreme, know, it's like someday maybe I'll go to grad school But first I want to get established. want to my job and it's like
Yeah, wait, you'll see 20 years later like you'll have done nothing and you're never going to do anything because you just, don't have the personality to take any risk basically with that kind of situation. It's like even taking a PhD involves risk. I mean, I see a lot of people like saying PhD is a horrible idea, like no one should do because there's no guarantee of a job at the end of that rainbow. It's like a very small percentage of people actually get a real professor tenure track job or whatever.
Well, yeah, mean, it's a risk. that's how interesting things happen through risk. And so, yeah, you have to be somewhat risk taking to take a position like that where you're basically going to be poor for years and years where all of your peers are getting like professional jobs and making money and you're falling behind. And obviously there's some risk involved in something like that. But it's not necessarily a condemnation of the path. It's just that these are people who want to take risks, presumably. Like the one mistake is if you're not someone who wants to take risks, but you do.
then you're like confused. It's like people who do think that a PhD guarantees a tenured professorship, but then that is a mistake. Like you should understand what you're getting into. you're, like going to Hollywood hoping to become a famous actor. It's like, obviously it probably won't happen, but you're willing to take the risk. And so like, that's totally valid. If you know what the risk is and you're willing to take it, like there's nothing wrong with that. And so the first question is to get yourself on that spectrum, like where am I? And then decide.
What does it mean then within that tolerance to live without objectives to the extent that you're comfortable? But that's a lot easier once you know what your tolerance is. And where are you going to apply this? Is this one thing to apply to your personal life, you can apply it to your professional life, you can apply it to your hobbies. Hobbies are way less risky. So there it's easy to be less objective, right? And that's one thing to consider here is you may be blowing an opportunity if all your hobbies are very objectively driven.
Ken Stanley (42:03.662)
It's like the one area in life where you could afford to play this game. And you're like, well, this year I'm going to do this, that, the other, I'm going to jump out of a plane and I'm going learn how to do this. It's like, well, do you need to be this objective about something where you actually have an opportunity to do whatever the heck you feel like doing? So there, you might want to have some teenage rebellion. But then when you get into your personal life and your professional life, obviously then there's actually bigger costs. So what is your tolerance? But let's say you do have the tolerance. So you really are, within the cushion that you have, you're willing to take risks.
Then yeah, then you really have to be brave, I think. That's the next step of it, is that it's not a joke to say, do what's interesting. Because by definition, you don't know where you're going. That's what we're suggesting here. Most people are not comfortable with that when push comes to shove. They like the idea of it because it's liberating. To hear that don't even need to decide where I'm going is like, can just do what I want. But when you're actually about to do that, it's very scary, actually. And so you gotta get over that. You gotta be like, well,
that this is, I believe in this path, hopefully the book will help you to feel that way. Like I believe that it actually is principled. Now given that I understand there's risk involved, but it's principled given the risk to follow the path of the interesting. Someone needs the courage to do that. And so I am just gonna do that because I believe in myself and I believe in this principle. And that's a hard step. It's a hard step for a person. It's also a hard step for an institution like a company.
Like a company's also struggle with this because like they do need to take risks in order to do innovative stuff. But they too, when it comes to that moment where it's like, I'm going to let people in this company just do stuff because it's interesting. Like, you the leadership just has a sudden fear that like, actually we're going to pay people to play around. We can't do this. Like we need OKRs. We need to know what the payoff is going to be. And then it gets nixed and they can't stomach it in the end.
And so it's a really tough thing, I think, for people in our culture to truly live this principle even once you've established a cushion. And so it requires, I think, kind of deliberate cognition. We have to actually confront this explicitly and say, I'm going to do this. And I understand why I'm doing it. And then you can get over that hump and actually follow something because it's interesting purely because it's interesting.
Tim Doyle (44:27.494)
really like the philosophy behind stepping stones for that and just having the mindset of I'm just trying to collect stepping stones and let me see where that leads me. And another interesting component that I think could really help people and it's something that you never hear in society, but you mentioned this in your book. Why is it better to actually look towards the past rather than to the future?
