Thanks a lot for this summary post! I did not know of these concepts, and I feel they are indeed very useful for thinking about these issues.
I do have some trouble with the distinction between intellectual progress and progress though. During my first reading, I felt like all the topics mentioned in the progress section were actually about intellectual progress.
Now, rereading the post, I think I see a distinction, but I have trouble crystallizing it in concrete terms. Is the difference about creating ideas and implementing them? But then it feels very reminiscent of the whole fundamental/applied research distinction, which gets blurry very fast. And even the applications of ideas and solutions requires a whole lot of intellectual work.
Maybe the issue is with the word intellectual? I get that you’re not the one choosing the terms, but maybe something like fundamental progress or abstraction progress or theoretical progress would be more fitting? Or did I miss some other difference?
I get why you’d feel unsure about those points you mention. That’s one of the things I let stay a bit implicit/fuzzy in this post, because (a) I wanted to keep things relatively brief and simple, and (b) I wanted to mostly just summarise existing ideas/usages, and that’s one point where I think existing usages left things a bit implicit/fuzzy.
But here’s roughly how I see things, personally: The way Tomasik uses the term “differential intellectual progress” suggests to me that he considers “intellectual progress” to also include just spreading awareness of existing ideas (e.g., via education or Wikipedia), rather than conceiving of new ideas. It seems to me like it could make sense to limit “intellectual progress” to just cases where someone “sees further than any who’ve come before them”, and not include times when individuals climb further towards the forefront of humanity’s knowledge, without actually advancing that knowledge. But it also seems reasonable to include both, and I’m happy to stick with doing so, unless anyone suggests a strong reason not to.
So I’d say “differential intellectual progress” both includes adding to the pool of things that some human knows, and just meaning that some individual knows/understands more, and thus humanity’s average knowledge has grown.
None of this directly addresses your questions, but I hope it helps set the scene.
What you ask about is instead differential intellectual progress vs differential progress, and where “implementation” or “application” of ideas fits. I’d agree that fundamental vs applied research can be blurry, and that “even the applications of ideas and solutions requires a whole lot of intellectual work.” E.g., if we’re “merely implementing” the idea of democracy in a new country, that will almost certainly require at least some development of new knowledge and ideas (such as how to best divide the country into constituencies, or whether a parliamentary or presidential system is more appropriate for this particular country). These may be “superficial” or apply only in that location, and thus not count as “breakthroughs”. But they are still, in some sense, advancements in humanity’s knowledge.
I’d see it as reasonable to classify such things as either “differential intellectual progress” or “differential progress”. I think they’re sort-of edge cases, and that the terms are a bit fuzzy, so it doesn’t matter too much where to put them.
But there are also things you’d have to do to implement democracy that aren’t really best classified as developing new ideas or having individuals learn new things. Even if you knew exactly what form of democracy to use, and exactly who to talk to to implement this, and exactly what messages to use, you’d still need to actually do these things. And the shift in their political attitudes, values, ideologies, opinions, etc., seem best thought of as influenced by ideas/knowledge, but not themselves ideas/knowledge. So these are the sorts of things that I consider clear cases of “progress” (in the neutral, descriptive sense of “lasting changes”, without necessarily having positive connotations).
Does that clarify things a bit? Basically, I think you’re right that a lot of it is fuzzy/blurry, but I do think there are some parts of application/implementation that are more like just actually doing stuff, or people’s opinions changing, and aren’t in themselves matters of intellectual changes.
Let’s take your concrete example about democracy. If I understand correctly, you separate the progress towards democracy into:
discovering/creating the concept of democracy, learning it, spreading the concept itself, which is under the differential intellectual progress.
convince people to implement democracy, do the fieldwork for implementing it, which is at least partially under the differential progress.
But the thing is, I don’t have a clear criterion for distinguishing the two. My first ideas were:
differential intellectual progress is about any interaction where the relevant knowledge of some participant increases (in the democracy example, learning the idea is relevant, learning that the teeth of your philosophy teacher are slightly ajar is not). And then differential progress is about any interaction making headway towards a change in the world (in the example the implementation of democracy). But I cannot think of a situation where no one learns anything relevant to the situation at hand. That is, for these definitions, differential progress is differential intellectual progress.
Another idea is that differential intellectual progress is about all the work needed for making rational agents implement a change in the world, while differential progress is about all the work needed for making humans implement a change in the world. Here the two are clearly different. My issue there stems with the word intellectual: in this case Amos and Tversky’s work, and pretty much all of behavioral economics, is not intellectual.
I think the first of those is close, but not quite there. Maybe this is how I’d put it (though I’d hadn’t tried to specify it to this extent before seeing your comment):
Differential progress is about actions that advance risk-reducing lasting changes relative to risk-increasing progress, regardless of how these actions achieve that objective.
