Ideal or Incremental?

Aim & Acceleration

I sometimes feel I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the idealized version of any particular system. I’ve been building an AI object detection feedback loop where I collect data, label it, train the computer on it, use the model to find the unreliable data, label it in a feedback loop of improvement. I’m easily beyond iteration 99.

Like many of my projects they start as ideas: a concept and an ideal. “How can I build a self improving object detector?” It takes thousands of incremental steps and thoughts to actualize any particular idea. I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out the first minimum viable product prototype.

Yet, once I’ve built any part of a system, the ideal beckons. If you make this part faster you’ll be able to label more data, if you add this element you’ll automate the labeling more, if you create this pipeline it’ll optimize the feedback loop, add this, tweak that. Endless potential.

I’m told this is the engineering mindset, good for me since figuring out how to make things work is essentially my job. However, there is a downside in that nothing is every really finished. There is no obtaining the ideal which was exciting enough to get me started. It’s an ideal which I will always fall short of. Even if it can get incrementally better forever.

What’s an ideal monetary system?

What’s an ideal governance structure?

What’s an ideal life?

What’s worth dying for?

Big questions always attract my deep thought

I think a lot about everything.

Do you think about everything? Does the inefficiency of everything irritate you? Do you find yourself compulsively optimizing everything in your mind?

When stories are told about Nikola Tesla it is said he designed his inventions in his mind, tested them, iterated on their design, until they were completed products and then he built them.

I also build and test everything in my mind before I consciously bring it into reality. Of course I can never account for everything and often come to a fork in the design road which requires experimental testing to validate. Thanks to my father I have the scientific method burned into the underlying structure of my neurons. My question everything model demands everything be torn apart and put back together, better.

The reason everything is not ideal can be boiled down to entropy, things do not remain organized without conscious effort and intelligent organization. They naturally fall apart and it is only with the consciously directed intention of life which build order and regularity.

That is my purpose, to put things back together. I want to build the longest lasting game of life. I am on the side of life.

Why do I prefer going uphill? Why do I find myself compelled to do difficult things? Where does my energy originate?

This is not intended to be an organized article with an end like usual.

There is a strange force which pulls me, and another which pushes me. The trick is to align them such that they aim towards the ideal. Then at least that which I fear pushes me and that which I love pulls me to ever greater heights.

We are all vectors like this, and that the more we can align together, the more we will be able to move closer to the ideal, and to eternally refine what the idea is. “Build heaven on earth” as the saying used to go.

What does your ideal look like? Ideal life, Ideal Body, Ideal Mind, Soul, Spirit..?

Unless we actually physically build, test, and try out the steps that get us closer to our conceptualized ideal, we won’t know if the steps actually get us closer work or take us backwards.

Try it out, test your ideas, go for it, do the work, ask, knock, seek.