Ken Stanley (44:54.07)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, that's an interesting one. Well, the origin of that question is the fact that objectives are future looking, right? Because like, if you're saying, is where I want to be in the future, and then you measure everything with respect to that, then you're just thinking about the future. And that's what we're used to. I mean, people think that's common sense. Like, well, of course, what else would I be thinking? I'm just going to go dwell on the past. I want to think ahead. Where am I going? But the thing is, you have to consider that actually
It's not as principled as it sounds because the future is a total fog. We have no idea what's going to happen in the future. We don't know the stepping stones that lead to that thing that you're envisioning. By hypothesis, I'm assuming this is like an ambitious objective. So we don't know the stepping stones. so what really is principled about the fact that you think you're going there? Like you basically have no information to help you, no compass to guide you, and you're just thinking about this thing in the abstract. It's not principled.
And so we said, well, what else can we do? This is why actually we're all so obsessed with objectives because everybody thinks there's no other choice, but that's a security blanket to make you feel better at saying you're going somewhere. You know, cause everything has to be like originally defined and assessed. And that's basically our culture because we want to mitigate risk. We're so obsessed with mitigating risk. It's like anything that might have a risk, I need to do something to make sure it doesn't have a risk. So make it more objective. That's why we're so future focused.
But I'm saying like, actually it's not so principled because you're not mitigating much when the world is deceptive. So what would it mean to be past focused? Well, actually the past is one interesting property that the future doesn't have, which is that it is known. Basically everything is known about the past, especially your own past. You know what you've done. You know why you did it. You know what happened. And you know what led from there to here. Like you know all the stuff about the past, much more than we know about the future. And we know this collectively and individually.
sure we don't know literally everything that ever happened in the past. We know a lot more than the future about which we know absolutely nothing because it hasn't happened yet. So what's the good of that? Well, the good of that is that if you're interested in, if you want to do something interesting, it's an important insight that to compute how interesting something is, you need to compare it to the past, not to the future. Interestingness is a comparison with the past because we're comparing the idea, the direction with where we've gone before.
Ken Stanley (47:15.458)
to understand whether it's interesting. Or like a big word that comes up in this is novelty. It's really what we're doing to a large extent. It's not the total picture, but part of it is novelty. We're deciding whether an idea is novel. Because if it's not novel, it's already been done before. That's why we look to the past. And so it's not interesting. mean, basically nothing that's not novel is interesting. It's like, okay, know, at a point in time it was, like the idea of like this box on four wheels that can get you from A to B.
That was interesting at some point, but right now it would be a really boring conversation if I start acting like, let's talk about what this could mean. It's like, that's called a car. It's been around for more than 100 years. It's not novel at all. That's the problem with it. It was at one point, and it would probably be exciting to talk about like 120 years ago. And so it changes what's novel over time because as soon as something comes into existence, it's no longer novel. But if you want to compute what's novel, if you want to figure out what's novel, you need to compare it to the past.
not the future, and the capacity is the large, highly informed set of information. Like it's everything that's ever been done. And so all of that is coming to bear on like whether this is a novel idea. Now just, it's important to also note that like what's interesting is not only determined by what's novel. In other words, it's true that everything interesting is novel, but not everything novel is interesting. So that's an important point. So there's some novel ideas that just suck, so they're not actually interesting.
But if it's not novel, it's definitely not interesting. So you need to start with that. But then other things enter into what's interesting as well, which is basically also from the past. It's your entire life, basically. Like all of your aesthetic preferences, all of the experience you've ever had in your life, what matters to you, the things that it made emotional impressions on you, the things that made technical impressions on you, all the epiphanies you ever had.
That all comes to bear, also your evolutionary heritage, like just like the way your brain is structured, things you inherited just by being part of evolution. All of that is coming to bear on what you find interesting. That's a lot of information, but it all comes from the past. And so this combination of novelty with that is how you decide on what stepping stone is next in your life if you're not being objective about it. And in some way, I think it's more principled because there's more information in the past than the future.
Tim Doyle (49:35.772)
Can you further explain the relationship between greatness and deception?
Ken Stanley (49:42.606)
Yeah, so that's an important point that underpins the argument about abandoning objectives. Which is this point that if you're in a complex space, or let's put it, because that might be a jargony way of saying it, so we just put it in a more conversational way, if you're dealing with hard problems, so a complex space and hard problems to me are basically the same thing. If hard problems, it's like,
curing a disease, something like this. you're dealing with, or for you, may be something like getting rich, finding love, like the things that are personal, but they're ambitious. We don't know what the stepping stones are. If you're dealing with these kinds of issues, then the reason that they're hard is because you don't know what the stepping stones are that leads to them. That's an important thing to recognize. It's kind of a truism because how could they be defined as hard if you did know what the stepping stones are?
