An unusual message for people who want to change the world

If you want to change the world, you probably feel aimless. You have no clear path at all, but despite the unknown, you still feel compelled to do something big. That is okay, and it is the only way to reliably achieve great things.

These ideas come from "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned", so this is very condensed. I encourage you to read the whole book, but I introduce the two main concepts from the book in this article.

• When trying to achieve large goals such as changing the world, objectives don't work.
• Instead of objectives, we should chase interesting and novel ideas.

Objectives are out

Imagine that you’re given an enormous petri dish the size of Earth. On this petri dish are single-celled organisms that are equivalent to the very first living cells on Earth, from which all other life eventually evolved. Your objective is to evolve organisms with human-level intelligence by selecting which organisms should reproduce. The basic idea is to replace natural selection with your own decisions about who gets to reproduce. Of course, it may sound difficult, but to make the problem easier you are allowed four billion years to finish.

The great thing about this experiment is that we know it’s possible because those very single-celled organisms did evolve over billions of years into human beings. The main challenge is just to be a good breeder because selecting which organisms will reproduce is ultimately nothing more than animal breeding. All you need to do is select parents to mate that are increasingly human-like and voilà, you are done before you know it.

So what should be your strategy to breed single-celled organisms all the way to human-level intelligence? We’d like to suggest a clear-headed approach that gets right to the heart of the matter: You can administer intelligence tests to the single-celled organisms! Then all you need to do is pick the ones that score highest to be the parents of the next generation. Soon enough, we’re on our way to a real Einstein, right?

Or maybe not. Clearly, this strategy is deeply flawed. If you really administered IQ tests to single-celled organisms, you would be lucky if they even survived, let alone evolved intelligence of any sort. But why wouldn’t something like that work? After all, it respects the general principle that we measure progress towards our goals by comparing where we are to where we want to be. But that principle is increasingly suspicious, as this thought experiment exposes once again.

The problem is that the stepping stones to intelligence do not resemble intelligence at all. Put another way, human-level intelligence is a deceptive objective for evolution. Once again, deception rears its confusing and misdirecting head. Rather than increasing intelligence, the stepping stones that lead from single-celled organisms to humans include such unrelated innovations as multicellularity and bilateral symmetry. Millions of years ago our ancestor was a flatworm. It would not score any accolades for its intellect, but its one great achievement was bilateral symmetry. Who would ever think that bilateral symmetry is essential to writing poetry? But it was an essential stepping stone on the road to Shakespeare. The problem with the intelligence test approach is that it entirely fails to detect such monumentally important discoveries. Instead it wastes precious effort measuring a property that will not come into play in any important way until eons in the future.

That may seem obvious because subjecting a cell to an IQ test (or any intelligence test) is unquestionably ridiculous. But the fact that it is ridiculous is exactly the point, and is why this experiment should ring alarm bells for anyone who still believes in the myth of the objective. Is it any less ridiculous to try to achieve any far-off, ambitious objective by measuring how close it is to our best candidate so far? What this thought experiment exposes is that the traditional approach to achievement, driven by and informed by objectives, can lead to genuinely ridiculous behavior. But ridiculous or not, the assumption that objectives should drive achievement dominates our culture and our everyday lives.

Evolution in nature is a stepping-stone collector. These stepping stones are collected not because they may lead to some far off primary objective, some ultimate uber-organism towards which all of life is directed, but because they are well-adapted in their own right. Each organism on the path to humans reproduced because it was successful in its own niche at its own time.

Chase the interesting and novel

Novelty can often act as a stepping stone detector because anything novel is a potential stepping stone to something even more novel. In other words, novelty is a rough shortcut for identifying interestingness: Interesting ideas are those that open up new possibilities. And while it might sound wishy-washy to go looking for “interesting” things, interestingness is a surprisingly deep and important concept.

The important point is that novelty (and interestingness) can compound over time by continually making new things possible. So instead of seeking a final objective, by looking for novelty the reward is an endless chain of stepping stones branching out into the future as novelty leads to further novelty. Rather than thinking of the future as a destination, it becomes a road, a path of undefined potential. Evolution in nature and human innovation are ratcheting processes that build stepping stone upon stepping stone, branching and diverging ever outward to everywhere and nowhere in particular.

But there might still seem to be a problem. Chasing novelty suggests a kind of aimless uncertainty. How do we know where we’re going? But that’s exactly the point. The greatest processes of innovation work precisely because they are not trying to go anywhere in particular. In this sense, we’ve abandoned the false security of the objective to embrace the wild possibility of the unknown. Of course, there’s still reason for concern. Such a search for novelty still feels unanchored and perhaps even almost random. Would it not simply chart a course from one fleeting novelty to another? Why should we believe that such a process has any meaning to it?

Because we can look to the past and see it works. I chose the natural selection example because I think almost everyone is familiar with the concept, but these ideas can be seen in all innovation whether it be the creation of the computer or the airplane... both of which are included in the actual book. Sure there is still the possibility that you spend your entire life working and never achieve greatness, but if you are reading this, you are probably the type of person that is going to forge ahead anyways. That fear will always be there, but now you can stop being so anxious about not having a clear and detailed plan. Chase the interesting and the novel if you want to change the world.

Greatness is possible if you are willing to stop demanding what that greatness should be.

So what am I doing?

I am trying my best to push humanity forward by letting go of objectives and pursing novel things that are interesting to me.

Even if all of this is not true, what else would I do with my life? I'm open to better answers, but so far this is the best one I've found.

So what interests you? Email me.