(don’t feel obliged to read or reply to this long and convoluted comment, just sharing as I’ve been pondering this since our discussion)
As I said when we spoke, there are some ideas I don’t agree with, but here you have made a very clear and compelling case, which is highly valuable and thought-provoking.
Let me first say that I agree with a lot of what you write, and my only objections to the parts I agree with would be that those who do not agree maybe do very simplistic analyses. For example, anyone who thinks that being a great teacher cannot be a super-impactful role is just wrong. But if you do a very simplistic analysis, you could conclude that. It’s only when you follow through all the complex chain of influences that the teacher has on the pupils, and that the pupils have on others, and so on, that you see the potential impact. So I would agree when you argue that someone who claims that in their role, they are 100x more impactful than a great teacher would be making a case that is at best empirically impossible to demonstrate. And so, a person who believes they can make the world better by becoming a great teacher should probably become a teacher.
And I’d probably generalise that to many other professions. If you’re doing a good job and helping other people, you’re probably having an above-average impact.
I also agree with you that the impacts of any one individual are necessarily the result of not just that individual, but also of all the influences that have made the impact possible (societal things) and of all the individuals who have enabled that person to become who they are (parents, teachers, friends, ). But I don’t think most EA’s would disagree with this.
The real question, even of not always posed very precisely, is: for individuals who, for whatever reason, finds themselves in a particular situation, are there choices or actions that might make them 100x more impactful?
And maybe if I disagree on this, it’s because I’ve spent my career doing upstream research, and in upstream research, it’s often not about incremental progress, but rather about 9 failures (which add very little value) and one huge success which has a huge impact. And there are tangible choice which impact both the likelihood of success and the potential impact of that success. You can make a choice between working on a cure for cancer or on a cure for baldness. You can make a choice between following a safe route with a good chance of incremental success, or a low-probability, untested route with a high risk but the potential for a major impact.
I also think there is some confusion between the questions “can one choice make a huge impact?” and “who deserves credit for the impact?” On the latter question, I would totally that we would be wrong to attribute all the credit to one individual. But this is different from saying that there are no cases where one individual can have an outsized impact in the tangible sense that, in the counterfactual situation where this individual did not exist, the situation would be much worse for many people.
When we talked about this before (after you had given Sam and me your 30-second version of the argument you present here 😊), I think I focused on scientific research (my area of expertise). I agreed that most scientists had at best an incremental impact. Often one scientist gets the public credit for the work of 100’s of scientists, technicians, teachers and others, maybe because they happened to be the ones to take the last step. Even Nobel prize-winners are sometimes just in the right place at the right time.
But I also argued that there were cases, with Einstein being the most famous one, where there was a broad consensus that one individual had had an outsized impact. That the counterfactual case (Einstein was never born) would lead to a very different world. This is not to say that Einstein did not build on the work of many others, like Lorentz, which he himself acknowledged, or that his work was not greatly enhanced by the experimental and theoretical work of other scientists who came later, or even that some of the patents he evaluated in his patent-office role did not majorly impact his thinking. But it still remains that his impact was massive, and that if he had decided to give up physics and become a lumberjack, physics could have developed much more slowly, and we might still be struggling with technical challenges that have now been resolved for decades, like how to manage the relativistic time-differences we observe on satellites which we now use for so many routine things from tv to car navigation.
For a famous, non-scientific (well, kind of scientific) example: one of the most famous people I almost interacted with online was Dick Fosbury. One of my friends worked with him on the US Olympic committee and one time he replied to one of my comments on facebook, which is about my greatest claim to fame! It is possible (though unlikely) that if he hadn’t existed, humans might still be doing high-jumping the way they did before him. Maybe it wasn’t him specifically but one of his coaches, or maybe some random physics student, who got the idea of the Fosbury flop, but it was likely one person, with one idea, or a small group of people working on a very simple question (how to maximise the height that a jumper can clear given a fixed maximum height of the centre of gravity). Of course people jumping higher doesn’t really impact the world greatly, but it’s just a very clear example of one individual having an outsized influence on future generations.
