This is how some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world have been organized, from Bell Labs to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
I have a post currently in my drafts pile titled “Leading The Parade”. Basic idea is that lots of supposedly-successful scientists, politicians, organizations, etc, were mostly “leading the parade”—walking somewhat in front of everyone else, but not actually counterfactually impacting the trajectory of progress much. It’s the opposite of counterfactual impact.
On the other hand, at least some scientists etc were counterfactually impactful. But “how much people talk about how great they were” is not a very reliable proxy for how counterfactually impactful people/organizations were; we need to look at some specific kinds of historical evidence which people usually ignore.
I use two cases from Bell Labs as central examples:
When asking whether a historical scientist or inventor had much counterfactual impact or was just leading the parade, one main type of evidence to look for is simultaneous discovery. If multiple people independently made the discovery around roughly the same time, then counterfactual impact is clearly low; the discovery would have been made even without the parade-leader. On the other hand, if nobody else was even close to figuring it out, then that’s evidence of counterfactual impact.
For example, let’s consider two big breakthroughs made at Bell Labs in the late 1940’s: the transistor, and information theory.
In the case of the transistor, we don’t have evidence quite as clear-cut as simultaneous discovery, but we have evidence almost that clear-cut. First, the people who developed the transistor at Bell Labs (notably Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley) were themselves quite worried that semiconductor researchers elsewhere (e.g. Purdue) would beat them to the punch. So they themselves apparently did not expect their impact to be highly counterfactual (other than to who got the patent).
Second, there were actually two transistor inventions at Bell Labs. Bardeen and Brattain figured out their transistor design first. Shockley, unhappy at being scooped, came along and figured out a totally different design within a few months. It’s not quite simultaneous independent invention, but clearly the problem was relatively tractable and plenty of people were working on it.
So, the inventors of the transistor were mostly “leading the parade”; they didn’t have much counterfactual impact on the technology’s discovery.
Shannon’s invention of information theory is on the other end of the spectrum.
Ask an early twentieth century communications engineer, and they’d probably tell you that different kinds of signals need different hardware. Sure, you could send Morse over a telephone line, but it would be wildly inefficient. To suggest that any signal can be sent with basically-the-same throughput over a given transmission channel would sound crazy to such an engineer; it wasn’t even in the space of things which most technical people considered.
So when Shannon showed up with information theory, ~nobody saw it coming at all. There was (as far as I know) no simultaneous discovery, nor anyone even close to figuring out the core ideas (i.e. fungibility of channel capacity). Shannon was probably not leading the parade; his impact was highly counterfactual.
Summary and upshot of all this:
It’s pretty straightforward to read histories in order to look for counterfactual impact
… but hardly anyone actually does that.
Standard narratives about which people/organizations were “highly impactful” seem pretty poorly correlated with counterfactual impact.
So I expect there’s a bunch of low-hanging intellectual fruit here, to be picked by going back through histories of lots of people/organizations and actually looking for evidence for/against counterfactual impact (like e.g. simultaneous discovery), and then compiling new lists of famous people/orgs which were/weren’t counterfactually impactful.
Absent that sort of project, I see claims like “This is how some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world have been organized, from Bell Labs to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology”, and I’m like… ummm, no, I’m not buying that these are some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world.
I have a post currently in my drafts pile titled “Leading The Parade”. Basic idea is that lots of supposedly-successful scientists, politicians, organizations, etc, were mostly “leading the parade”—walking somewhat in front of everyone else, but not actually counterfactually impacting the trajectory of progress much. It’s the opposite of counterfactual impact.
On the other hand, at least some scientists etc were counterfactually impactful. But “how much people talk about how great they were” is not a very reliable proxy for how counterfactually impactful people/organizations were; we need to look at some specific kinds of historical evidence which people usually ignore.
I use two cases from Bell Labs as central examples:
Summary and upshot of all this:
It’s pretty straightforward to read histories in order to look for counterfactual impact
… but hardly anyone actually does that.
Standard narratives about which people/organizations were “highly impactful” seem pretty poorly correlated with counterfactual impact.
So I expect there’s a bunch of low-hanging intellectual fruit here, to be picked by going back through histories of lots of people/organizations and actually looking for evidence for/against counterfactual impact (like e.g. simultaneous discovery), and then compiling new lists of famous people/orgs which were/weren’t counterfactually impactful.
Absent that sort of project, I see claims like “This is how some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world have been organized, from Bell Labs to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology”, and I’m like… ummm, no, I’m not buying that these are some of the most effective, transformative labs in the world.