
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned [video] - henning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI
======
ssivark
The story of how Feynman found out about the Challenger disaster is quite
interesting. It is not that he was a clever detective ferreting out the facts
-- it's just that he tried something different and let himself be nudged along
in the process.

To quote from his book "What do you care what other people think?"...

 _Well, a few days after the accident, I get a telephone call from the head of
NASA, William Graham, asking me to be on the committee investigating what went
wrong with the shuttle! [...] When I heard the investigation was going to be
in Washington, my immediate reaction was not to do it: I have a principle of
not going anywhere near Washington or having anything to do with government,
so my immediate reaction was -- how am I going to get out of this? [Gweneth,
his wife says] "If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a
group, going around from place to place together. But if you join in the
commission, there will be eleven people -- all in a group going around from
place to place together -- while the twelfth one runs around all over the
place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything,
but if there is, you'll find it." She said, "There isn't anyone else who can
do that like you can."_

------
chillacy
Steve jobs said something like: You can only connect the dots looking
backwards. I've found that to be true in many ways. If you look at any success
story, it usually involves many degrees of luck, chance, crazy coincidence,
etc. From business stories, to how you met your closest friends, or even your
significant other.

Of course, this is survivorship bias, and we're constantly missing great
opportunities every day.. but it's still interesting how things turn out.

~~~
agumonkey
But there's a metalevel theory there. After spending years failing to learn
music, I finally hit a few sweet spots. I couldn't be more wrong before. But
knowing how failing can lead to knowing, how being wrong helps you map the
possible space to home in the right leads you to a very different approach on
discovery.

------
kevinwang
Some of the extrapolations from the picture platforms to other domains are a
bit hand-wavy in the talk, but his response to the Edison question [0] is
pretty enlightening.

Additionally - just pondering here - this heuristic of novelty seems present
in human nature: \- the drive that scientists, mathematicians, researchers,
and technologists have to discover new things \- the drive that hackers and
artists have to make new and different things

Does anyone agree that these aspects of humans are in tune with what the
subject of the talk, or are they more unrelated than I think?

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI)

------
coderKen
Found this pretty much enlightening, I think this applies to careers as well.
When I look back at the steps I took towards getting to where I am now, I
don't see any connection, they were seemingly random steps.

~~~
thewarrior
Didn't Steve Jobs say the same thing ? You cant connect the dots going
forward. They only make sense when looking back.

------
lkrubner
This was much better than I expected from the title.

~~~
jakeogh
Agreed. The book has gotta be worth $20:
[http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319155234](http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319155234)

~~~
sah2ed
The kindle version on Amazon [0] is slightly cheaper at $16.19.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-
Objective...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-
Objective/dp/3319155237)

------
WalterBright
There are counterexamples, for instance, the Wright Bros. invented the
airplane through a directed research and development process.

------
greggman
Interesting talk. I really couldn't tell how much of it really meant something
and how much of it was fluff like "power poses".

In any case he's been giving similar talks for a while.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZBViI8ZaU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZBViI8ZaU0)

------
turbohz
But there are still too many javascript libraries out there!

~~~
thewarrior
That's a very interesting point. When I look at React and React native , I do
feel that they could be stepping stones to something really interesting.

The Decco app that was posted on HN only reinforced this idea. I feel that one
day we'll be flinging fully formed react compoenents as fast as we fling for
loops while coding today. Some form of smart component search and automatic
insertion could speed up programming by a huge amount.

Abstracting out the DOM rendering means we could have universal components.

But these aren't here yet. You don't have to use the latest framework in your
project if you don't need. But that shouldn't stop the experimentation and the
evolution.

So go forth and write ye Single page app frameworks and ye Coffee script to
brainfuck transpilers.

------
WalterBright
This fits right in with the Connections thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075430)

which is all about serendipitous discoveries.

------
argonaut
Speaking from an AI/ML perspective, I'd like to point out one flaw, which is
that exploration (of unexplored states) is certainly something that can be
incorporated into your objective function, or accounted for in other ways,
depending on the specific AI/ML algorithm and domain. This is a very common
thing to do in reinforcement learning, for example.

~~~
chillacy
I think he just about says this in his talk when he discuses developing
"novelty search". The applications to AI seemed more straightforward (don't
blindly run up to a local maxima if your search space isn't monotonic), but
the application to life is less straightforward but more interesting.

------
kevindeasis
I'd like to hear arguments against his claim. Even better if it is a machine
learning experiment that invalidates his idea.

It would be interesting to compare the two sides.