I would argue that there are many more mundane examples of outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case.
A great teacher compared to a “good” teacher can have an outsize impact, maybe inspiring them to change the world rather than just to succeed in their careers, or maybe teaching them statistics in a way that they can actually understand and enabling them to teach others.
A great boss compared to a good boss is another example. I was lucky enough to work for one boss who almost single-handedly changed the way people were managed across a massive corporation. In a 20th century culture of command & control, of bosses taking credit for subordinates’ work, but not taking the blame, of micromanaging, and of many other now-out-dated styles, he was the first one to come in and manage like an enlightened 21st century manager, as a “servant leader”. He would always take the blame personally and pass on the credit, which at the time was unheard of. At first this hurt his career, but he persevered and suddenly the senior managers noticed that his projects always did better, his teams were more motivated, his reports were more honest (without “positioning”) and so on. And suddenly many others realised that his was the way forward. And in literally a few years, there was a major change in the organisation culture. Senior old-style managers were basically told to change their ways or to leave.
This was one individual with an outsized influence. It was not obvious to most people that he personally had had that much impact, but I just happened to be right there in the middle (in the right place at the right time) and got to observe the impact he was having, to hear the conversations with him and about him, and to see how people started first to respect and then to imitate him.
So I’m not convinced in general that one person cannot have outsized impact, or that one role or one decision cannot have outsized impact.
However, maybe our views are not totally disparate. Because in many cases, I would agree that those who have outsized impact could not have predicted that they would have outsize impact, and in many cases weren’t even trying to have outsize impact. My boss was just a person who believed in treating everyone with respect and trust, and could not imagine doing differently even if it had been better for his career. Einstein was a physicist who was passionately curious, he wasn’t trying to change the world as much as to answer questions that bothered him. Fosbury wanted to win competitions, he didn’t care whether others copied him or not.
And maybe when people to have outsize impact, it’s less about their being strategic outliers (who chose to have outsize impact) and more that they are statistical outliers. In some fields, if 1000 people work on something, then each one moves it forward a bit. In other fields, if 1000 people set out to work on a problem, maybe one of them will solve it, without any help from the others. You could argue that that one person has had 1000x the impact of the others. But maybe it’s fairer to say that “if 1000 people work on a problem, there is a good chance that one of them will solve it, but the impact will be the result of “1000 people worked on it” rather than focusing on the one person who found the solution, even if this solution was unrelated to what the other 999 people were doing. In the same way that if you buy 1000 lottery tickets you have 1000x the chance of winning, but there is no meaningful sense in which the winning lottery ticket was strategically better than the others before the draw was made.
And yet, it feels like there are choices we make which can greatly increase or decrease the odds that we can make a positive and even an outsize contribution. And I’m not convinced by (what I understand to be) your position that just doing good without thinking too much about potential impact is the best strategy. Right now, I could choose to take a typical project-management job or I could choose to work leading the R&D role for a climate-start-up or I could work on AI Governance. There is no way I can be sure that one role will be much more impactful, but it is pretty clear that in two of those roles at least have strong potential to be very impactful in a direct way, while for the project-management role, unless the project itself is impactful, it’s much less likely I could have major impact.
I’m pretty sure by now I’m writing for myself having long lost any efforts to follow my circuitous reasoning. But let me finish (I beg myself, and graciously accede).
I come away with the following conclusions:
It is true that we often credit individuals with impacts that were in fact the results of contributions from many people, often over long times.
However, there are still cases where individuals can have outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case where they do not exist.
It is not easy to say in advance which choices or which individuals will have these outsize influences …
… but there are some choices which seem to greatly increase the chance of being impactful.
Other than that, I broadly agree with the general principle that we should all look to do good in our own way, and that if you’re doing good and helping people, it’s likely that you are being impactful in a positive way, and probably you don’t need to stress about trying to find a more impactful role.
