Imagine you want to decrease the size of the defense budget. The typical way you might approach this is to look around at the things you know how to do and do them on the issue of decreasing the defense budget. So, if you have a blog, you might write a blog post about why the defense budget should be decreased and tell your friends about it on Facebook and Twitter. If you’re a professional writer, you might write a book on the subject. If you’re an academic, you might publish some papers. Let’s call this strategy a “theory of action”: you work forwards from what you know how to do to try to find things you can do that will accomplish your goal.
A theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?” A decrease in the defense budget: how does one achieve that? Yes, you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Congress passes a new budget with a smaller authorization for defense next year. [...] you get a majority of the House and Senate to vote for it and the President to sign it.
Great, great — so how do you get them to do that? Now we have to think about what motivates politicians to support something. [...] if you have a politician with a given set of beliefs, how do you convince them that cutting the defense budget advances those beliefs? [...] you need to find people the politicians trust and get them to convince the politicians. [...] we can continue down this road for a while — figuring out who politicians trust, figuring out how to persuade them, figuring out how to get them to, in turn, persuade the politicians, etc. [...] You can see that this can take quite a while.
It’s not easy. It could take a while before you get to a concrete action that you can take. But do you see how this is entirely crucial if you want to be effective? Now maybe if you’re only writing a blog post, it’s not worth it. Not everything we do has to be maximally effective. But DC is filled with organizations that spend millions of dollars each year and have hardly even begun to think about these questions. I’m not saying their money is totally wasted — it certainly has some positive impacts — but it could do so much more if the people in charge thought, concretely, about how it was supposed to accomplish their goals.
Hmm, I view those as medium-term goals, where this method can be quite effective—but note even there the threat of lost purposes. Decreasing the defense budget is likely a proxy for another, deeper, goal. If you build an organization and program dedicated to decreasing the defense budget and it turns out that other paths would have been more effective, you may find yourself constrained by the actions you’ve already taken.
On the other hand, many of the early actions you might take do build up the sort of generalized advantage you might be able to use even if another scenario proves to be more relevant—but once you get far enough on the chain you risk overcommitting to one particular route or subproblem.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of long vs. short term that makes or breaks backwards chaining—it’s more a matter of the backwards branching factor.
For chess, this is enormous—you can’t disjunctively consider every possible mate, nor can you break them into useful categories to reason about. And for each possible mate, there are too many immediate predecessors to them to get useful informaton. You can try to break the mates into categories and reason about those, but the details are so important here that you’re unlikely to get any insights more useful than “removing the opponent’s pieces while keeping mine is a good idea”.
Fighting a war is a bit better—since you mention Imperial Japan in another comment, let’s sketch their thought process. (I might garble some details, but I think it’ll work for our purposes) Their end goal was roughly that western powers not break up the Japanese Empire. Ways this might happen: a) Western powers are diplomatically convinced not to intervene. b) Japan uses some sort of deterrent threat to convince Western powers not to intervene. c) Japan’s land forces can fight off any attempted attack on their empire. d) Japan controls the seas, so foreign powers can’t deliver strong attacks. This is a short enough list that you can consider them one by one, and close enough to exhaustive to make the exercise have some value. Choosing the latter pretty much means abandoning a clean backward chain, which you should be willing to do, but the backwards chain has already done a lot for you! And it’s possible that with the US’s various advantages, a decisive battle was the only way to get even a decent chance at a war win, in which case the paths do victory do converge there and Japan was right to backwards chain from that, even if it didn’t work out in the end.
As for defense budgets, you might consider that we’re backwards chaining on the question “How to make the world better on a grand scale?” You might get a few options: a) Reduce poverty, b) cure diseases, c) prevent wars, d) mitigate existential risk. Probably not exhaustive, but again, this short list contains enough of the solution space to make the exercise worthwhile. Looking into c), you might group wars into categories and decide that “US-initiated invasions” is a large category that could be solved all at once, much more easily than, say, “religious civil wars”. And from there, you could very well end up thinking about the defense budget.
Aaron Schwartz’s post Theory of Change suggests that it can be a good strategy to generally do this even for long-term goals.
That’s a great post! Five-paragraph summary:
Hmm, I view those as medium-term goals, where this method can be quite effective—but note even there the threat of lost purposes. Decreasing the defense budget is likely a proxy for another, deeper, goal. If you build an organization and program dedicated to decreasing the defense budget and it turns out that other paths would have been more effective, you may find yourself constrained by the actions you’ve already taken.
On the other hand, many of the early actions you might take do build up the sort of generalized advantage you might be able to use even if another scenario proves to be more relevant—but once you get far enough on the chain you risk overcommitting to one particular route or subproblem.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of long vs. short term that makes or breaks backwards chaining—it’s more a matter of the backwards branching factor.
For chess, this is enormous—you can’t disjunctively consider every possible mate, nor can you break them into useful categories to reason about. And for each possible mate, there are too many immediate predecessors to them to get useful informaton. You can try to break the mates into categories and reason about those, but the details are so important here that you’re unlikely to get any insights more useful than “removing the opponent’s pieces while keeping mine is a good idea”.
Fighting a war is a bit better—since you mention Imperial Japan in another comment, let’s sketch their thought process. (I might garble some details, but I think it’ll work for our purposes) Their end goal was roughly that western powers not break up the Japanese Empire. Ways this might happen: a) Western powers are diplomatically convinced not to intervene. b) Japan uses some sort of deterrent threat to convince Western powers not to intervene. c) Japan’s land forces can fight off any attempted attack on their empire. d) Japan controls the seas, so foreign powers can’t deliver strong attacks. This is a short enough list that you can consider them one by one, and close enough to exhaustive to make the exercise have some value. Choosing the latter pretty much means abandoning a clean backward chain, which you should be willing to do, but the backwards chain has already done a lot for you! And it’s possible that with the US’s various advantages, a decisive battle was the only way to get even a decent chance at a war win, in which case the paths do victory do converge there and Japan was right to backwards chain from that, even if it didn’t work out in the end.
As for defense budgets, you might consider that we’re backwards chaining on the question “How to make the world better on a grand scale?” You might get a few options: a) Reduce poverty, b) cure diseases, c) prevent wars, d) mitigate existential risk. Probably not exhaustive, but again, this short list contains enough of the solution space to make the exercise worthwhile. Looking into c), you might group wars into categories and decide that “US-initiated invasions” is a large category that could be solved all at once, much more easily than, say, “religious civil wars”. And from there, you could very well end up thinking about the defense budget.
I don’t think you need overcommitment when doing backchaining. I don’t think Aaron Schwartz had any problem with overcommiting.
That’s not what lead to his death, that was rather miscalculation of the political forces.
The Ripple effects from Aaron Schwartz actions are immense.