[publicdaniel]

@Jeremy, have you ever encountered Ken Stanley’s book “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”?

If you’re not familiar with him, he was the guy that invented the NEAT algorithm, Novelty Search, etc.

In his book he talks about stepping stones and following what’s “interesting” to individuals. It seems like Answer.AI is focused on applied engineering, but any thoughts on this type of approach from a Research perspective?

[egillia3]

Hey! It’s Eric (the author). To the author of this comment, I’d say that the use of “long leash within a narrow fence” (which directed Langmuir’s work) or “circumscribed freedom” (which directed much Bell work) is generally compatible with researcher interests.

As I talk about in the article, Langmuir was able to pick from a bunch of problems in his wheelhouse…there were just conditions. And those conditions meant whatever area he picked might come with a high willingness to spend from GE! And if his work yielded results GE would have a way to quickly deploy the knowledge. All of which is great. To put his work in a box with what the Coolidge-types did is probably unfair. He was following curiosity under constraints, that’s all.

That is not to say all basic research roles in the world should look like that. But it makes sense given most basic researchers don’t fully understand which of all the problems they could happily pursue are actually most useful to industry. MIT professors of the early 1900s used to source research problems somewhat similarly.

Hopefully all of that helps a bit!

[gradschoolfail]

This is funnily relevant because as far as I understand Ken is or was a research manager at OpenAI, and as outlined in the article, Answer.AI is trying not to be OpenAI.

[jph00]

I should caveat this by saying I've only read summaries of the book, not the book itself. My understanding of it is that they view setting ambitious objectives as potentially limiting progress, and instead promote shorter-term novelty-seeking approaches.

This is certainly how we do things at Answer.AI -- we hire people that are passionate tinkerers, and encourage a playful and spontaneous approach. That doesn't mean there's no coordination or long-term goal, but rather that we view these short-term approaches as being a good way to make progress.