Differential intellectual progress is a subset of differential progress where an increase in knowledge by some participant is a necessary step between the action and the outcomes. It’s not just that someone does learn something, or even that it would necessarily be true that someone would end up having learned something (e.g., as an inevitable outcome of the effect we care about). It’s instead that someone had to learn something in order for the outcome to occur.
In the democracy example, if I teach someone about democracy, then the way in which that may cause risk-reducing lasting changes is via changes in that person’s knowledge. So that’s differential intellectual progress (and thus also differential progress, since that’s the broader category).
If instead I just persuade someone to be in favour of democracy by inspiring them or making liking democracy look cool, then that may not require them to have changes in knowledge. In reality, they’re likely to also “learn something new” along the lines of “this guy gave a great speech”, or “this really cool guy likes democracy”. But that new knowledge isn’t why they now want democracy; the causal pathway went via their emotions directly, with the change in their knowledge being an additional consequence that isn’t on the main path.
(Similar scenarios could also occur where a change in knowledge was necessary, such as if they choose to support democracy based on now explicitly thinking doing so will win them approval from me or from their friends. I’m talking about cases that aren’t like that; cases where it’s more automatic and emotion-driven.)
Does that seem clearer to you? (I’m still writing these a bit quickly, and I still think this isn’t perfectly precise, but it seems fairly intuitive to me.)
And then we could perhaps further say that differential technological development is when a change in technology was a necessary step for the effect to occur. Again, it’s not just an inevitable consequence of the chain of events, but rather something on the causal pathway between our action and the outcome we care about.
I think it’s possible that this framing might make the relationship between all three clearer than I did in this post. (I think in the post, I more just pointed to a general idea and assumed readers would have roughly the same intuitions as me—and the authors I cite, I think.)
(Also, my phrasing about “causal pathways” and such is influenced by Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why, which I think is a great book. I think the phrasing is fairly understandable without that context, but just thought I’d add that in case it’s not.)
That’s a great criterion! We might be able to find some weird counter-example, but it solves all of my issues. Because intellectual work/knowledge might be a part of all actions, but it isn’t necessary on the main causal path.
I’ve gone with adding a footnote that links to this comment thread. Probably would’ve baked this explanation in if I’d had it initially, but I now couldn’t quickly find a neat, concise way to add it.
And thanks for the suggestion to make this idea/criterion into its own post. I’ll think about whether to do that, just adjust this post’s main text to reflect that idea, or just add a footnote in this post.
Thanks a lot for this summary post! I did not know of these concepts, and I feel they are indeed very useful for thinking about these issues.
I do have some trouble with the distinction between intellectual progress and progress though. During my first reading, I felt like all the topics mentioned in the progress section were actually about intellectual progress.
Now, rereading the post, I think I see a distinction, but I have trouble crystallizing it in concrete terms. Is the difference about creating ideas and implementing them? But then it feels very reminiscent of the whole fundamental/applied research distinction, which gets blurry very fast. And even the applications of ideas and solutions requires a whole lot of intellectual work.
Maybe the issue is with the word intellectual? I get that you’re not the one choosing the terms, but maybe something like fundamental progress or abstraction progress or theoretical progress would be more fitting? Or did I miss some other difference?
Thanks for that feedback!
I get why you’d feel unsure about those points you mention. That’s one of the things I let stay a bit implicit/fuzzy in this post, because (a) I wanted to keep things relatively brief and simple, and (b) I wanted to mostly just summarise existing ideas/usages, and that’s one point where I think existing usages left things a bit implicit/fuzzy.
But here’s roughly how I see things, personally: The way Tomasik uses the term “differential intellectual progress” suggests to me that he considers “intellectual progress” to also include just spreading awareness of existing ideas (e.g., via education or Wikipedia), rather than conceiving of new ideas. It seems to me like it could make sense to limit “intellectual progress” to just cases where someone “sees further than any who’ve come before them”, and not include times when individuals climb further towards the forefront of humanity’s knowledge, without actually advancing that knowledge. But it also seems reasonable to include both, and I’m happy to stick with doing so, unless anyone suggests a strong reason not to.
So I’d say “differential intellectual progress” both includes adding to the pool of things that some human knows, and just meaning that some individual knows/understands more, and thus humanity’s average knowledge has grown.
None of this directly addresses your questions, but I hope it helps set the scene.
What you ask about is instead differential intellectual progress vs differential progress, and where “implementation” or “application” of ideas fits. I’d agree that fundamental vs applied research can be blurry, and that “even the applications of ideas and solutions requires a whole lot of intellectual work.” E.g., if we’re “merely implementing” the idea of democracy in a new country, that will almost certainly require at least some development of new knowledge and ideas (such as how to best divide the country into constituencies, or whether a parliamentary or presidential system is more appropriate for this particular country). These may be “superficial” or apply only in that location, and thus not count as “breakthroughs”. But they are still, in some sense, advancements in humanity’s knowledge.