If you know exactly what you need to do and you're correct about that, then it's not hard. That's not the definition of hard anymore. It must be the case that for all the hard things in life, all the hard things for society, we don't know what the stepping stones are. But why don't we know what the stepping stones are? What could make it so hard? Well, it's because the things that will lead to that. It's not that it's impossible to cure this disease. It might be possible. The problem that we face though is that the things that will lead to the cure don't look like the cure.
They don't seem to have anything to do with the cure. They don't resemble the cure. But if they did, again, we would just know how to do it. So it wouldn't be hard. That would just violate the definition of a hard problem. So it's like because by definition it's hard, we must not know what they look like and they must not look like what we think we're gonna get. So for example, with the curing of a disease, the thing would be if we do things that decrease the mortality rate, it appears to be that we're on the right path. So that's a non-deceptive view.
that things must be moving in the right direction. But the thing is that that actually may be just a very, very slow improvement that never leads to a total cure. That's deception. You think you keep pouring the money into it. It's not that it's bad that things are getting a little bit better. But if you want to actually cure the problem, it's not going to be anything related to reducing the mortality rate. Of course, reducing the mortality rate is what resembles the solution.
Ken Stanley (52:07.534)
That's why it's deceptive. It looks like that's the thing you want to do, of course. Like we want to get down to zero. But actually it turns out that the solution has nothing to do with reducing the mortality rate. Like I said, it could have to do with researching tree sap. Tree sap is not reducing the mortality rate of any disease on earth. And the person who's looking at tree sap isn't even thinking about curing diseases. They may be interested in it for totally orthogonal reasons. And that is deception. The thing is that the thing that you really need
It looks like it's the wrong thing. And so what I'm saying though, is that all hard problems have this property. This is why we're so screwed when we're so objective about everything. I mean, and I especially referring to society because it's so objective here and not just individuals, because like research institutions, funding agencies, like the people who give money to scientists, they tend to be very objective, which if what I'm saying is true, it means that that's totally unprincipled and crazy. They should not be so objective.
issues, know, say things like, you know, what are you going to accomplish? What are the deliverables? What do you expect the value to be to society? I mean, literally ask these questions when you send in a grant application, you're trying to get money for research. And of course, like you can't answer those questions if you don't know where you're going. But the only way we're going to solve all these problems is if we go places where we don't know where they lead. And of course, it's like really a politically fraught issue, you know, because like this idea that
that we're gonna fund research which has no clear social value, pisses off a lot of people. People don't like that, especially in today's environment, cutting everything. But the problem is when it comes to actually ambitious and difficult problems, that's just how the world works. There's nothing we can do about it, which is the general argument for basic research. And so somebody has to have the courage to follow the path of the interesting, somebody has to have the courage to fund the path of the interesting, because the world is deceptive,
And the things that look pointless to you, like the guy looking at the tree sap, will turn out to be the things that fix all the world's problems. And so living in a world like that, because it's deceptive, it's like a serious problem if everything we do is objectively driven. And that's why deception is central to the whole argument. We have to confront the fact that the world is deceptive.
Tim Doyle (54:27.676)
So tying that into the personal and individual level and within my own life, because I feel I resonate with that a lot where I feel like earlier in my life, I did have these objectives and these ambitious things that I wanted to achieve. And what I was met with was mistakes and deception. But I think that's really interesting because I think within my larger timeline and
when I zoom out over those years, I feel like that's evolved into a stepping stone. What are your thoughts there and how like being met with deception and then like having to deal with that and sort of counteract that. Yes, it was once an objective, but then it can turn into a stepping stone within this larger picture.