Thanks a lot for that comment, Dennis. You might not believe it (judging by your comment towards the end), but I did read the full thing and am glad you wrote it all up!
I come away with the following conclusions:
It is true that we often credit individuals with impacts that were in fact the results of contributions from many people, often over long times.
However, there are still cases where individuals can have outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case where they do not exist.
It is not easy to say in advance which choices or which individuals will have these outsize influences …
… but there are some choices which seem to greatly increase the chance of being impactful.
Put in this way, I have very little to object. Thanks for providing that summary of your takeaways, I think that will be quite helpful to me as I continue to puzzle out my updated beliefs in response to all the comments the essay has gotten so far (see statements of confusion here and here).
For example, anyone who thinks that being a great teacher cannot be a super-impactful role is just wrong. But if you do a very simplistic analysis, you could conclude that. It’s only when you follow through all the complex chain of influences that the teacher has on the pupils, and that the pupils have on others, and so on, that you see the potential impact.
That’s interesting. I think I hadn’t really considered the possibility of putting really good teachers (and similar people-serving professions) into the super-high-impact category, and then my reaction was something like “If obviously essential and super important roles like teachers and nurses are not amongst the roles a given theory considers relevant and worth pursuing, then that’s suspicious and gives me reason to doubt the theory.” I now think that maybe I was premature in assuming that these roles would necessarily lie outside the super-high-impact category?
The real question, even of not always posed very precisely, is: for individuals who, for whatever reason, finds themselves in a particular situation, are there choices or actions that might make them 100x more impactful? [...] And yet, it feels like there are choices we make which can greatly increase or decrease the odds that we can make a positive and even an outsize contribution. And I’m not convinced by (what I understand to be) your position that just doing good without thinking too much about potential impact is the best strategy.
I think the sentiment behind those words is one that I wrongfully neglected in my post. For practical purposes, I think I agree that it can be useful and warranted to take seriously the possibility that some actions will have much higher counterfactual impact than others. I continue to believe that there are downsides or perils to the counterfactual perspective, and that it misses some relevant features of the world; but I can now also see more clearly that there are significant upsides to that same perspective and that it can often be a powerful tool for making the world better (if used in a nuanced way). Again, I haven’t settled on a neat stance to bring my competing thoughts together here, but I feel like some of your comments above will get me closer to that goal of conceptual clarification—thanks for that!
Wow, Sarah, what a wonderful essay!
(don’t feel obliged to read or reply to this long and convoluted comment, just sharing as I’ve been pondering this since our discussion)
As I said when we spoke, there are some ideas I don’t agree with, but here you have made a very clear and compelling case, which is highly valuable and thought-provoking.
Let me first say that I agree with a lot of what you write, and my only objections to the parts I agree with would be that those who do not agree maybe do very simplistic analyses. For example, anyone who thinks that being a great teacher cannot be a super-impactful role is just wrong. But if you do a very simplistic analysis, you could conclude that. It’s only when you follow through all the complex chain of influences that the teacher has on the pupils, and that the pupils have on others, and so on, that you see the potential impact. So I would agree when you argue that someone who claims that in their role, they are 100x more impactful than a great teacher would be making a case that is at best empirically impossible to demonstrate. And so, a person who believes they can make the world better by becoming a great teacher should probably become a teacher.
And I’d probably generalise that to many other professions. If you’re doing a good job and helping other people, you’re probably having an above-average impact.
I also agree with you that the impacts of any one individual are necessarily the result of not just that individual, but also of all the influences that have made the impact possible (societal things) and of all the individuals who have enabled that person to become who they are (parents, teachers, friends, ). But I don’t think most EA’s would disagree with this.
The real question, even of not always posed very precisely, is: for individuals who, for whatever reason, finds themselves in a particular situation, are there choices or actions that might make them 100x more impactful?
