
The Myth of the Objective - greywolve
http://www.opowell.com/post/myth-of-the-objective/
======
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/...](http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-
management/overview/deming-points.html)

~~~
taneq
So how do you know whether you're always improving if you don't measure your
performance at consistent points along the way? Just ask everyone if it _felt_
like you improved, followed by a group hug and mutual back-patting?

~~~
bandushrew
I dont think he said to eliminate the measurements, he said to eliminate the
quotas.

~~~
mathattack
Exactly.

Going by his theory... If you say, "I am paying you to produce 1,000 cars per
month" then that's what you'll get. If instead you rely on intrinsic
motivation, and improve the system, you will get more than 1,000, and they'll
be higher quality.

This doesn't work everywhere. (Certainly not with Sales commission!) But it is
worth thinking through the logical implications of it.

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throw843434
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 other non-STEM people (in
marketing/politics/sociology etc.).

This triviality has nothing at all to do with Zen or any of the things
Westerners take for being "rustic" and "warm and fuzzy".

~~~
manmal
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 have nothing in
the bank. How do you get there? Any plan would most probably not work, if
executed in a rigid manner (or we would all look up the recipe on the internet
and be millionaires). You end up trying all kinds of jobs, investments, take
opportunities when they arise, etc.. and finally you realize that you probably
will not ever make it. Or you get lucky and make your million - who knows.
Picbreeder showed that it's quite rare to hit the very desired result you
wanted.

However, if you were more flexible regarding your goal, at every step, then
you might take the job that agrees the most with you, meet a lot of great
people, travel if you are able, start a family.. and end up without a million
in the bank but with a satisfying life situation. With pic breeder, certain
shapes and beautiful pictures emerged that were not intended or planned from
the start. The algorithm went along with whatever was there, and optimized on
that.

Looking at the millionaire example again - if you already had 500k, then
doubling that might not be that hard (?), or not that many steps away. People
keep saying that the more money you have, the easier it is to earn - think
opportunities like buying an apartment in a firesale and reselling it for 1.5
as much.

For me, it's a very counter intuitive way of looking at things. It goes very
deep against the wanting of goals or things in our current society. OTOH, it
somehow makes sense that things work this way, because every step in our step-
by-step plans is SO dependent on things beyond our control. Agile development
methods remind me of this very much: Try telling a customer not familiar with
agile that the software she orders might look completely different than she
imagines it right now - most will think you are crazy or want to cheat them.
But you might recognize problems in every sprint, and adapt the end goal
accordingly.

~~~
orclev
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.

~~~
nostrademons
> 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).

Most people who are millionaires don't get there by holding a million dollars
in currency, they get there by holding assets worth a million dollars. This is
_not_ zero sum - assets can be created (and destroyed), and their value is
assigned only at the time of transaction. The total value of all assets in the
U.S. is significantly larger (by orders of magnitude) than the total amount of
U.S. dollars available.

~~~
orclev
It isn't a question of actual dollars in circulation, you can always print
more after all, it's a question of total economic value. All goods in
circulation in the U.S. have a finite value, and it definitely is a zero sum
game. You can add more goods and therefore value, but that can only happen at
a certain rate (this would be tied into population growth, employment rate,
and profit margins among other things). There are also close ties with median
income as the value of goods tends to be tied directly to wealth distribution.
Ultimately at any given time there is a finite amount of "wealth" to go
around, if one person gets a bigger slice, then that means someone else has to
take a smaller slice. People don't want to be millionaires because they have
some unhealthy attraction to U.S. currency, they want to be millionaires
because of the goods and services that they can trade that money for (or in
many cases because they can use it for rent seeking to generate unearned
income). The actual amount of currency in question is irrelevant, it's a
question of access to those goods and services, and those goods and services
are finite, therefore wealth is finite.

~~~
nnfy
If economic value were zero sum, then economies would never grow.

>All goods in circulation in the U.S. have a finite value, and it definitely
is a zero sum game.

Except I can create new goods, possibly for free (e.g. writing software,
growing crops, mining materials) and directly increase the value of the
economy. Contrary to zero sum.

>You can add more goods and therefore value, but that can only happen at a
certain rate

Unless you want to try to argue that the rate is so low that the economy is
*effectively zero sum in the short term, you've just contradicted yourself. If
you can add value to the economy, it is fundamentally not zero sum.

You seem to be conflating the finiteness of wealth and value with the
inability to create new wealth or value.