I’d see it as reasonable to classify such things as either “differential intellectual progress” or “differential progress”. I think they’re sort-of edge cases, and that the terms are a bit fuzzy, so it doesn’t matter too much where to put them.
But there are also things you’d have to do to implement democracy that aren’t really best classified as developing new ideas or having individuals learn new things. Even if you knew exactly what form of democracy to use, and exactly who to talk to to implement this, and exactly what messages to use, you’d still need to actually do these things. And the shift in their political attitudes, values, ideologies, opinions, etc., seem best thought of as influenced by ideas/knowledge, but not themselves ideas/knowledge. So these are the sorts of things that I consider clear cases of “progress” (in the neutral, descriptive sense of “lasting changes”, without necessarily having positive connotations).
Does that clarify things a bit? Basically, I think you’re right that a lot of it is fuzzy/blurry, but I do think there are some parts of application/implementation that are more like just actually doing stuff, or people’s opinions changing, and aren’t in themselves matters of intellectual changes.
Thanks for the in-depth answer!
Let’s take your concrete example about democracy. If I understand correctly, you separate the progress towards democracy into:
discovering/creating the concept of democracy, learning it, spreading the concept itself, which is under the differential intellectual progress.
convince people to implement democracy, do the fieldwork for implementing it, which is at least partially under the differential progress.
But the thing is, I don’t have a clear criterion for distinguishing the two. My first ideas were:
differential intellectual progress is about any interaction where the relevant knowledge of some participant increases (in the democracy example, learning the idea is relevant, learning that the teeth of your philosophy teacher are slightly ajar is not). And then differential progress is about any interaction making headway towards a change in the world (in the example the implementation of democracy). But I cannot think of a situation where no one learns anything relevant to the situation at hand. That is, for these definitions, differential progress is differential intellectual progress.
Another idea is that differential intellectual progress is about all the work needed for making rational agents implement a change in the world, while differential progress is about all the work needed for making humans implement a change in the world. Here the two are clearly different. My issue there stems with the word intellectual: in this case Amos and Tversky’s work, and pretty much all of behavioral economics, is not intellectual.
Does any of these two criteria feel right to you?
I think the first of those is close, but not quite there. Maybe this is how I’d put it (though I’d hadn’t tried to specify it to this extent before seeing your comment):
Differential progress is about actions that advance risk-reducing lasting changes relative to risk-increasing progress, regardless of how these actions achieve that objective.
Differential intellectual progress is a subset of differential progress where an increase in knowledge by some participant is a necessary step between the action and the outcomes. It’s not just that someone does learn something, or even that it would necessarily be true that someone would end up having learned something (e.g., as an inevitable outcome of the effect we care about). It’s instead that someone had to learn something in order for the outcome to occur.
In the democracy example, if I teach someone about democracy, then the way in which that may cause risk-reducing lasting changes is via changes in that person’s knowledge. So that’s differential intellectual progress (and thus also differential progress, since that’s the broader category).
If instead I just persuade someone to be in favour of democracy by inspiring them or making liking democracy look cool, then that may not require them to have changes in knowledge. In reality, they’re likely to also “learn something new” along the lines of “this guy gave a great speech”, or “this really cool guy likes democracy”. But that new knowledge isn’t why they now want democracy; the causal pathway went via their emotions directly, with the change in their knowledge being an additional consequence that isn’t on the main path.
(Similar scenarios could also occur where a change in knowledge was necessary, such as if they choose to support democracy based on now explicitly thinking doing so will win them approval from me or from their friends. I’m talking about cases that aren’t like that; cases where it’s more automatic and emotion-driven.)
Does that seem clearer to you? (I’m still writing these a bit quickly, and I still think this isn’t perfectly precise, but it seems fairly intuitive to me.)
And then we could perhaps further say that differential technological development is when a change in technology was a necessary step for the effect to occur. Again, it’s not just an inevitable consequence of the chain of events, but rather something on the causal pathway between our action and the outcome we care about.
I think it’s possible that this framing might make the relationship between all three clearer than I did in this post. (I think in the post, I more just pointed to a general idea and assumed readers would have roughly the same intuitions as me—and the authors I cite, I think.)
(Also, my phrasing about “causal pathways” and such is influenced by Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why, which I think is a great book. I think the phrasing is fairly understandable without that context, but just thought I’d add that in case it’s not.)
That’s a great criterion! We might be able to find some weird counter-example, but it solves all of my issues. Because intellectual work/knowledge might be a part of all actions, but it isn’t necessary on the main causal path.
I think this might actually deserve its own post.
I’ve gone with adding a footnote that links to this comment thread. Probably would’ve baked this explanation in if I’d had it initially, but I now couldn’t quickly find a neat, concise way to add it.
Thanks again for prompting the thinking, though!
Great!
And thanks for the suggestion to make this idea/criterion into its own post. I’ll think about whether to do that, just adjust this post’s main text to reflect that idea, or just add a footnote in this post.