[The Knowledge Project Ep. #148] Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives

Shane: You wrote a book about questioning the value of objectives, which revealed a surprising paradox: objectives are good when they’re modest, but things get more complicated when they’re ambitious. Can you expand on that?

Ken: Yeah. This is something that people don’t talk about that often. People don’t talk about the problem with setting objectives. There are some controversies in society. This is currently not one of them, but yet if you think about it, this is something that we do all the time. It’s basically one of the, I think, deepest facets of our culture is that we think of accomplishment and achievement and discovery in terms of setting an objective and then pursuing it. And I do research in artificial intelligence, my normal job. And in the course of doing that research, we just started to see undeniable evidence that that approach to achievement has some serious flaws.