Individuals who shape the world, are often those who have ended up being optimizers.
It might be worth fleshing this claim out because it doesn’t seem clear to me (interpreting “often” so the claim is non-trivial). Isn’t the world mostly shaped by ideas? Aren’t ideas mostly generated by people who are especially explore rather than exploit? Isn’t explore rather than exploit at least on the surface, and maybe more deeply, not an instance of “being an optimizer”? I mean, a true optimizer would certainly explore a lot. But it doesn’t seem so straightforward to interpret individual humans this way. Maybe the story could be that individual humans who bring out novel ideas are participating as a part of some broader optimizer, but this would need fleshing out. And your statement connotes, to me, optimizers in the sense of, like, Napoleon or something, which is a plausible but different picture of what shapes the world. Yet another picture would be “low-level emergent social forces”.
It might be worth fleshing this claim out because it doesn’t seem clear to me (interpreting “often” so the claim is non-trivial). Isn’t the world mostly shaped by ideas? Aren’t ideas mostly generated by people who are especially explore rather than exploit? Isn’t explore rather than exploit at least on the surface, and maybe more deeply, not an instance of “being an optimizer”? I mean, a true optimizer would certainly explore a lot. But it doesn’t seem so straightforward to interpret individual humans this way. Maybe the story could be that individual humans who bring out novel ideas are participating as a part of some broader optimizer, but this would need fleshing out. And your statement connotes, to me, optimizers in the sense of, like, Napoleon or something, which is a plausible but different picture of what shapes the world. Yet another picture would be “low-level emergent social forces”.