Ken Stanley (55:10.67)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's true and that can't be denied that occasionally in this perhaps misguided search for an objective or attempt to reach an objective, something turns up that is actually useful in the future. So a new stepping stone. And that may lead some to conclude that it's fine then.
pursue objectives then ambitiously because sometimes we'll come across something useful anyway and then we can do both. Why should we be so radical about this? know, abandon objectives entirely. But I think it's actually taking that too far to come to that optimistic conclusion. Because the real issue here is that
in the process of pursuing an objective, if you successfully extracted from that something that isn't related to that objective, but leads you in a new direction, that's opportunism. And that is being non-objective, actually. So like at some point you were able to deviate in a different direction. That may have been after you crashed and burned or something like that, but still, like the thing that was principled that you did was the non-objective move. And in fact, your life could have been potentially
I mean, I'm not speaking to you personally, because I don't know what you did, but it could have been potentially, hypothetically better if you had simply been opportunistic to begin with and not crashed and burned. Like if you had noticed, well, I was going down this path, but this just came up. This is really interesting. Forget what I was doing before. And then as I move down that path, this turns out to be a really valuable lesson. And so like the whole thing might have worked better if you hadn't been so objective to begin with.
Ken Stanley (57:05.632)
If you had just been opportunistic, I mean, being opportunistic is very related to this idea of following interestingness. like, I see a new stepping stone. I'm just gonna go down there. I wasn't thinking or planning on it at first, but it's very interesting. And so like, think if you have those experiences on an objective path, it shows that you're not totally objective. That's basically what I would take from it. It's like you had some part of you that was intrinsically non-objective in exploratory.
And I think that that's true of all human beings. Like I think it's actually like more of our true nature as human beings is to not be objective. Like if you think about it, the reason that we're so objective is mostly because it's been beaten out of us over time to be less objective. It's not because it's our natural state. Like if you look at like five-year-olds in the playground or something, they're not all like, okay, what am going to accomplish today? All right, now let's go play.
It's like they just do whatever they find interesting, which is obviously healthy and good. You wouldn't want to have those set objectives before they entered the playground. But they learn a lot because they're like that. Like they discover new things. so that was the natural state that we started with, all of us. But then like we lost it because like it's very early on in school. you start to see that like the only way to be successful is to do what someone else told you is your objective.
It's like you're gonna have a quiz, you're gonna learn these words, you're gonna do this math problem, and all the things that aren't like that are things people don't compliment you for. It's like every time someone says good job, it's because it was objective. And the things you decided to do, like you drew some silly picture, it's like well I don't know, it's just that's some casual leisure activity, it's of no value. Like you never get a reward for that.
other than maybe your mom says is nice, but you don't get rewards the way you get in school. Like that looks like what's going to lead to success in life is school. It's pretty clear that's the way things work. So by the time you're 20 or 25, it's been beaten out of you completely. So now like that instinct has been beaten down. But the thing is that it's not, it's still part of human nature. Like I think there's a way, that's why I think people liked the book in part is because it was liberating because it allows you to be your normal self, which is just somebody who sometimes does things without knowing where you're going.
Ken Stanley (59:18.668)
That's just human nature. think it's the way we are and it's natural. And so being allowed and being given permission to do that I think is liberating. And so when you get to these situations and you think in hindsight, I did actually extract an interesting thing out of that. And when followed that, it actually led me somewhere good. Well, that's because that part of you isn't completely dead, but it might've worked better if it was less dead.
And so again, I'm not saying should eliminate all objectives like I've kind of conceded that over and over so that's definitely not the point here But to some extent probably many people could benefit from being less objective and following the path of the interesting more often and so I wouldn't I wouldn't make this This tricky move to like it's actually okay to just follow objectives Because in that path eventually I'll just find your sink things anyway see because I think what that's that's shutting down a lot of stepping stone collecting
ultimately, even if it sometimes happens, it's working despite the fact that you're doing the wrong thing, not because of it. It would work better if you just embraced how the world actually works and follow the path of the interesting because that's the best thing to follow if you're interested in innovation.
Tim Doyle (01:00:29.604)
I think the underlying thought there within this conversation, like you mentioned, is kind of just returning to that childlike self of who you are. Because, like you said, we start off as creative and that kind of gets programmed out of us. And what gets replaced with it is objectiveness. And something that you say within the book is also how adults should have unstructured play.
What do you think that looks like? Is that kind of just taking up more hobbies or putting that into practice for somebody so that they can kind of get within this mindset of not having an objective? What do you see that as?
Ken Stanley (01:01:09.632)
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it relates, of course, to this point about the fact that the system that we have created is really damaging to this natural exploratory instinct that we all start out with. And like, in fact, even for myself, I was
I actually thought explicitly about this question when I was in high school because I had some ideas. I thought to myself, I have a lot of ideas actually. I started to write them down, just random ideas. But actually explicitly thought, I remember thinking that it's not really useful to have ideas. That's just like a thing you do when you have free time or something.
