Greatness cannot be planned, what's more harmful than planned economy is planned thinking
- Prophet Bookstore
- Feb 26
- 10 min read
Updated: Aug 17
By Prophet Bookstore (Wechat account: Prophet Big Issues), rewritten in English by Mr. Y
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” - Western proverb
Today, many people have heard about the disasters that the planned economy has brought to human: the Great Famine in Ukraine, the Three Years of Difficulty in China, and the "Arduous March" in North Korea.
However, the "planned thinking", which is the source of the "planned economy" cognition, has been everywhere.
In personal growth, "My success can be replicated", "Let not your child lose at the starting line ", "Life is like a button, one wrong step will lead to all wrong steps “.
In business, “A small goal first, 100 million dollars!”, achieve this in three years, achieve that in five years, “annual, quarterly, monthly KPI”.
At the society or national level, "family planning", "catch up with and surpass the UK and the US", "100 Nobel Prize plans in 100 years".
These ubiquitous, long-term, macro, and “lofty” slogans and goals are all manifestations of “planned thinking” at different levels and degrees.
Today, this kind of "goal culture" has penetrated the daily lives of most people. Instead of being resisted, this “culture” has become more and more popular. "No goals, no plans" have become the synonym of drifting and indulgence, and even positions and courses such as life planners and career planning courses have been created.
Rather than negating the planned economy, what is more urgent now is the denial of this "planned thinking". The reason is that planned thinking is not only the cognitive source of the planned economic utopia but also rooted in the human brain. Its existence will seriously affect our understanding of individuals, business, society and even the real world.
The book " Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" published by two computer scientists, Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, is a masterpiece that reflects on "planned thinking" in all aspects.
In the view of the two authors, the clearer the lofty "goal", the more serious the time waste and the frustration of confidence, and the further away people are deviated from success and happiness.
In the book, the two authors revealed at least four major fallacies of planning thinking with a strong "purposefulness".
Planning thinking fallacy 1: short-sightedness effect - Falling into a big trap to avoid a small pit
The road to success requires many "steppingstones", but these "steppingstones" are often unknown and uncertain. The evolutionary process can produce a colorful biological world because nature is a "steppingstone" collector.
The many mutinies that occurred during the biological evolution were neither harmful nor beneficial and originally had nothing to do with the survival competition. However, it was these purposeless "mutinies" or "variations" that have led to species diversity and brought greater adaptability to organisms.
Therefore, the correct strategy in life should be to keep an open mind to any path in order to achieve greatness and be a "steppingstone" collector to create a path that would have never been thought of otherwise. Excessive obsession with single lofty goals often leads to short-sightedness, resulting in a blind eye to truly meaningful "discoveries".
Many important mathematical discoveries were based on mathematicians’ curiosity and intellectual adventures and eventually developed into the cornerstones of science and technology.
The induction coil, the predecessor of the generator, was not originally designed for this purpose.
The successful algorithms that control humanoid robots like Optimus were not originally designed to provide the robots with any practical functions, but simply to perform interesting actions.
Economist Samuelson once used the fallacy of composition to explain this ubiquitous violation of original intentions in real life and the world.
"The fallacy of composition is an informal fallacy that arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole."
What is right at the micro level may not be correct at the macro level; what is right at the macro level may be very wrong at the micro level. It is often unknown whether a local goal or discovery is the correct answer or path to the ultimate grand goal or discovery.
If you are too obsessed with a distant grand goal, you will fall into the denial of "the current uselessness" and over-reliance on "the current useability".
History has proven countless times that things that are useless at the moment may turn out to be the most useful in the end. The old sayings of Chinese people, "read thousands of books and travel thousands of miles", "meet countless people", "dare to try and fail, and be brave to try", all follow this principle.
Planning thinking fallacy 2: social engineering movement - A parody of science and engineering
There is no doubt that technological innovation is the core motive driving social progress in contemporary times.
The biggest feature of the technological innovation is actually "uncertainty". In other words, it is impossible to predict in advance which field, what kind of discovery, or what kind of technology will become the goat.
From the earliest great voyages to the later steam revolution, electricity revolution, until the recent Internet revolution, and Artificial Intelligence revolution, none of these important inventions and creations had a project investment department or planning committee behind them.
On the contrary, many of those social engineering projects with strong "purpose" and "plan" thinking ended in failure.
In 1971, Nixon launched a “War on Cancer” that has had no effect to date.
In 1982, Japan introduced a 10-year "fifth-generation computer" system, which ended in failure.
China’s “863 Plan”, “Shanghai Jiaotong University's Han Chip”, etc., countless projects ended in farce.
As Hayek criticized the social engineering movement in his book The Counter-Revolution of Science: A Study in the Abuse of Reason, the belief that innovation can be drafted and designed like a construction engineering is "an accomplice of the arrogant people who want to control society."
No great innovation is strategically planned. As people once said:" The so-called strategy is nothing more than luckiness summarized after the fact."
Any businessman who claims to have seen through the future is most likely a liar.
Planning thinking fallacy 3: Campbell's Law - Every policy from above has its own countermeasures
Most people's working method is to focus on one goal and work hard on it. But in the real world, many methods that seem to help us achieve our goals are very deceptive, and even the benchmarks for measuring the goals themselves are problematic.
Instead of becoming a steppingstone, a long-term, clear "lofty" goal has become a stumbling stone.
