(2023-08-29) Brander Tools For Thought Should Evolve Building Blocks

Gordon Brander: Tools for thought should evolve building blocks. Goldberg’s paper is about designing genetic algorithms (GAs), but the patterns he identifies reveal deep insights about innovation in general. They also suggest new ways of thinking about tools for thought. Let's unpack!

the GA ends up unbundling, remixing, and composing building blocks to make new, higher-level building blocks, in a (hopefully) upward spiral.

We see this building block pattern emerge in other kinds of evolving systems, too.

As Goldberg puts it, identification and exchange of building blocks is the critical path to innovative success.

what are GAs evolving? A population of possibilities.

Hard problems are hard because their building blocks are hard to find

This insight clicks together nicely with insights from assembly theory

By measuring the complexity of a system, we can get a sense of its evolutionary depth, its assembly index.

*Goldberg calls these BB-hard problems.

…This may be because the BBs are deep or complex, hard to find, or because different BBs are difficult to separate, but whatever the difficulty, it may be understood in strictly mechanistic terms.*

Many BB-Hard problems are problems that require a relatively high assembly index to solve.

Innovation has to outpace takeover, or evolution gets stuck

Genetic algorithms sometimes prematurely converge toward a single solution, and then get stuck.

Why does this happen? Goldberg identifies two important variables: time-to-innovation (ti) and time-to-takeover (t).*

A tool for thought should evolve building blocks

Building blocks encode a useful trait. A building block note encodes an idea.

Building blocks are atomic.

Building blocks are composable

Aha! We’ve rediscovered the evergreen note pattern.

Grow the pool of building blocks. The bigger your pool of atomic notes, the greater the number of possible combinations.

Introduce mutation. Permanent notes are sort of like DNA. They act as a durable repository for memory across time. What might happen if we introduced mutation to the system?

Add a selection pressure. Evolution requires mutation, memory, and one more thing—selection.

How might you, yourself, act as a selection pressure on your own notes? (curation) Can we introduce game loops to help us manually curate, combine, and prune notes?

Expand the diversity of building blocks. As Goldberg puts it, diversity is a necessary condition of selectorecombinative success.

Build an engine to discover hard building blocks. These building blocks are probably going to have a high assembly index. What does this mean for note-taking? We want to build game loops that encourage us to compose small ideas into bigger ones, in a recursive loop

Accelerate time-to-innovation.