And it's mostly a waste of time because it doesn't help you to do anything. It's like, won't help me get through school. It won't help me get to the college I need to get to. Like, I didn't see anywhere where eventually this will actually be useful for me to have these ideas. It's more like just a fun side activity, which is an absolutely pathetic indictment of the whole system. That somebody could think that is absolutely insane. Can you imagine an actual intelligent student thinking that having ideas is useless? It was absolutely crazy. It was somewhere around like 25, the age of 25.
I think that I started to actually think it might be useful to have an idea because because I was in a PhD program. But it took a couple of years of the PhD program because the first few years are still classes. But suddenly, like in the PhD program, when classes started ending, I had this like epiphany. was like, oh, it actually might be good that I have ideas. Finally, like after all this time, an idea of someone might actually like it if I have an idea, which is again, just completely nuts to wait to age 25 to even think that.
And so, yeah, there's something seriously wrong. But I mean, the instinct for playful discovery was there. I was having these ideas, but I just didn't think it was useful for anything. And all means to be able to do that is just to actually recognize it as an important part of your life, basically.
Ken Stanley (01:03:25.454)
Like your daily activity is I was gonna say but it's basically part of your life I mean, it's like as important as your job or things like that That like you need to have some opportunity to explore whatever it is that you explore It not necessarily inventions or something. It's just whatever you explore. It could be paths through the forest But just like whatever is interesting to you And it's it's it's obviously psychologically healthy because it is like more close to like natural human nature. I think
There's also more likely to lead to something interesting if you care to do anything interesting. so like that, that excising that aspect of human nature is definitely not healthy for anybody. But also it's like, it's like, it's like a feel good thing to say that, you know, just to say, well it's better for you to do what makes you feel good. But the part that makes it more interesting than just like a feel good self-help kind of lesson is the fact that I'm saying it, like there's tons of
empirical evidence scientifically, this actually is the thing that leads to better outcomes. So it's not just the thing that you do because it feels good. It actually is a principled thing to do. Like the only caveat to that is that there's risk involved. Like it might lead nowhere. And so you just have to be okay with the fact that like the only way to do something interesting is sometimes to go nowhere. And then it goes back to how much cushion you need. But when it comes to just playful stuff that you do in your spare time, you don't need much cushion.
It's obviously like a worthy thing to do and it's not very risky.
Tim Doyle (01:04:55.036)
is having purpose overrated because in a way I now see purpose as being synonymous with objective. And I think within our society today, it's become kind of a buzzword and a question like, what's your purpose? And if you don't have like a concrete answer or like a concrete understanding of that, you can kind of get into this thought process of like, Oh my God, I don't know what my purpose is. Like, I don't know what I'm doing in life. What are your thoughts on that?
Ken Stanley (01:05:12.589)
Yeah.
Ken Stanley (01:05:23.308)
Yeah, I do think it's kind of overrated. Like at some level, I don't want to go as far as saying it is overrated because at some level, when moral principles come into play and things like that, I wouldn't advocate to completely abandon all of that. Like some of that is like part of your purpose. It's like, want to do something good in the world. I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying, just completely forget about that. It doesn't matter. It's something in the back there, like you keep it in the storage.
But generally I think it's pretty true that this is an overrated idea of having purpose because it is damaging, I think, to individuals given that the world is deceptive. And so your purpose becomes a deceptive objective, which is like because of that destined to bring you to disappointment. Like you're going to have a disappointing life because you have this burning purpose inside of you, which is an ambitious objective.
And nothing can be achieved that way. If it's ambitious. mean, if your purpose is not ambitious, then you can achieve it. It's like, okay, well, I want to become an accountant or something. Again, I'm not saying it's easy, but it's just that we know what the stepping stones are. Then it's okay. Again, there's no moral problem with that, or it's not noble. mean, there's reasons to do things the safe way. But the thing is, if it's a super ambitious thing, it's guaranteed to be deceptive.