In response to the endless "performance evaluation" nowadays, sociologist Campbell proposed a "Campbell's Law": the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corrupt pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. Campbell's Law points out that the more important an indicator is in the social decision-making process, the more likely it is to be manipulated.
The first danger revealed by "Campbell's Law" is that a single indicator can hardly reflect the real problems.
For example, evaluating teachers based on students' test scores will directly induce teachers to conduct test-oriented teaching. The result is not to cultivate students with rich knowledge and practical skills, but to produce students who are good at taking exams. Students' grades may improve, but they have less practical knowledge.
The real purpose of education should be to make students understand learning, love learning, and be good at learning, rather than to become an "Exam expert".
Another danger revealed by "Campbell's Law" is improper incentives. Rewards exercised to make results better can easily backfire.
For example, Britain once offered a bounty to eliminate poisonous snakes in Colonia India. As a result, Indians competed to raise cobras in order to get the bounty, and the number of poisonous snakes in India increased at the end.
Social movements aimed at reducing alcoholism led to the proliferation of other more harmful drugs. Giving big bonuses to executives to increase corporate profits will actually lead to short-term profit-seeking.
All these just reflect the common phenomenon of "there are policies from above and countermeasures from below" in many societies and countries. Some people also refute that "indicators can only be completed and optimized if they are quantified", but the opposite is true, as the results always show that "the more quantified, the worse it is."
Planning thinking fallacy 4: The God Delusion - Greatness cannot be planned
The watchmaker analogy is a teleological argument used to prove the existence of God, just as it is easy to observe that a watch (e.g., a pocket watch) does not arise by chance or on its own, but was instead made by the deliberate handiwork of a skilled watchmaker, so it is easy to make the analogy that nature did not happen by chance or by itself, but was made by the intentional hand of an intelligent designer.
In The Blind Watchmaker, science communicator and author Richard Dawkins argued that the watch analogy conflates the complexity of organisms that can reproduce themselves (and may become more complex over time) with the complexity of inanimate objects that cannot transmit any reproductive changes (such as the numerous parts made in a watch). The comparison breaks down because of this important distinction.
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
Chinese sociologist Zheng Yefu wrote in his masterpiece Civilization is a Byproduct that many great inventions in human history were the result of unintentional actions, without any plan beforehand
Agriculture was a byproduct of human settlement and population growth under a specific natural geographical environment (e.g. suitable for growing wheat or rice). No human ancestor had intended to build an agricultural society before that.
The emergence of agriculture had also derived division of labor, exchange, class, technological progress, etc., which was furtherly not what the first batch of farmers could have anticipated.
Writing was the result of the promotion of state power. Writing depends on state power - it is indispensable, and state power in turn depends on writing - it is more convenient to promote state power with writing. But the cultural communication effect after writing invented is by no means the purpose of promoting state power at the beginning.
Papermaking was a byproduct of people making bark cloth. Before it was used for writing, "paper" was mainly used for packaging and making clothes. The cultural communication effect produced by paper was also by no means what the first batch of papermakers could have imagined.
In the book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, the two authors also found that the great achievements or inventions which subverted the entire industry or system were never deliberately planned according to a certain goal, but the result of unintentional efforts.
Many great musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs started their careers halfway through their careers; Elvis Presley never thought of becoming a singer when he was young.
The Wright brothers, who invented the airplane, were bicycle manufacturers at first.
The vacuum tube was a principal component of early computers, but the concept of computing did not provide any clues about the need for vacuum tubes. The vacuum tube was invented long before computers and was not used for computing purposes at all when it was created.
All examples pointed to one conclusion - civilization was a byproduct, and greatness cannot be planned. The real path to success often subverts goal-oriented plans and breaks previous thinking and cognition.
The above four fallacies were just the tip of the iceberg of the paradigm of this book. In addition, there were many highlights and wonderful discoveries in the book.
Giving up the planning thinking, everyone's life has infinite possibilities
In the book, the two authors indicated that the achievements of most fields of human beings, from career choices to love, leisure and entertainment, and even historical exploration, could not be planned - the more obsessed with planning, the further away from success: the greater the success was, the further was away from the original plan.
In fact, this book was also an "accidental work". The two authors were machine learning researchers.
This book was an unexpected spark that popped out during their research on intelligent robots. They originally had no plan to publish a book, but they ended up "unintentionally" harvesting this masterpiece that subverts the conventional way of thinking of human beings.
The research on these thinking paradigms has broken the superstition of relying on goals and plans to achieve success that has persisted for many years in our mindset and heralds a new chapter of great innovation for mankind.
"Unexpected work" also has "unexpected surprises".
In the book, the two authors also proposed specific methodologies such as "treasure hunter thinking", "steppingstone model", and "novelty exploration", etc. It is an operational guide for individuals, businesses, and society to achieve true and great success and happiness and provides a new perspective for the upgrade of human intelligence.
More than 20 years ago, China Central Television broadcast a public service advertisement: "Life is like a journey. You don't have to worry about the destination. What really matters is the scenery along the way and the mood of watching the scenery."
This was not a spiritual chicken soup, but a truly high standard "success motto".
The best way to achieve "grand ambitions" is "not to deliberately pursue a specific goal", because the more deliberations, the more things will go against your wishes.
These words can also serve as a life guide, give up overly persistent goal consciousness, and life has infinite possibilities.
Source & Copyright Notice
This article is translated from the original Chinese article “比计划经济更可怕的是计划思维”, first published at https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/pdJi0hfNTuh4rTc1wlAF1g.
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