Good news everyone: I’m getting into podcasting!
As part of my investigation into how scientific paradigms are created, I hosted a talk by Simon DeDeo, Professor Of Many Topics at Carnegie Mellon and the Santa Fe Institute, recorded at the recent ILIAD conference in Berkeley. He discusses the idea of explore vs exploit in science. Spoiler: he comes down very hard on the exploit side, based primarily on a case study of Darwin.
For the video averse among you, here’s the transcript.
I have two more episodes in editing, but am on the hunt for more guests. I’m looking to talk to scientists or ex-scientists about how ideas are created and spread in their field. Bonus points if they can talk about Chaos, Complexity, or Catastrophe Theory in particular.
Thanks to my Lightspeed Grants and my Patreon patrons for supporting this work.
Aceso Under Glass 
Link is broken, directs to:
http://simon DeDeo – Social and Decision Sciences – Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences – Carnegie Mellon University
Thank you!
Is this really an exception to explore exploit. For good algorithms we expect that the luckier we are the faster the shift from explore to exploit is. And for the people with the best scores at the end we find they shifted fastest. So finding a great scientist already focused on the field of his eventual fame at a young age doesn’t seem to contradict the theory. I think there are more specific lessons to take here as to how much we should encourage people to be well rounded but I think the framing does multi-arm bandit analogies a disservice.