So you're likely heading for disappointment and deception. And so that's really damaging to a lot of people, I think, because a lot of people do have very ambitious purpose in their life that I met throughout my life. I met all kinds of people like this, very ambitious, very principled, very nice people, very creative people, but yet have this burning purpose. And it just turns into this psychological shackle that they can't get out of.
and it burns their life away because they can't do it. And they're not sure how to do it, how to realize this thing. It's like, well, maybe that doesn't matter. Like actually, like you don't need a purpose. Like maybe like the thing that you will do that's best for the world is something you'll discover because you just do whatever you find interesting. Like you don't need some higher purpose. And I mean, I started thinking that way about myself, you know, because I was like, you know, I also was very like, really
Ken Stanley (01:07:46.646)
I think a lot often that I just want to do something that will help the world. I feel much better if I just do something that helps all the problems that there are in the world and then I can feel proud of myself. But then I'm like, but practically speaking, I'm good at what I'm good at. I just never had a choice. I didn't get to choose what I'm good at. I'm just good at it. It is probably more true that if I just follow whatever that leads to, it'll do something more positive for the world than if I sit around trying to figure out how to fix the world.
I should just do – it's like the book I think was a positive thing in the world but it wasn't something I set out to try to write this book. If I was just obsessed through my life, how am going to fix the world, I never would have written the book which is very ironic. I think that comes up over and over and over again. That's the nature of deception. I think it can be very liberating just to be like it's not your job to fix the world or whatever this big thing. Even if it's selfish like becoming a billionaire, forget about it. None of it is your job.
Just do what you find interesting. That's all you really can do. And it's more likely to come out with the things that you want in the end. You're more likely to get rich. You're more likely to help the world. Like everything is more likely because the world is structured in a deceptive way, in a circuitous way. And if you follow what you find interesting, you're more likely to collect stepping stones. And if you collect stepping stones, you're more likely to do something that's impactful for either for you or for the world or whatever it is.
And so yeah, think it's really, really interesting. It's really fascinating because I'm thinking about particular people I know, what it could have done for them to really just early on just say, I don't need to have this big ambitious thing that I care about and just like, and just be myself. Like what would have happened? What would have been different? How much better would life have been? And what more would they have actually done for the world paradoxically, if they had let go of that.
Tim Doyle (01:09:41.372)
we're definitely forced into those boxes of having to think like that. And I think a lot of that comes from schooling where it's like, well, what do you want to major in? What do you want to do after you graduate rather than just like taking it one day at a time, basically. So somebody listening to this might feel like a little uneasier stress because we're talking about like, all right, like don't have goals or objectives. Look to the past rather than the future. What you say is your purpose or it really doesn't even matter. And
I think to calm these feelings, and it's almost like an answer you give at your end of your book, is this role of the treasure hunter. Can you explain what that is and sort of what people can do within that role so that they have kind of like a mindset of coming out of this listening to this and sort of like, okay, there is something practical that I can do moving forward here.
Ken Stanley (01:10:25.463)
Yay.
Ken Stanley (01:10:30.498)
Right, right, right. Yeah, that's a good way to kind of wind up the discussion because it's true that often when you get to through half the book or something, there's this sinking feeling that what's being advocated is just randomness or chaos or something. like what used to be nice, at least when I had objectives, to have some principles to work with. Like there was some anchor.
that I could follow or some compass. But if you're just saying, there's no principles at all, just do anything, it sounds like randomness and randomness is not a reassuring principle. It's not something that makes anybody feel good and it's actually scary. And that's why it's important to emphasize that I'm not advocating for randomness. That's not the point. What you call the treasure hunter, which is like a way of explaining what I am advocating.
Is there is the real alternative which is not about randomness? What I'm talking about here is that the idea of interestingness is Principled it's not random And so, know the path of the interesting like when you have multiple options and you could go down different paths And you choose what's most interesting to you. That is not an unprincipled decision the way the world is set up it makes it feel unprincipled because like
we set up in a very objective world. And so usually we justify decisions objectively, which usually means there's an assessment, which usually means there's a test or something, like if there's some way of measuring, is this the right path? How do you measure if you don't know where you're going, if you don't have an objective? If you do have an objective, then you can do these measurements. It makes you feel better because then it feels like there's a principle that is protecting me from the wild unknown of the world. Like anything could happen out there, but I know where I'm going, so I have this compass.
