This commits the fallacy of assigning all of Google’s worth to Page and Brin. While they certainly deserve a large share of the credit so too do Craig Silverstein, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, the original VCs who invested in Google, and at least one hundred thousand other people, probably more.
Anyone know a name for this fallacy? I.e. attributing the entire value of some group or action to a few salient individuals while ignoring the contributions of all the other people involved. This strikes me as a major failure mode in a lot of discussion on LessWrong about effective altruism and life choices. I don’t know how to apportion credit and blame to individual people for group actions (and almost all effective actions are group actions). I’m not sure it’s even a meaningful question.
I don’t know how to apportion credit and blame to individual people for group actions (and almost all effective actions are group actions). I’m not sure it’s even a meaningful question.
Interesting! I hadn’t heard of Shapley Value before.
Regarding voting, let me do a back of the envelope calculation: every voter (that voted the same way) would, by symmetry arguments have contributed equal value. And since Shapley averages over every possible voter subset, and voters would only get credited for those subsets where they are the determining vote (which is proportional to the factorial of the margin of victory I think) then the value each voter (for policy A given two alternatives) contributes is something like:
RB
----
n MV!
Where n is the number of voters for policy A, RB is relative benefit of policy A compared to B, and MV is the margin of victory. But I think I made a mistake of ome kind somewhere.
Since the Shapley value of all players also has to sum to the value of the end result, I think the value of each A voter has to be just RB/n. I’m way out of my depth with the combinatorics here, but here’s a paper I found that gives a bit more information than the wikipedia page.
Good point, but I don’t think the value of the end result is necessarily equal to RB, for much the same reason that (I suspect) Shapley value would correspond to (something like) “market value” rather than “market value plus consumer surplus”. That is, no matter how badly you want you bathroom cleaned, the value of the labor to clean the bathroom is only equal to the market value of that labor, irrespective of how happy I am to have it done.
While voting doesn’t directly map onto a market like that, there is a similar sense in which being one of the voters for something that “had no chance of passing” (thus getting the high margin of victory) is worth less—even per voter—than voting for something whose fate was less certain.
It seems to me to be related to the big separate issue of whether, if an election is settled by two votes, nobody’s vote had any effect—by the same logic if an election was settled by one vote, everyone who voted for the winning side solely decided the election and get all the credit for it. The altruistic credit due to Page and Brin is not the interval between this universe and the counterfactual universe where they didn’t exist, any more than the credit due for an election result is the distance between this universe and the counterfactual universe where you voted the other way.
Yes, that’s a very good analogy; and perhaps one that’s a little easier to get a handle on mathematically since it’s very well specified. The logic of the problems seems exactly the same.
Not exactly. Counterfactual credit on individuals isn’t additive. For instance, we can say that almost every piece of the car is counterfactually (for the removal of the piece) essential (worth the entire value of the car).
That said, in this case, one would have to wonder what these employees would have done otherwise. I imagine the value of the founders for Google counterfactually, is somewhat equal to the value of Google minus the value of what the used-by-Google resources (money and lots of talent), had they been used elsewhere.
I’ll buy your car, minus a windshield wiper blade, for a dollar. I’ll also sell you a windshield wiper blade from mine for half of the bluebook value.
It certainly doesn’t generalize to physical objects composed of smaller objects; and the standard assumption is that almost all talent has non-exceptional results.
Craig Silverstein, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, the original VCs who invested in Google, and at least one hundred thousand other people, probably more.
Working at Google diverted these people’s skilled labor from other worthwhile endeavors. I agree that these people being involved contributed by choosing Google as opposed to choosing something else. But I don’t think that the effect size is very large. Google’s market cap is about 200 billion, which is only 5x Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s wealth. Much of this valuation comes from Google having a dominant position rather than from Google’s contribution relative to the counterfactual. I would be interested in making an adjustment to account for the issue that you mention, but I doubt that it would be greater than 2x.
Working at Google diverted these people’s skilled labor from other worthwhile endeavors.
Huh? If someone writes a software program worth $100,000, then they have contributed $100,000 to the economy. If the person could have written a program worth $80,000, that doesn’t mean that the person has only contributed $20,000 to the economy. Your comment makes sense if evaluating the value of Google to the economy, but not when evaluating the value of the employees to Google or the economy.
Ok, so I intended to ask the question “How much value did Brin and Page create by founding Google?” rather than the question “How much value did the early Google staff collectively create in contributing to Google’s growth?” When I get a chance, I’ll edit the post to this effect.
Don’t mistake Google’s market cap for the value people have gotten out of Google. Shareholders only get a fraction of the value delivered by their companies.
Sometimes, that “fraction” is greater than 1 (not that I’m saying that it is in the case of Google). Rent seeking, regulatory capture, arbitrage, and tournament theory are all cases where people make more money than their contribution to the economy.
Indeed, this was the premise of my post :-). I was using the ratio of the founders’ earnings to market cap as a proxy for the ratio of social value produced by the founders to social value produced by Google.
They created a hell of a lot of value with just the original pagerank algorithm. I remember just how bloody useless search engines were in 1998. Google was the first one that was any good whatsoever.
