There are many other situations where this sort of thing applies, some with quite more serious consequences than a game of chess.
For instance, during World War II the Imperial Japanese Navy had a strategy called Kantai Kessen (“naval fleet decisive battle”, often referred to simply as the Decisive Battle Doctrine), which was essentially a big backchain of this sort.
Reasoning that a naval war between Japan and the United States would culminate in a decisive battle between the fleets and that winning this battle would win the war (as it had for the Japanese with the Battle of Tsushima against the Russians in 1905), Japanese strategists designed a war plan that focused heavily on putting themselves into a strong position to initate such a decisive battle, chaining back from this all the way to the level of what types of ships to build.
However, this reasoning backfired. The Japanese fixation on concentrating forces for a major battle lead them to ignore elements of the war that could have given them an advantage. For instance, Japan never had a serious anti-commerce raiding strategy on either offense or defense; their submarines were focused on whittling down the enemy fleet in preparation for a final battle and they neglected attacks on US shipping and inadequately defended their own shipping from similar methods.
By contrast, while the United States had begun the war with similar “decisive battle” ideas (these were quite in vogue thanks to Mahan’s influence), they were ironically forced to come up with a new strategy following heavy losses at Pearl Harbor. Their “island hopping” strategy focused on building incremental advantages and didn’t rely on staging a specific battle until circumstances presented that as the best option—and indeed proved far more effective.
Now, there are of course other factors at work here—the US had very relevant industrial and commerce advantages, for instance—but this does seem a non-toy example where focusing on chaining backwards from a desired end point too far in the future led to serious strategic errors.
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.
There are many other situations where this sort of thing applies, some with quite more serious consequences than a game of chess.
For instance, during World War II the Imperial Japanese Navy had a strategy called Kantai Kessen (“naval fleet decisive battle”, often referred to simply as the Decisive Battle Doctrine), which was essentially a big backchain of this sort.
Reasoning that a naval war between Japan and the United States would culminate in a decisive battle between the fleets and that winning this battle would win the war (as it had for the Japanese with the Battle of Tsushima against the Russians in 1905), Japanese strategists designed a war plan that focused heavily on putting themselves into a strong position to initate such a decisive battle, chaining back from this all the way to the level of what types of ships to build.
However, this reasoning backfired. The Japanese fixation on concentrating forces for a major battle lead them to ignore elements of the war that could have given them an advantage. For instance, Japan never had a serious anti-commerce raiding strategy on either offense or defense; their submarines were focused on whittling down the enemy fleet in preparation for a final battle and they neglected attacks on US shipping and inadequately defended their own shipping from similar methods.
By contrast, while the United States had begun the war with similar “decisive battle” ideas (these were quite in vogue thanks to Mahan’s influence), they were ironically forced to come up with a new strategy following heavy losses at Pearl Harbor. Their “island hopping” strategy focused on building incremental advantages and didn’t rely on staging a specific battle until circumstances presented that as the best option—and indeed proved far more effective.
Now, there are of course other factors at work here—the US had very relevant industrial and commerce advantages, for instance—but this does seem a non-toy example where focusing on chaining backwards from a desired end point too far in the future led to serious strategic errors.
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.