But again, you have to remember though that because the world is deceptive, the compass is false. And so you're destined for hitting a dead end. So just because you feel better, because of your security blanket of the objective, means absolutely nothing. It's just as dangerous. It's just as dangerous as following the path of the interesting and probably more so, because almost certainly it's going to be deceptive. But so what is following the path of the interesting? Then people think, well, that's just doing crazy random things. It's like there's nothing to go on there.
Ken Stanley (01:12:51.202)
But you have to understand it's not true, it's just that it's not objective. And so what it gets into is subjectivity, like the subjective notion of interestingness and realizing despite everything we've been taught is not random. Like what you find interesting is credible and extremely interesting in its own right. Like because it's your entire life coming to bear on a judgment call. Like if you ask me what kind of algorithms are interesting in artificial intelligence today,
I can give you some of my thoughts about what's interesting, but they may be instinctual, intuitive. I may not have proof yet because I'm talking about the cutting edge in the future. Where are we going? We haven't yet gotten the data on that. But that doesn't mean that it's irrelevant just because I don't have data yet. I'm an expert on artificial intelligence. I've thought about it for decades. It's not like you would just be like, it doesn't matter because you don't have an objective justification for your feelings. You're allowed to have subjective feelings. I would say that's our
greatest talent is that we are amazingly sensitive subjectively. And yet it's like totally shut down, like the way that society is set up. That like, you know, because we want everything to be objective. It's like, you can, you can spend 30 years getting an education, getting a PhD or something like becoming an expert in a field, maybe a few years in the world. And then like, nobody cares what you find interesting. Like they just want to see a performance chart. It's like, you think it would be interesting to do this? Like your, your, your, manager might say,
Well, where's the data? I'm not going to just listen to you. So basically, we just throw 30 years of learning and experience and intelligence down the toilet because we'd rather look at a bar chart, which a kindergartner could read and tell you this line is higher than that line. And that's how we're supposed to make decisions. Well, the thing is that 30 years of experience actually does have value. The intuitive, subjective notion
is not based on nothing, it's based on your entire life. So of course it's true that like I wouldn't ask a chef what he thinks about the best algorithm any more than a chef should ask me what I think is the most interesting new trend in recipes. Like I don't have a clue. Obviously this is based on experience here. Like I'm talking about things that you've spent a long time basically saturating your mind in these issues. Then it becomes credible to have an intuition or a subjective notion of interestingness. It doesn't mean you just go ask a random person on the street.
Ken Stanley (01:15:15.234)
That would be random and chaotic. This is an important point, because a lot of people, one thing that's interesting is go to the Wikipedia page on serendipity. There's a page on serendipitous discovery and you can find invention after invention after invention that was serendipitously discovered. There was some guy who was working on radars and a chocolate in his pocket melted and that's how the microwave was invented. What's really interesting about all these stories is that how do you explain that the people who had these
ideas, these serendipitous ideas, were smart and educated and had a good track record. Like if serendipity was really random, it would be like crazy guys talking to themselves on the street banging into brick walls. Like that's what would be having all the serendipitous inventions. That is not how the world works. It's because these people have intuitions and they have the subjective experience. Like to actually see opportunity, they're opportunistic when it appears.
Like realize the fact that this chocolate melted actually is really, really interesting. Like that's something that takes a lot of experience to identify the opportunity. It's just like me seeing in pick breeder that like the steps that led to things like the discovery of the butterfly don't look like butterflies. Like most people wouldn't think twice. Like who cares what it would mean nothing. It's like that is a serendipitous discovery. It's not what I expected to discover in pick breeder.
but I had to be open to the opportunity because of the decades of experience that preceded me. And so your subjective notion of interestingness is fine tuned in your area, whatever it is of expertise and everybody has something. I mean, even being homeless is an area of expertise. Like you've got a whole world of stuff that I know nothing about intuitively. I would not know what is interesting in that world. And so everybody has these kinds of intuitions in their area of experience. And so,
So that is something we should value. And now second to that is you should not assume that what I'm saying is just that, I have experience that you should just give me a million dollars. It's like, well, you know, I've been around for 30 years thinking about AI. And so I don't need to justify to you anything. Just give me money and let me do what I want to do. Of course, like the world can't work that way. This is where gatekeepers come in. And this gets dangerous because gatekeepers then want to go back to being objective.