This commits the fallacy of assigning all of Google’s worth to Page and Brin. While they certainly deserve a large share of the credit so too do Craig Silverstein, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, the original VCs who invested in Google, and at least one hundred thousand other people, probably more.
Anyone know a name for this fallacy? I.e. attributing the entire value of some group or action to a few salient individuals while ignoring the contributions of all the other people involved. This strikes me as a major failure mode in a lot of discussion on LessWrong about effective altruism and life choices. I don’t know how to apportion credit and blame to individual people for group actions (and almost all effective actions are group actions). I’m not sure it’s even a meaningful question.
Shapley value is one way to answer this question.
Interesting! I hadn’t heard of Shapley Value before.
Regarding voting, let me do a back of the envelope calculation: every voter (that voted the same way) would, by symmetry arguments have contributed equal value. And since Shapley averages over every possible voter subset, and voters would only get credited for those subsets where they are the determining vote (which is proportional to the factorial of the margin of victory I think) then the value each voter (for policy A given two alternatives) contributes is something like:
Where n is the number of voters for policy A, RB is relative benefit of policy A compared to B, and MV is the margin of victory. But I think I made a mistake of ome kind somewhere.
Since the Shapley value of all players also has to sum to the value of the end result, I think the value of each A voter has to be just RB/n. I’m way out of my depth with the combinatorics here, but here’s a paper I found that gives a bit more information than the wikipedia page.
Good point, but I don’t think the value of the end result is necessarily equal to RB, for much the same reason that (I suspect) Shapley value would correspond to (something like) “market value” rather than “market value plus consumer surplus”. That is, no matter how badly you want you bathroom cleaned, the value of the labor to clean the bathroom is only equal to the market value of that labor, irrespective of how happy I am to have it done.
While voting doesn’t directly map onto a market like that, there is a similar sense in which being one of the voters for something that “had no chance of passing” (thus getting the high margin of victory) is worth less—even per voter—than voting for something whose fate was less certain.
It seems to me to be related to the big separate issue of whether, if an election is settled by two votes, nobody’s vote had any effect—by the same logic if an election was settled by one vote, everyone who voted for the winning side solely decided the election and get all the credit for it. The altruistic credit due to Page and Brin is not the interval between this universe and the counterfactual universe where they didn’t exist, any more than the credit due for an election result is the distance between this universe and the counterfactual universe where you voted the other way.
The more general problem is considering something as “the” cause when it is only “a” cause.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/halpern/papers/blame.pdf (etc by Halpern)
Yes, that’s a very good analogy; and perhaps one that’s a little easier to get a handle on mathematically since it’s very well specified. The logic of the problems seems exactly the same.
Conservation of credit/blame?
If we give Brin and Page full credit for everything Google did for three years, then we must give zero credit to everyone else for those outcomes.
Not exactly. Counterfactual credit on individuals isn’t additive. For instance, we can say that almost every piece of the car is counterfactually (for the removal of the piece) essential (worth the entire value of the car).
That said, in this case, one would have to wonder what these employees would have done otherwise. I imagine the value of the founders for Google counterfactually, is somewhat equal to the value of Google minus the value of what the used-by-Google resources (money and lots of talent), had they been used elsewhere.
I’ll buy your car, minus a windshield wiper blade, for a dollar. I’ll also sell you a windshield wiper blade from mine for half of the bluebook value.
It certainly doesn’t generalize to physical objects composed of smaller objects; and the standard assumption is that almost all talent has non-exceptional results.
Working at Google diverted these people’s skilled labor from other worthwhile endeavors. I agree that these people being involved contributed by choosing Google as opposed to choosing something else. But I don’t think that the effect size is very large. Google’s market cap is about 200 billion, which is only 5x Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s wealth. Much of this valuation comes from Google having a dominant position rather than from Google’s contribution relative to the counterfactual. I would be interested in making an adjustment to account for the issue that you mention, but I doubt that it would be greater than 2x.
Huh? If someone writes a software program worth $100,000, then they have contributed $100,000 to the economy. If the person could have written a program worth $80,000, that doesn’t mean that the person has only contributed $20,000 to the economy. Your comment makes sense if evaluating the value of Google to the economy, but not when evaluating the value of the employees to Google or the economy.
Ok, so I intended to ask the question “How much value did Brin and Page create by founding Google?” rather than the question “How much value did the early Google staff collectively create in contributing to Google’s growth?” When I get a chance, I’ll edit the post to this effect.
Don’t mistake Google’s market cap for the value people have gotten out of Google. Shareholders only get a fraction of the value delivered by their companies.
Sometimes, that “fraction” is greater than 1 (not that I’m saying that it is in the case of Google). Rent seeking, regulatory capture, arbitrage, and tournament theory are all cases where people make more money than their contribution to the economy.
Indeed, this was the premise of my post :-). I was using the ratio of the founders’ earnings to market cap as a proxy for the ratio of social value produced by the founders to social value produced by Google.
They created a hell of a lot of value with just the original pagerank algorithm. I remember just how bloody useless search engines were in 1998. Google was the first one that was any good whatsoever.