Now, that aside, one could argue that currency exchange itself is zero sum on
short timeframes when new money is not printed, but market forces dynamically
assign value to currency, such that the economy may still grow with a finite
supply of money. Furthermore, I'd like to point out that generally when one
purchases goods or services, even in the short term the transaction is
unlikely to be zero sum, because goods and services can be used immediately to
generate more wealth, and therefore are arguably worth more following the
exchange.

~~~
orclev
More or less your first point, the rate of growth is so low, that over short
term it's effectively zero sum.

Something else to consider is that in your example of "for free" wealth
creation you're not actually getting any of that for free, that's a form of
wealth transformation or transfer. Let me elaborate on that point using each
of your examples. I'll start with mining as that's the simplest, in that case
you're taking a natural resource (which is finite) and extracting it and
refining it. You're having to pay your workers (and/or buy and maintain
machines) in order to do so, so in part your redistributing the companies
wealth to the workers and service providers your company does business with.
In exchange you receive raw and/or processed minerals/metals. That might seem
like wealth creation but it's really transformation, you've reduced the value
of the land you extracted the material from and converted it into a
transportable form. The value of that material might seem to be more, but
that's only because you've invested value in extracting it, in other words
you're passing on your cost of doing business. You haven't added value, the
value was already there, you've simply converted it and invested some of your
companies value into it, so when you sell it you're simply converting one form
of wealth into another, you're converting the wealth of that processed
material into cash wealth.

The situation with growing crops is similar, although part of what is being
invested there is time. You might think, "well, time is infinite, there's
always more time", but each persons time is finite and it has value, even if
only to that person (opportunity cost), so once again you're doing a wealth
transformation, you're transforming those workers time into money, and ground,
seed, fertilizer, water, and sun into crops. When you sell those crops you're
once again recouping your cost of doing business. Wealth hasn't been created
from nothing, it was transferred and concentrated from a variety of sources.
You might think, "well, what about the workers time, that's new wealth", only
it isn't, there was a cost involved in those workers upbringing and living, so
that's once again just a form of wealth transfer and transformation. Truly the
only free wealth in the entire thing is the sun, although even that isn't
infinite, even if it is free from the perspective of anyone on Earth (it might
be more accurate to say it's wasted/destroyed if you don't use it). Ultimately
there is no free lunch, entropy always wins.

Software is the most complicated one, as there's zero unit costs associated
with it, but substantial development costs. Once again though, you're looking
at wealth transformation/transfer. In the case of software you're
transferring/transforming the developers, QA, and other workers personal
knowledge and time into software. Similar to the workers in the previous
example they've invested time and money into improving their knowledge and
living, so you're really paying them for them to recoup their losses (wealth
transfer) and then when you sell the software you're simply passing those
expenses on to your customers.

Ultimately it's all about wealth transformation and transfer. There is finite
natural wealth, it existed before humanity, and if humans vanished tomorrow it
would continue to exist. Economies are mostly about taking the existing wealth
and distributing, concentrating, and transforming it into forms that are more
convenient for people. When you get down to it, the unit cost of a good is
really it's intrinsic value, it's a form of wealth transformation. Profit
margins on the other hand, are wealth transfer, you're transferring wealth
from the purchaser to yourself. No value is actually being created. New wealth
only comes from discovering new resources. Want to create wealth now? Do like
Elon Musk and others are doing and take a look at asteroid mining.

------
quuquuquu
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 innovation, what happens when I'm not selling
anything, or selling things at a loss?

The bills come due at some point, and so many people fail.

We don't all have endless sums of money that we can rely on while we wait for
our Zen powers to coalesce and then people magically send us money.

~~~
ballenf
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"?

~~~
quuquuquu
There's a considerable amount of luck in Zuck's story.

Peter Thiel gave him money and he demolished Myspace somehow.

I don't think he got there by daydreaming ^.^

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merraksh
It would be interesting to test this on academicians: take objectives off of
them (grants, large number of publications; hell, even tenure!) and let them
wander freely through their field of research. I have the impression this was
normality decades ago.

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danielam
Reminds me of (a variation of) a Yiddish proverb: How do you make God laugh?
Tell him about your plans.

~~~
123e1daAdfafsdf
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but
planning is indispensable." \-- Eisenhower

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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.

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arbie
The article made me realize I do this frequently. I keep an eye out for
serendipity. Encountering new problems often makes me take up an adventure
from months or years ago where I learned a new piece of technology or a method
that _seemed_ like a dead end at the time, but becomes a stepping stone in
hindsight.

A dead end only means you're looking at the wrong direction at _that_ moment.

Always chase the yet unlearned.

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mistercow
Having spent a lot of time with PicBreeder, I suspect that the "ancestors look
nothing like their descendants" thing is more an artifact of how our brains
interpret images, rather than implying some deeper insight into how objectives
affect the process.