Ken Stanley (01:17:31.566)
So the gatekeepers are like, well, then show me some evidence. Like, I can't just take your word for it here. Like, I don't care. You've been around for 30 years. Like, dude, show me something concrete. So the bar chart comes back and then we're away from interestingness again. Well, but the thing is that what you have to consider is that the gatekeeper does have the right to ask you questions, but they should be asking you why you think it's interesting. That's where the discussion should center. And you should be able to justify it.
Why do you think this is interesting? And the reason that things are interesting in my view is because they open up a new playground, not because they cause the performance curve to go up, but because you've created, you found a new place on the frontier where no one has been exploring before and there must be things there that are interesting too. And so it's just like the kids standing in front of the playground. They see the infinite opportunity there of all the things they could do. They don't quite know what it's going to be in the end. That's when you find a new playground, you've done something interesting.
And so that's a stepping stone worth following. There's going to be new low-hanging fruit in the playground, but I can't tell you what it is. But I should be able to explain why there's a new playground. In my field, the chef will have a different kind of playground than the AI researcher, but there are playgrounds. so now the treasure hunter's job is to collect the playgrounds. What I'm calling playgrounds is also basically treasures. And it's basically a metaphor. What it's saying is that if you're in the forest and there's treasures that are buried underneath the dirt,
and you find a treasure underneath the dirt, you don't know what it's going to be, but you dug in there and you found a treasure. What's interesting about the structure of the world is that there are probably other treasures buried nearby. And so we don't know what they are, but one treasure leads to another. And so you should be treasure hunting. That's what you should be doing. And it is principled because you decided where to dig, because you have intuitions about where the interesting places are in the
and those intuitions are credible. Yes, you should justify them, but you can justify them intuitively and subjectively. They don't all have to be justified objectively, and often it's stupid to do it objectively because it just leads to deception. I mean, do you really think that raising test scores and getting a better score this year for the whole class will eventually lead to everybody getting 100 on their test? It will never happen in a million years. And it's because it's obviously deceptive. That is not the path to everyone getting 100 on their test.
Ken Stanley (01:19:49.378)
And yet that's the way we play this game with our standardized testing system. It's just an example. You need to sometimes follow your intuitions. Like when the teacher thinks it would be interesting to do things this way, but there's no objective justification, the inability for the system to tolerate that is a huge weakness in the system. And it's still principled. It's not random. It's because the teacher has decades of thinking about education. They've actually interacted with kids. They know what kids are like. They know the diversity of learning styles in the classroom. There's like all kinds of information there.
How come they can't use their subjective intuitions for anything? Because everything is driven by tests and objective measurements. And so it's a straight jacket. It's a straight jacket around us. And you could be a treasure hunter and you could follow your subjective intuitions and collect stepping stones, which are these treasures, which are basically new playgrounds that open up new opportunities. And that is a principled thing to do. And so it's not something to fear. It's something like to embrace. But with that final caveat that, of course, there's risk involved.
You just have to remember that. If you follow my advice and the first time you do it, you don't get a big payoff, you can't blame me because I told you there's risk involved. Like what I'm saying is that like if you keep playing this game, eventually you'll do something interesting. If you only do it once, there's no guarantees. It's like if you put all your eggs in one basket in any way, there's no guarantees. So this is about payoff over time and it's like investing. Like you have a portfolio, like some will pay off and some don't. If you're a venture capitalist, all you need is one big payoff.
That's why they play this game this way. mean, that's why actually venture capitalists often resonate with the book a lot because it sort of like aligns with their own intuitions about the world. And so it's a risk taking philosophy. And if you don't like risk, you don't have to follow the philosophy. But if you weren't willing to take risks, treasure hunting is principled. So you're not giving up anything. You're taking something new. And it's an informed and principled pursuit that you can actually follow.
Tim Doyle (01:21:49.338)
Leading with curiosity rather than ambition. Ken, it's been great talking with you. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Where can people go to connect with you and see more of your work?
Ken Stanley (01:22:01.774)
So good question. Thank you. Yeah, I was really glad to be on the show This was a great great set of questions and I appreciate the chance to connect with your audience on these questions To follow me and learn more about me. I guess you could go to Ken Stanley net Which is just my home page? And you can find links to different things including my email which I'm happy to hear from people about this subject So, you know feel free to reach out
Tim Doyle (01:22:29.862)
Awesome, great having you on the show, Ken.
Ken Stanley (01:22:32.555)
Yeah, great to be here. Thanks very much.
