A singleton is hard to verify unless there was a long period of time after its discovery during which it was neglected, as in the case of Mendel.
Yet if your discovery is neglected in this way, the context in which it is eventually rediscovered matters as well. In Mendel’s case, his laws were rediscovered by several other scientists decades later. Mendel got priority, but it still doesn’t seem like his accomplishment had much of a counterfactual impact.
In the case of Shannon, Einstein, etc, it’s possible their fields were “ripe and ready” for what they accomplished—as perhaps evidenced by the fact that their discoveries were accepted—and that they were simply plugged in enough to their research communities during a period of faster global dissemination of knowledge that any hot-on-heels competitors never quite got a chance to publish. But I don’t know enough about these cases to be confident.
I can think of a couple cases in which I might be convinced of this sort of counterfactual impact from a scientific singleton:
All peers in a small, tight-knit research community explicitly stated none of them were even close (though even this is hard to trust—are they being gracious? how do they know their own students wouldn’t have figured it out in another year’s time?). Do we have any such testimonials for Shannon, Einstein, etc?
The discovery was actually lost, then discovered and immediately appreciated for its significance. Imagine a math proof written in a mathematician’s papers, lost on their death, rediscovered in an antique shop 40 years later, and immediately heralded as a major advance—like if we’d found a proof by Fermat of Fermat’s Last Theorem in an attic in 1950.
Money was the bottleneck. There are many places a billion dollars can be put into research. If somebody launches a billion-dollar research institute in an underfunded subject that’s been languishing for decades and the institute they founded starts coming up with major technical advances, that’s evidence it was a game-changer. Of course it’s possible that billionaire put their money into the field because they had information that the research was coming to fruition and they wanted to get in on something hot, but I probably have more trouble believing they could make such a prediction so accurately than that their money made a counterfactual impact.
A discovery can also be “counterfactually important” even if it only speeds up science a bit and is only slightly a singleton. Let’s say that every year, there’s one important scientific discovery and a million unimportant ones, and the important ones must be discovered in sequence. If you discover 2025′s important discovery in 2024, all the future important discoveries in the sequence also arrive a year earlier. If each discovery is worth $1 billion/year, then you’ve now created $1 billion counterfactual dollars per year every year as long as this model holds.
A singleton is hard to verify unless there was a long period of time after its discovery during which it was neglected, as in the case of Mendel.
Yet if your discovery is neglected in this way, the context in which it is eventually rediscovered matters as well. In Mendel’s case, his laws were rediscovered by several other scientists decades later. Mendel got priority, but it still doesn’t seem like his accomplishment had much of a counterfactual impact.
In the case of Shannon, Einstein, etc, it’s possible their fields were “ripe and ready” for what they accomplished—as perhaps evidenced by the fact that their discoveries were accepted—and that they were simply plugged in enough to their research communities during a period of faster global dissemination of knowledge that any hot-on-heels competitors never quite got a chance to publish. But I don’t know enough about these cases to be confident.
I can think of a couple cases in which I might be convinced of this sort of counterfactual impact from a scientific singleton:
All peers in a small, tight-knit research community explicitly stated none of them were even close (though even this is hard to trust—are they being gracious? how do they know their own students wouldn’t have figured it out in another year’s time?). Do we have any such testimonials for Shannon, Einstein, etc?
The discovery was actually lost, then discovered and immediately appreciated for its significance. Imagine a math proof written in a mathematician’s papers, lost on their death, rediscovered in an antique shop 40 years later, and immediately heralded as a major advance—like if we’d found a proof by Fermat of Fermat’s Last Theorem in an attic in 1950.
Money was the bottleneck. There are many places a billion dollars can be put into research. If somebody launches a billion-dollar research institute in an underfunded subject that’s been languishing for decades and the institute they founded starts coming up with major technical advances, that’s evidence it was a game-changer. Of course it’s possible that billionaire put their money into the field because they had information that the research was coming to fruition and they wanted to get in on something hot, but I probably have more trouble believing they could make such a prediction so accurately than that their money made a counterfactual impact.
A discovery can also be “counterfactually important” even if it only speeds up science a bit and is only slightly a singleton. Let’s say that every year, there’s one important scientific discovery and a million unimportant ones, and the important ones must be discovered in sequence. If you discover 2025′s important discovery in 2024, all the future important discoveries in the sequence also arrive a year earlier. If each discovery is worth $1 billion/year, then you’ve now created $1 billion counterfactual dollars per year every year as long as this model holds.