Improve vs Explore

Should you make something new for breakfast or eat eggs and toast like you have for years? Should you learn something new or keep practicing what you already know? Is it worth it to read that new book or read an old classic you’ve already read, looking for new wisdom?

Every day we make choices that can broadly fall into two buckets: Improving and Exploring. If you want to improve a skill you already know, you can try to perfect it by doing some well-known exercises. In music, that could mean playing scales or easier pieces you already know. If you want to explore, that could mean anything from learning a new piece to add to your repertoire to picking a new instrument to play. One choice is more familiar and easy to quantify, whereas the other is unfamiliar and hard to quantify. If a piano player learns how to play the drums, how do you know before your invest hours into the drums how much better you’ll get at the piano, or music in general? Exploring is also hard because there are infinite things to explore at any time. I could continue playing the piano, or choose the drums, or choose any number of instruments to pick up or any number of music pieces to learn, and for all of them, the rewards are uncertain.

The familiar improvement sure sounds nice, but you’ll eventually run out gains from doing the same thing. Keep doing the same exercises? It’ll take longer to build muscle in the same area. Keep playing the same piece? Eventually you’ll play it just about as well as you can. So you’re forced to explore a little bit.

Exploration sure sounds better, but it can be a slog. You might try something new and realize your old skills have atrophied. Maybe you’ll find that whatever you found out was strictly worse than whatever you used to do in the past, and it was just better off to improve instead of explore. If you get burnt too many times exploring, you’ll find the warm embrace of improvement through familiar activities inviting.

There’s no real wisdom to be gleamed here. Even if you had the fastest computer in the world and a relatively simple improve vs explore dilemma, the computer most likely wouldn’t be able to find the optimal allocation of improving vs exploring – that means there’s no one “best” way of living life or improving a skill. I find something nice about that – that we can’t reduce hard problems to simple computation makes life worth living.

There are more areas in which this conflict comes up – you might choose to believe stereotypes vs spending the time to think through every scenario. We’ve learned that stereotypes are bad – they underpin most of the injustices in the world today – but they’re also a great evolutionary heuristic. If we always had to make a case for why the bear in front of us could be nice and not maul us to death or that jumping off a cliff might be good for us, there’d be a lot fewer people. Put more simply, we have a conscious and an unconscious brain. The unconscious brain just does things for us without rhyme or reason. It’s the reason why we don’t have to consciously breathe or why our reflexes move our hands off a hot stove. It takes less energy than our conscious brain, and is resistant to exploring. The conscious part of us is more malleable, but it takes a lot more time and energy. Thus, it’s less likely to get stuck in a local minimum of reasoning, but only if our brain has enough resources to devote to this kind of thinking. We’ve also learned how to fuse the two – we’re very good at pattern matching, but this can fail us when things seem incoherent, or otherwise defy our expectations.

That just leaves how we choose to live our lives or improve our skills. There’s probably many ways to get close enough to the top (either being fulfilled or good at what you do) that there’s not much to say about it. Some people choose pursuits that are very straightforward and more amenable to more of the improve side, like chess, but that’s not to say that top chess players don’t try to explore new ways to improve their chess. Other pursuits that are more creative like pursuing art or music require a lot of exploration to master. Some people prefer to spend their time more focused on a routine whereas some are more free form. Who’s to say what works for you?