There's plenty of evidence to make it clear that sometimes we can do well without setting goals, but a deeper problem is that novelty searches don't always help us find what we're looking for. We may wander aimlessly among all possible answers, but in the end we may not be able to find a solution, a situation that is also common in real life. So it's a mistake to think that we need deeper diversity while still focusing on pursuing holistic goals. Its mistake lies in denying the inevitable flaws of the goal – if the wrong compass is used in the way forward, then no matter how hard you try to deviate from its direction, you will be influenced by it to continue in the wrong direction.
In fact, the limitations of search have been discussed by countless scholars. For example, the "no free lunch theorem" proposed by mathematicians David Warbert and William McCreadyy shows that there is no overall optimal search algorithm for all the problems to be optimized. In addition, with the mentality of "lonely inventor" or "ancient sages are lonely", it is unrealistic to assume that "a certain goal can inevitably be achieved only through the unremitting efforts of oneself." On the contrary, in the long run, the people who can finally completely conquer the "search space" must be a group of bright minds with different interests, not individuals who rely on any single goal alone. We are sure that butterfly images and car images on websites like the image incubator will be found in the future, not because someone is deliberately looking for it, but because everyone is looking for everything full of possibilities. The future may not come as we planned, but it will.
The right way to unleash the energy of treasure hunters is to separate people from each other, as image incubator sites do, where people can only continue to create, interact and interact on pictures completed by others. Although many people involved in the treasure hunt system may come with personal goals, since everyone's goals are different, the whole system itself does not have a set goal to agree on.
Are there clear and unambiguous cases in which defining the overall goals of society creates more disadvantages? In fact, there is abundant evidence in the social sciences to support how often this happens. Campbell's Law, for example, states that when social indicators are quantified and used in social decision-making, they bring greater pressure for social corruption, corroding and distorting social processes that would otherwise need to be monitored. In other words, social indicators such as academic achievement tests tend to be least effective when they are used as a means of "performance improvement." The reason is that it is difficult for a single metric to accurately grasp what people really care about. Evaluating teachers based on students' test scores can lead to test-based teaching that results not in students with a wealth of knowledge and practical skills, but in test-taking students who are good at memorization and exams. When targeting test scores, students' grades may improve, but it also means they have less practical knowledge.
A more pernicious and extreme form of Campbell's Law is perverse incentives, where sometimes rewards or measures that make things better actually make things worse. For example, during the Indian colonial period, the British government introduced a policy to eliminate poisonous snakes: Indian citizens received a payment for each dead snake handed in. However, this measure did not have the desired effect, and instead led to a scramble among Indian citizens to raise cobras in order to kill them for profit. Eventually, the number of venomous snakes in India increased as a result. It can be seen that improper incentive policies have the effect of running counter to expectations. The same thing happened in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, but the target was not poisonous snakes, but rats. This ultimately led to the emergence of rat farms, not the reduction of the rodent problem.
The early stages of software engineering have seen a similar "everything is measurable" trend. Many are keen to discuss the promise of specific measurement standards in the hope of improving productivity and software quality. Tom Demack wrote an influential book in 1982, the most famous of which is that "what is unmeasurable is what is uncontrollable." 35 years later, Demack published another article stating that his views had changed over time, 'the measure is good, more is better, the more the better', but in the end it turned out that 'their use should be cautious and modest'. Because for complex software made up of millions of lines of code and countless interacting parts, a simple measure of "one size fits all" becomes worthless. "While metrics allow us to exert control over the process, tight controls only apply to projects that don't have the potential to have a significant impact," Demack wrote. So no matter how accurately we can assess the similarity of the skulls, this method will not work. Because the picture that leads to the skull picture with the nature of a stepping stone does not look like a skull in any way. The problem with this approach is that what we're comparing or evaluating (the skull) looks completely different from the stepping stone to the picture of the skull. So when we are guided by a fundamentally wrong policy, no amount of accuracy is of any use to us.
The Finnish primary education system, for example, gives teachers greater personal autonomy and eliminates the need for students to take standardized tests. From this point of view, Finland's education system follows more of a non-goal-based spirit of exploration, which is a key factor in Finland's ability to lead the world in education, far surpassing the United States. Equally noteworthy is the fact that higher education in the United States has only recently begun to embrace the same "accuracy assessment-based accountability" as elementary schools, which had been considered global leaders for some time.
In place of the deceptive principle of the target is the "treasure hunter principle", and what the treasure hunter does is collect stepping stones. In fact, instead of using different evaluation criteria, teaching should be organized as a "treasure hunt" dedicated to finding the best educational methods. So, what exactly should be done? We may need to get most teachers and schools to stop standardizing tests on students and instead have each teacher compile a collection of assignments, tests, syllabuses, teaching concepts, teaching methods, and student samples at the end of the year. The set was anonymously sent to a panel of judges for evaluation. The group consisted of five teachers from different schools across the country. The jury evaluates the work of fellow faculty members in terms of curriculum integrity, innovation, and student performance. The results of the assessment consist of a score and written comments. The appeal of this peer-driven assessment approach is that teachers and schools are no longer compared to "we expect them to reach a certain level and height," but to "assess them as they are." It is important that the entire education system will be fully focused on disseminating new educational ideas. Teachers are not forced to resort to dull and rigid test-taking methods, but are constantly exposed to a variety of teaching methods. This improvement is due to the fact that teachers participate in different groups each year and receive evaluations and feedback from others. Therefore, teachers will constantly see the teaching methods and achievements of other teachers, and scrutinize the rationale behind them.