The Nonlinear Library LW - Leading The Parade by johnswentworth
Jan 31, 2024
14:21
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Leading The Parade, published by johnswentworth on January 31, 2024 on LessWrong.
Background
Terminology: Counterfactual Impact vs "Leading The Parade"
Y'know how a parade or marching band has a person who walks in front waving a fancy-looking stick up and down? Like this guy:
The classic 80's comedy Animal House features a
great scene in which a prankster steals the stick, and then leads the marching band off the main road and down a dead-end alley.
In the context of the movie, it's hilarious. It's also, presumably, not at all how parades actually work these days. If you happen to be "leading" a parade, and you go wandering off down a side alley, then (I claim) those following behind will be briefly confused, then ignore you and continue along the parade route. The parade leader may appear to be "leading", but they do not have any counterfactual impact on the route taken by everyone else; the "leader" is just walking slightly ahead.
(Note that I have not personally tested this claim, and I am eager for empirical evidence from anyone who has, preferably with video.)
A lot of questions about how to influence the world, or how to allocate credit/blame to produce useful incentives, hinge on whether people in various positions have counterfactual impact or are "just leading the parade".
Examples
Research
I'm a researcher. Even assuming my research is "successful" (i.e. I solve the problems I'm trying to solve and/or discover and solve even better problems), even assuming my work ends up adopted and deployed in practice, to what extent is my impact counterfactual? Am I just doing things which other people would have done anyway, but maybe slightly ahead of them? For historical researchers, how can I tell, in order to build my priors?
Looking at historical examples, there are at least some cases where very famous work done by researchers was clearly not counterfactual. Newton's development of calculus is one such example: there was simultaneous discovery by Leibniz, therefore calculus clearly would have been figured out around the same time even without Newton.
On the other end of the spectrum, Shannon's development of information theory is my go-to example of research which was probably not just leading the parade. There was no simultaneous discovery, as far as I know. The main prior research was by Nyquist and Hartley about 20 years earlier - so for at least two decades the foundations Shannon built on were there, yet nobody else made significant progress toward the core ideas of information theory in those 20 years. There wasn't any qualitatively new demand for Shannon's results, or any key new data or tool which unlocked the work, compared to 20 years earlier.
fungibility of information both pose and answer a whole new challenge compared to the earlier work. So that all suggests Shannon was not just leading the parade; it would likely have taken decades for someone else to figure out the core ideas of information theory in his absence.
Politics and Activism
Imagine I'm a politician or activist pushing some policy or social change. Even assuming my preferred changes come to pass, to what extent is my impact counterfactual?
Looking at historical examples, there are at least some cases where political/activist work was probably not very counterfactual. For instance, as I understand it the abolition of slavery in the late 18th/early 19th century happened in many countries in parallel around broadly the same time, with relatively little unification between the various efforts. That's roughly analogous to "simultaneous discovery" in science: mostly-independent simultaneous passing of similar laws in different polities suggests that the impact of particular politicians or activists was not very counterfactual, and the change would likely have happened regardless.
timeline of ...
Background
Terminology: Counterfactual Impact vs "Leading The Parade"
Y'know how a parade or marching band has a person who walks in front waving a fancy-looking stick up and down? Like this guy:
The classic 80's comedy Animal House features a
great scene in which a prankster steals the stick, and then leads the marching band off the main road and down a dead-end alley.
In the context of the movie, it's hilarious. It's also, presumably, not at all how parades actually work these days. If you happen to be "leading" a parade, and you go wandering off down a side alley, then (I claim) those following behind will be briefly confused, then ignore you and continue along the parade route. The parade leader may appear to be "leading", but they do not have any counterfactual impact on the route taken by everyone else; the "leader" is just walking slightly ahead.
(Note that I have not personally tested this claim, and I am eager for empirical evidence from anyone who has, preferably with video.)
A lot of questions about how to influence the world, or how to allocate credit/blame to produce useful incentives, hinge on whether people in various positions have counterfactual impact or are "just leading the parade".
Examples
Research
I'm a researcher. Even assuming my research is "successful" (i.e. I solve the problems I'm trying to solve and/or discover and solve even better problems), even assuming my work ends up adopted and deployed in practice, to what extent is my impact counterfactual? Am I just doing things which other people would have done anyway, but maybe slightly ahead of them? For historical researchers, how can I tell, in order to build my priors?
Looking at historical examples, there are at least some cases where very famous work done by researchers was clearly not counterfactual. Newton's development of calculus is one such example: there was simultaneous discovery by Leibniz, therefore calculus clearly would have been figured out around the same time even without Newton.
On the other end of the spectrum, Shannon's development of information theory is my go-to example of research which was probably not just leading the parade. There was no simultaneous discovery, as far as I know. The main prior research was by Nyquist and Hartley about 20 years earlier - so for at least two decades the foundations Shannon built on were there, yet nobody else made significant progress toward the core ideas of information theory in those 20 years. There wasn't any qualitatively new demand for Shannon's results, or any key new data or tool which unlocked the work, compared to 20 years earlier.
fungibility of information both pose and answer a whole new challenge compared to the earlier work. So that all suggests Shannon was not just leading the parade; it would likely have taken decades for someone else to figure out the core ideas of information theory in his absence.
Politics and Activism
Imagine I'm a politician or activist pushing some policy or social change. Even assuming my preferred changes come to pass, to what extent is my impact counterfactual?
Looking at historical examples, there are at least some cases where political/activist work was probably not very counterfactual. For instance, as I understand it the abolition of slavery in the late 18th/early 19th century happened in many countries in parallel around broadly the same time, with relatively little unification between the various efforts. That's roughly analogous to "simultaneous discovery" in science: mostly-independent simultaneous passing of similar laws in different polities suggests that the impact of particular politicians or activists was not very counterfactual, and the change would likely have happened regardless.
timeline of ...