Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned [video]

The story of how Feynman found out about the Challenger disaster is quite interesting. It is not that he was a clever detective ferreting out the facts -- it's just that he tried something different and let himself be nudged along in the process.

To quote from his book "What do you care what other people think?"...

Well, a few days after the accident, I get a telephone call from the head of NASA, William Graham, asking me to be on the committee investigating what went wrong with the shuttle! [...] When I heard the investigation was going to be in Washington, my immediate reaction was not to do it: I have a principle of not going anywhere near Washington or having anything to do with government, so my immediate reaction was -- how am I going to get out of this? [Gweneth, his wife says] "If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join in the commission, there will be eleven people -- all in a group going around from place to place together -- while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it." She said, "There isn't anyone else who can do that like you can."

Steve jobs said something like: You can only connect the dots looking backwards. I've found that to be true in many ways. If you look at any success story, it usually involves many degrees of luck, chance, crazy coincidence, etc. From business stories, to how you met your closest friends, or even your significant other.

Of course, this is survivorship bias, and we're constantly missing great opportunities every day.. but it's still interesting how things turn out.

Some of the extrapolations from the picture platforms to other domains are a bit hand-wavy in the talk, but his response to the Edison question [0] is pretty enlightening.

Additionally - just pondering here - this heuristic of novelty seems present in human nature: - the drive that scientists, mathematicians, researchers, and technologists have to discover new things - the drive that hackers and artists have to make new and different things

Does anyone agree that these aspects of humans are in tune with what the subject of the talk, or are they more unrelated than I think?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI

Found this pretty much enlightening, I think this applies to careers as well. When I look back at the steps I took towards getting to where I am now, I don't see any connection, they were seemingly random steps.

This was much better than I expected from the title.

There are counterexamples, for instance, the Wright Bros. invented the airplane through a directed research and development process.

Interesting talk. I really couldn't tell how much of it really meant something and how much of it was fluff like "power poses".

In any case he's been giving similar talks for a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZBViI8ZaU0

But there are still too many javascript libraries out there!

This fits right in with the Connections thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075430

which is all about serendipitous discoveries.

Speaking from an AI/ML perspective, I'd like to point out one flaw, which is that exploration (of unexplored states) is certainly something that can be incorporated into your objective function, or accounted for in other ways, depending on the specific AI/ML algorithm and domain. This is a very common thing to do in reinforcement learning, for example.

I'd like to hear arguments against his claim. Even better if it is a machine learning experiment that invalidates his idea.

It would be interesting to compare the two sides.