Comment by ccvannorman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccvannorman | Hacker News Reader

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Cute but a bit trite. I love surprises, particularly in the form of, "Wow, I can make HOW much money doing $new_thing?" or "Wow, $new_tech is actually possible?", and have found my optimal path to date is constantly pushing my boundaries to find such surprises. Likewise in science all progress happens with surprises, not, "Aha! Just as I thought." but "Oh, that's interesting..."

In other words one optimization for living is to seek out and maximize surprise!

I definitely agree with the compression of information and simulation of potential futures as a default operation for brains, but I don't agree with the blanket "reduction in surprise" as the reward function, as it's much more nuanced.

In other words, cave-man could have been more successful minimizing lifetime surprise, if he sat in his cave all day, not playing with tools or meeting other tribes, and that's clearly not what happened.

I would rather argue that we make scientific discoveries to predict the future and minimize surprises. The discoveries themselves are often indeed surprising. But once we understand things (electricity, magnetism, gravitation) we can predict behaviour better (planets location in two weeks) so we are no longer surprised by how things turn out to be :)

> Likewise in science all progress happens with surprises, not, "Aha! Just as I thought." but "Oh, that's interesting..."

I'd say that the bulk of scientific progress is of the "Ah, just as we thought." sort, but it's not the kind that gets headlines (because humans are wired to take notice and remember surprising information, making them less likely to be surprised in the future).

Isn't the drive to create "surprising" results in science creating situations like the replication crisis and incentivizing researchers to manipulate results so as to make them more surprising?

I think you are in some way looking for those information, or have a place ready for those information in your mind, and therefore those are not really a surprise. Anyway, I'm very curious, what are the things you do to 'push your boundaries to find such surprises'?

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