And maybe if I disagree on this, it’s because I’ve spent my career doing upstream research, and in upstream research, it’s often not about incremental progress, but rather about 9 failures (which add very little value) and one huge success which has a huge impact. And there are tangible choice which impact both the likelihood of success and the potential impact of that success. You can make a choice between working on a cure for cancer or on a cure for baldness. You can make a choice between following a safe route with a good chance of incremental success, or a low-probability, untested route with a high risk but the potential for a major impact.
I also think there is some confusion between the questions “can one choice make a huge impact?” and “who deserves credit for the impact?” On the latter question, I would totally that we would be wrong to attribute all the credit to one individual. But this is different from saying that there are no cases where one individual can have an outsized impact in the tangible sense that, in the counterfactual situation where this individual did not exist, the situation would be much worse for many people.
When we talked about this before (after you had given Sam and me your 30-second version of the argument you present here 😊), I think I focused on scientific research (my area of expertise). I agreed that most scientists had at best an incremental impact. Often one scientist gets the public credit for the work of 100’s of scientists, technicians, teachers and others, maybe because they happened to be the ones to take the last step. Even Nobel prize-winners are sometimes just in the right place at the right time.
But I also argued that there were cases, with Einstein being the most famous one, where there was a broad consensus that one individual had had an outsized impact. That the counterfactual case (Einstein was never born) would lead to a very different world. This is not to say that Einstein did not build on the work of many others, like Lorentz, which he himself acknowledged, or that his work was not greatly enhanced by the experimental and theoretical work of other scientists who came later, or even that some of the patents he evaluated in his patent-office role did not majorly impact his thinking. But it still remains that his impact was massive, and that if he had decided to give up physics and become a lumberjack, physics could have developed much more slowly, and we might still be struggling with technical challenges that have now been resolved for decades, like how to manage the relativistic time-differences we observe on satellites which we now use for so many routine things from tv to car navigation.
For a famous, non-scientific (well, kind of scientific) example: one of the most famous people I almost interacted with online was Dick Fosbury. One of my friends worked with him on the US Olympic committee and one time he replied to one of my comments on facebook, which is about my greatest claim to fame! It is possible (though unlikely) that if he hadn’t existed, humans might still be doing high-jumping the way they did before him. Maybe it wasn’t him specifically but one of his coaches, or maybe some random physics student, who got the idea of the Fosbury flop, but it was likely one person, with one idea, or a small group of people working on a very simple question (how to maximise the height that a jumper can clear given a fixed maximum height of the centre of gravity). Of course people jumping higher doesn’t really impact the world greatly, but it’s just a very clear example of one individual having an outsized influence on future generations.
I would argue that there are many more mundane examples of outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case.
A great teacher compared to a “good” teacher can have an outsize impact, maybe inspiring them to change the world rather than just to succeed in their careers, or maybe teaching them statistics in a way that they can actually understand and enabling them to teach others.
A great boss compared to a good boss is another example. I was lucky enough to work for one boss who almost single-handedly changed the way people were managed across a massive corporation. In a 20th century culture of command & control, of bosses taking credit for subordinates’ work, but not taking the blame, of micromanaging, and of many other now-out-dated styles, he was the first one to come in and manage like an enlightened 21st century manager, as a “servant leader”. He would always take the blame personally and pass on the credit, which at the time was unheard of. At first this hurt his career, but he persevered and suddenly the senior managers noticed that his projects always did better, his teams were more motivated, his reports were more honest (without “positioning”) and so on. And suddenly many others realised that his was the way forward. And in literally a few years, there was a major change in the organisation culture. Senior old-style managers were basically told to change their ways or to leave.
This was one individual with an outsized influence. It was not obvious to most people that he personally had had that much impact, but I just happened to be right there in the middle (in the right place at the right time) and got to observe the impact he was having, to hear the conversations with him and about him, and to see how people started first to respect and then to imitate him.
So I’m not convinced in general that one person cannot have outsized impact, or that one role or one decision cannot have outsized impact.
