I have no idea. It's entirely plausible that one of us wrote the Claude bit in there months ago and then forgot about it.

The joke is that Claude somehow got activated on the editor, and added a line thanking itself for editing despite us not wanting it to edit anything and (as far as we've noticed) not editing anything else besides that one line.

Nope, we were in Overleaf.

... but also that's useful info, thanks.

Working on a paper with David, and our acknowledgments section includes a thankyou to Claude for editing. Neither David nor I remembers putting that acknowledgement there, and in fact we hadn't intended to use Clause for editing the paper at all nor noticed it editing anything at all.

None that I know of; it's a topic ripe for exploration.

Bell Labs is actually my go-to example of a much-hyped research institution whose work was mostly not counterfactual; see e.g. here. Shannon's information theory is the only major example I know of highly counterfactual research at Bell Labs. Most of the other commonly-cited advances, like e.g. transistors or communication satellites or cell phones, were clearly not highly counterfactual when we look at the relevant history: there were other groups racing to make the transistor, and the communication satellite and cell phones were both old ideas waiting on the underlying technology to make them practical.

That said, Hamming did sit right next to Shannon during the information theory days IIRC, so his words do carry substantial weight here.

Good idea, but... I would guess that basically everyone who knew me growing up would say that I'm exactly the right sort of person for that strategy. And yet, in practice, I still find it has not worked very well. My attention has in fact been unhelpfully steered by local memetic currents to a very large degree.

For instance, I do love proving everyone else wrong, but alas reversed stupidity is not intelligence. People mostly don't argue against the high-counterfactuality important things, they ignore the high-counterfactuality important things. Trying to prove them wrong about the things they do argue about is just another way of having one's attention steered by the prevailing memetic currents.

The claim is not that either "solution" is sufficient for counterfactuality, it's that either solution can overcome the main bottleneck to counterfactuality. After that, per Amdahl's Law, there will still be other (weaker) bottlenecks to overcome, including e.g. keeping oneself focused on something important.

Hypothesis: for smart people with a strong technical background, the main cognitive barrier to doing highly counterfactual technical work is that our brains' attention is mostly steered by our social circle. Our thoughts are constantly drawn to think about whatever the people around us talk about. And the things which are memetically fit are (almost by definition) rarely very counterfactual to pay attention to, precisely because lots of other people are also paying attention to them.

Two natural solutions to this problem:

• build a social circle which can maintain its own attention, as a group, without just reflecting the memetic currents of the world around it.
• "go off into the woods", i.e. socially isolate oneself almost entirely for an extended period of time, so that there just isn't any social signal to be distracted by.

These are both standard things which people point to as things-historically-correlated-with-highly-counterfactual-work. They're not mutually exclusive, but this model does suggest that they can substitute for each other - i.e. "going off into the woods" can substitute for a social circle with its own useful memetic environment, and vice versa.