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Categories come easy to our minds. Dichotomies, even easier. In a seemingly innate drive to simplify, regularize, and reduce, we perceive and act in the world through the lens of dichotomies. Even a quick survey of our world will reveal this strong tendency to dichotomise. One ever present dichotomy that riddles us is the exploration–exploitation trade-off. From the mundane and everyday – try the new restaurant or familiar –  to the complicated and life-changing fork-in-road decisions, we are constantly faced with the choice to explore or exploit. Choose the road well traveled or less traveled? But what does it mean to explore and exploit? When is it better to do one or the other?

Ontologically, life is a series of explorations. Fundamentally, you can only make your path by walking it. However, path-making is difficult, tenuous, risky, so niche constructed worlds afford us engineered trails to exploit. A map can ground exploiters, whereas explorers cling to the shaky grounding of a compass.  Exploiters focus on the center with an eye to the boundaries, explorers live on the edge and look further into the horizon. Exploration has the allure of novelty, whereas exploitation has the comfort of familiarity.  Exploration is about possibilities, whereas exploitation resides in probabilities. The outcomes during exploitation are distributed normally, whereas power-laws are the appropriate descriptive distribution of explorations. When exploiting, consequences resemble their causes, however explorations can yield phase transitions with effects unrecognizable from their causes. 

Recognizing the primacy of exploration, both exploration and exploitation are necessary for a fulfilled life. It is the wise who recognize that the dichotomy, if not pragmatically false, is fundamentally untrue. It is the powerful that minimize dichotomies imposed by others. It is the opportunist who turns the  dichotomy into a continuum. Explore here, exploit there, explore more now, less later. Evolution is a 4.5 billion year lesson in exploration-exploitation. Exploiting affordances, optimizing probabilities for survival, while exploring the space of possibilities via mechanisms that produce variation. As someone who actively seeks lessons from the natural world, these essays are my attempt at explorations of the mind. As the historian Will Durant so eloquently stated,  “the only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual.”