Stanley: Metrics are useless for hard problems because required stepping stones are counterintuitive
Ken Stanley · Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives · Oct 4, 2022 · at 13:22
AI researcher Ken Stanley explains his 'stepping stone' principle and why objective metrics fail to identify innovative breakthroughs.
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“If the actual stepping stones that lead to where we want to go are counterintuitive, in other words, they're not what you would expect, then the metrics are useless, right? Because they won't detect those stepping stones because they don't look like what the metrics are trying to detect. And if you think about it, of course, they're going to be counterintuitive. It's like a rule. Because the thing is, if the stepping stones are not counterintuitive, then it's not a hard problem. So we would have solved it already.”
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