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Review of "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" by Stanley and Lehman

engineeringideas.substack.com · 3,382 words · saved by 1 readers

Kenneth Stanley's and Joel Lehman's book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective has two components: theoretical, describing something about the reality, and ethical (practical, political), prescribing what people and other agents should do. On the theoretical side, the authors show that the ideas from the quality diversity field of science (I'm hesitant even to say "computer science" because computation and algorithms are now ubiquitous in all disciplines of science; Steven Wolfram even calls multicomputation, which is closely related to quality diversity, a new paradigm for theoretical science) apply to many domains of human and agentic activity: choosing projects (business or scientific) to join (or deciding what project to start), looking for a partner, deciding what to do with one's life and career next. The authors show that in these domains, setting too far-reaching goals (objectives) and trying to purposefully reach them is often counterproductive. The object

Kenneth Stanley's and Joel Lehman's book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective has two components: theoretical, describing something about the reality, and ethical (practical, political), prescribing what people and other agents should do. On the theoretical side, the authors show that the ideas from the quality diversity field of science (I'm hesitant even to say "computer science" because computation and algorithms are now ubiquitous in all disciplines of science; Steven Wolfram even calls multicomputation, which is closely related to quality diversity, a new paradigm…

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