Hm, I can’t say I find this example very convincing either. In Bostrom’s paper, he identifies many different ways in which the human species could go extinct. If the Japanese thought the same way Bostrom did, they would have brainstormed many different scenarios under which they could lose the war. Their failure to do so represents a lack of lateral thinking, which seems orthogonal to the forward chain vs backward chain thing. Lack of lateral thinking can come up during forward chaining too, if you don’t fully explore your options (e.g. spending all of your time thinking about air power and none of your time thinking about sea power).
Anyway, I suspect a balance of both forward and back chaining is best. Backchaining is good for understanding which factors are actually important. Sometimes it’s not the ones you think would give you “generalized advantage”. For example, during the Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive was a military loss for the North, so a naive notion of “generalized advantage” might have indicated it was a bad idea. But it ended up being what allowed them to win the war in the long run due to its psychological effect on the American public. If the US military had backchained and tried to brainstorm all of the scenarios under which the South could lose the war (“murphyjitsu”), they might have realized at a certain point that demoralization of the American public was one of the few remaining ways for them to lose. Further backchaining, through thinking like the enemy and trying to generate maximally demoralizing attack scenarios, might have suggested the idea of a surprise attack during the Lunar New Year truce period.
I’d expect our intuitions about “generalized advantage” to be least reliable in domains where we have little experience, such as future technologies that haven’t been developed yet. But I think backchaining can be useful in other scenarios as well—e.g. if my goal is to be President, I could look at the resume of every President at the time they were elected, and try to figure out what elements they had in common and how they were positioned right before the start of their successful run.
Hm, I can’t say I find this example very convincing either. In Bostrom’s paper, he identifies many different ways in which the human species could go extinct. If the Japanese thought the same way Bostrom did, they would have brainstormed many different scenarios under which they could lose the war. Their failure to do so represents a lack of lateral thinking, which seems orthogonal to the forward chain vs backward chain thing. Lack of lateral thinking can come up during forward chaining too, if you don’t fully explore your options (e.g. spending all of your time thinking about air power and none of your time thinking about sea power).
Anyway, I suspect a balance of both forward and back chaining is best. Backchaining is good for understanding which factors are actually important. Sometimes it’s not the ones you think would give you “generalized advantage”. For example, during the Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive was a military loss for the North, so a naive notion of “generalized advantage” might have indicated it was a bad idea. But it ended up being what allowed them to win the war in the long run due to its psychological effect on the American public. If the US military had backchained and tried to brainstorm all of the scenarios under which the South could lose the war (“murphyjitsu”), they might have realized at a certain point that demoralization of the American public was one of the few remaining ways for them to lose. Further backchaining, through thinking like the enemy and trying to generate maximally demoralizing attack scenarios, might have suggested the idea of a surprise attack during the Lunar New Year truce period.
I’d expect our intuitions about “generalized advantage” to be least reliable in domains where we have little experience, such as future technologies that haven’t been developed yet. But I think backchaining can be useful in other scenarios as well—e.g. if my goal is to be President, I could look at the resume of every President at the time they were elected, and try to figure out what elements they had in common and how they were positioned right before the start of their successful run.