However, maybe our views are not totally disparate. Because in many cases, I would agree that those who have outsized impact could not have predicted that they would have outsize impact, and in many cases weren’t even trying to have outsize impact. My boss was just a person who believed in treating everyone with respect and trust, and could not imagine doing differently even if it had been better for his career. Einstein was a physicist who was passionately curious, he wasn’t trying to change the world as much as to answer questions that bothered him. Fosbury wanted to win competitions, he didn’t care whether others copied him or not.
And maybe when people to have outsize impact, it’s less about their being strategic outliers (who chose to have outsize impact) and more that they are statistical outliers. In some fields, if 1000 people work on something, then each one moves it forward a bit. In other fields, if 1000 people set out to work on a problem, maybe one of them will solve it, without any help from the others. You could argue that that one person has had 1000x the impact of the others. But maybe it’s fairer to say that “if 1000 people work on a problem, there is a good chance that one of them will solve it, but the impact will be the result of “1000 people worked on it” rather than focusing on the one person who found the solution, even if this solution was unrelated to what the other 999 people were doing. In the same way that if you buy 1000 lottery tickets you have 1000x the chance of winning, but there is no meaningful sense in which the winning lottery ticket was strategically better than the others before the draw was made.
And yet, it feels like there are choices we make which can greatly increase or decrease the odds that we can make a positive and even an outsize contribution. And I’m not convinced by (what I understand to be) your position that just doing good without thinking too much about potential impact is the best strategy. Right now, I could choose to take a typical project-management job or I could choose to work leading the R&D role for a climate-start-up or I could work on AI Governance. There is no way I can be sure that one role will be much more impactful, but it is pretty clear that in two of those roles at least have strong potential to be very impactful in a direct way, while for the project-management role, unless the project itself is impactful, it’s much less likely I could have major impact.
I’m pretty sure by now I’m writing for myself having long lost any efforts to follow my circuitous reasoning. But let me finish (I beg myself, and graciously accede).
I come away with the following conclusions:
It is true that we often credit individuals with impacts that were in fact the results of contributions from many people, often over long times.
However, there are still cases where individuals can have outsize impact compared to the counterfactual case where they do not exist.
It is not easy to say in advance which choices or which individuals will have these outsize influences …
… but there are some choices which seem to greatly increase the chance of being impactful.
Other than that, I broadly agree with the general principle that we should all look to do good in our own way, and that if you’re doing good and helping people, it’s likely that you are being impactful in a positive way, and probably you don’t need to stress about trying to find a more impactful role.
Thanks a lot for that comment, Dennis. You might not believe it (judging by your comment towards the end), but I did read the full thing and am glad you wrote it all up!
Put in this way, I have very little to object. Thanks for providing that summary of your takeaways, I think that will be quite helpful to me as I continue to puzzle out my updated beliefs in response to all the comments the essay has gotten so far (see statements of confusion here and here).
That’s interesting. I think I hadn’t really considered the possibility of putting really good teachers (and similar people-serving professions) into the super-high-impact category, and then my reaction was something like “If obviously essential and super important roles like teachers and nurses are not amongst the roles a given theory considers relevant and worth pursuing, then that’s suspicious and gives me reason to doubt the theory.” I now think that maybe I was premature in assuming that these roles would necessarily lie outside the super-high-impact category?
I think the sentiment behind those words is one that I wrongfully neglected in my post. For practical purposes, I think I agree that it can be useful and warranted to take seriously the possibility that some actions will have much higher counterfactual impact than others. I continue to believe that there are downsides or perils to the counterfactual perspective, and that it misses some relevant features of the world; but I can now also see more clearly that there are significant upsides to that same perspective and that it can often be a powerful tool for making the world better (if used in a nuanced way). Again, I haven’t settled on a neat stance to bring my competing thoughts together here, but I feel like some of your comments above will get me closer to that goal of conceptual clarification—thanks for that!