Ken Stanley, AI researcher and author of 'Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned', discusses why standardized metric-driven assessment fails in complex domains with host Shane Parrish.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.4s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We cannot make progress in certain kinds of extremely complex problems, which education is one of those. Simply by just laying out some assessment system and then trying to follow it towards this global objective, which is just incredibly complex to get to.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ken Stanley
Insight
Stanley: Dismissing experts' subjective sense of 'interesting' cripples innovation
“It's actually the subjective judgments are the interesting ones because, like, the objective judgments are easy. You don't need a degree to just measure something. You know, some kid takes some test, you get a score. You can average them across everybody at th…”
Ken StanleyOct 4, 2022▶ 25:57Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives
Opinion
Stanley: Direct pursuit of human-level AI is a naive objective
“Like, at some level, there's, like, this really grandiose conception of, like, some human-like computer, and, like, that is, I think, a naive objective right now. Like, you just don't want to know how to do that. We don't know what the stepping stones are that…”
Ken StanleyOct 4, 2022▶ 39:29Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives
Insight
Stanley: AI research proves objective-driven achievement is deeply flawed
“And in the course of doing that research, we just started to see undeniable evidence that that approach to achievement has some serious flaws.”
Ken StanleyOct 4, 2022▶ 3:00Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives
Insight
Stanley: Major breakthroughs require positioning for serendipity rather than setting objectives
“And actually like a lot of what we do that facilitates making these kinds of important discoveries is to actually set us up, set ourselves up for having effective serendipity, which is not the way that we, you know, talk about things when you talk about settin…”
Ken StanleyOct 4, 2022▶ 4:45Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives
Insight
Stanley: Metrics are useless for hard problems because required stepping stones are counterintuitive
“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 m…”
Ken StanleyOct 4, 2022▶ 13:22Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives
Insight
Stanley: Evolution solved all problems in one run, unlike typical ML
“Evolution, it's a very unique thing in the sense that it's kind of like a search or like a learning algorithm that discovered everything that was ever created in nature in a single run. This is very different from like what you see in typical machine learning,…”
Ken StanleyOct 4, 2022▶ 21:25Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.