The Importance of Interestingness in Human Invention and Education

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Interestingness is crucial to progress in fields like education and human invention.
Humans care about things they find interesting, whereas evolution is guided by arbitrary concepts of interestingness.
Exploring the issue of what is interesting is important, even if it veers around the accountability issue.
Interestingness is the magic sauce that has enabled humans to create amazing artifacts and genres over the eons.

Artificial intelligence researcher and author Kenneth Stanley has argued that “as soon as you create an objective, you ruin your ability to reach it.” So what should you consider when thinking about your objectives, and what will set you up for success? On this episode Stanley discusses how to set the right objectives for your life, why we’re too tied to accomplishments, what role accountability plays in our education system, the value of peer review, why transformative innovations are always counter intuitive, and so much more. Stanley is the co–author of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, as well as the former Head of Core AI Research at Uber AI and the Open-Endedness Team Leader at OpenAI. He has also served as the Charles Millican Professor in Computer Science at University of Central Florida.

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