There are AI projects that attempt to approximate a "natural image manifold" –
essentially a blob in the space of possible images where you find things that
look like photographs to humans. I think the PicBreeder thing has more to do
with that; the set of images that people want to create occupies a relatively
confined space within the set of all possible PicBreeder outputs. So working
off of _any_ previously built image is basically a "shortcut to the manifold",
if you will.

Or to put it another way: when you consider the entire space of PicBreeder
outputs, any existing image is much closer to whatever you want to make than
starting from scratch.

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scandox
Surely the human taking 70 steps to find an interesting image is _less_
aimless than the computer that took 30,000 steps and didn't find anything
interesting? In other words a non-local goal was somehow forming in their mind
drawing them down a particular path? Or am I missing something?

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sevensor
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.

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

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kuwze
I've read most of the book and I am confused by the fact that it completely
skips artificial evolution (especially obvious in the domestication of cats
and dogs).

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protonfish
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.

~~~
mirceal
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.

~~~
MyObjective4
Wouldn't humans creating recognizable images by choosing a particular
aberration that looks like something familiar be more akin to intelligent
design? Without this intelligence and creativity to see something in each new
breed and branch, coupled with the ability on the site to rank images and
label images. The final images would have ever existed.

According to Dawkins, Evolution has two objectives. Optimizing survival and
procreation. We saw how the randomness toward an objective failed to produce
anything meaningful in this example so how is this similar to natural
evolution?

I see no similarities.

~~~
mirceal
the point is that you cannot design it. you're exploring the space looking at
what is interesting. So if you're given a start image and an end image (an
objective) you cannot reach the end image. In the case of pic-breeder you are
playing the role of a fitness function not that of an intelligent designer.

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unit91
> When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.

> Objectives can, ironically, be obstacles to innovation and creativity.

This, like much of the Zen worldview, is self-refuting. If objectives can be
obstacles that leave me with only one eye on the path, then the new objective
is just to focus on "the path" of innovation and creativity. My objective may
have _changed_ , but I still have an objective.

~~~
YCode
A lot of "zen" wisdom is vague and even illogical. Koans are a great (if not
the great) example.

They don't intend to teach you anything. Instead, they create doubt in your
beliefs so that you can see possibilities you were previously blind to.

In this instance perhaps the difference is using the "objective" as a starting
point rather than a desired end result.

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MyObjective4
So how do you harness the knowledge that many of the best ideas that have been
thought up weren't the original intention or objective. I don't get the point.
I think this is saying something like, only fate will create something
extraordinary. This is useless nonsense.

Most of the claims of the video and article seem to lead nowhere, or are
commonly known and while mildly interesting, are easily explained by logical
observation and analysis. Knowing them doesn't help get you anywhere (that
would be an objective). If there is no objective to the video, then why watch
it. This is starting to sound like some kind of relativism.

The success of PicBreeder is accomplished by individuals ability to see
interesting things evolving and the vast number of real world similar objects
they had to choose from. Of course an algorithm cannot replicate that because
it is not creative. This does more to dis-prove natural evolution IMO because
the images that took shape required creative intelligence to facilitate them
doing so. As to the point of the final pictures only appearing when there was
no particular objective, OK fair enough, but how does this help us? What new
thing did we learn? We know that many inventions and innovations were
discovered this way. Why is it an epiphany? The computer could not create a
recognizable picture because it was only given one. If it had the google
images library to match to, it would certainly come up with some very great
pictures.

On the Living Image Project, The recognizable images didn't happen, because
different people saw different things and voted different directions. This
failed precisely because there was no objective. If the Living Image Project
stated an objective (A teacup for example), it would have had far more
success. This just goes to show that objectives are important because in the
real world, there are needs. If the article and video was useful, it would
have revealed something helpful about how to fill needs (objectives) in a
better way. The majority of problems are solved with objectives in mind. This
article and video never seem to recognize that. The conclusion almost seems to
say that attempting to fill known needs is a problem in the world today.

In the Novelty search demo that was shown, the biped that used the novel
behavior algorithm walked better than the farther distance algorithm only
explains the constraints that the failing algorithms had. All it proves is
that when an algorithm has more choices to explore, in many cases it did
better. To me this would be like telling someone to build the best house, car,
ETC but only use the knowledge from 3 books. Tell someone else to do the same
but use the internet, unlimited books, Talk to people ETC. Should we be
surprised at the result? Kenneth Stanley seemed to be, and seemed to think it
revolutionary. What new thing does this teach us in practical terms? Nothing.
More stepping stones mean a better result. This is common sense.

It is no wonder the National Science Foundation would not give this guy any
money. He hasn't taught us anything new. I want my 30 minutes of life back.

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primeblue
Beautiful!

