15 ms·

What if? On the value of counterfactual history

31 points by benbreen 11y ago

tantalor 11y ago
See also, "What If Counterfactuals Never Existed?" https://newrepublic.com/article/119357/altered-pasts-reviewed-cass-r-sunstein https://newrepublic.com/article/119357/altered-pasts-reviewe...
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Counterfactuals are great for students, for readers of popular fiction, for philosophers and pundits. They just suck for historians. That's because a historian is fortunate to concentrate on what actually happened, removed from his or her opinion about things at large. When engaging in a counterfactual, all of that subjective "nonsense" (in strictly historical terms) comes to the surface and the historian is just engaging in a form of intellectual self-stimulation. I love reading them, and coming up with my own, but they're a form of polemic, not an academic pursuit of their own. I think most professional historians understand that.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Historians' "customers" are other historians. We do have people building historically-rich entertainment product ( in the manner of Michener ) out of that grist. It's hard to say that is worse than, say, just-television. One thing we get is actually good television - I consider "Vikings" a great deal of fun, and it has at least legend integrated in to a narrative framework. Somebody has to popularize things or it just dries out. And I can't tell you how much history of things long ago has changed just in the last five decades or so. The things didn't change... but the story did. It's sad how little faith we have in nonfiction mass media.
JumpCrisscross 11y ago
I always saw it as constructing versus running models. Historians dispassionately collect and interpret data. In doing so they can come to surprising conclusions, e.g. around how violence [1] or hegemony [2] propagate. Counterfactualists run these models to simulate decisions, both past and present. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243 http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151... [2 http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/dp/0393349276/ref=la_B001H6RT1O_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449681758&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/d...
- mikeash 11y ago
  Have there been any serious attempts to generate more rigorous models that can be simulated? I'm sure any such attempt would fall far short of reality, but even a terrible failure would be fascinating.
  - benbreen 11y ago
    I basically agree with DanielBMarkham's comment below, but I have nonetheless been thinking about trying to do something like this for awhile now. I've been struck by how many historians my age got interested in history in part because of the Civilization game franchise. When I was a kid I became obsessed with setting up Civ II games to run over night with every civ played by the AI, then seeing which one ended up conquering the New World. At some level, this surely influenced my decision to study the Columbian Exchange in grad school, which is what I work on now. So even if it doesn't yield any usable empirical data, I think it would be an amazing teaching tool. And who knows, maybe in 10 years, some hyper-advanced version of an historical simulation game might end up proving useful in answering certain highly specific historical question (i.e., why did Spanish galleons suffer a lower rate of shipwreck than Portuguese ones, or the like). At any rate, if anyone knows about projects along these lines, I'd be very interested to hear about them. I think the trouble would be 1) convincing funding agencies that it's not a fool's errand and 2) arranging for an effective collaboration between historians and computer scientists/game designers/whoever else would have relevant expertise. But it does strike me as something which could be fascinating.
    - zardo 11y ago
      In away, this is what economic models are trying to do. Develop a system that predicts the past, use it to predict the future(s).
arethuza 11y ago
One area where I find counterfactuals interesting is where they give a fictionalized account of plans that are themselves historical - SIOP at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Nazi Generalplan Ost.
pinewurst 11y ago
A really good (and entertaining) book on how counterfactuals reflect shifting biases is "The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism" by Gavriel Rosenfeld. It collects and analyzes "Hitler won" stories from pre-WW2 until the present.
sjclemmy 11y ago
A really odd alternate history novel I read recently is called 'Pavane'. Worth a read if you're into that kind of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_(novel)

31 points by benbreen 11y ago

See also, "What If Counterfactuals Never Existed?" https://newrepublic.com/article/119357/altered-pasts-reviewed-cass-r-sunstein https://newrepublic.com/article/119357/altered-pasts-reviewe...

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Counterfactuals are great for students, for readers of popular fiction, for philosophers and pundits. They just suck for historians. That's because a historian is fortunate to concentrate on what actually happened, removed from his or her opinion about things at large. When engaging in a counterfactual, all of that subjective "nonsense" (in strictly historical terms) comes to the surface and the historian is just engaging in a form of intellectual self-stimulation. I love reading them, and coming up with my own, but they're a form of polemic, not an academic pursuit of their own. I think most professional historians understand that.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Historians' "customers" are other historians. We do have people building historically-rich entertainment product ( in the manner of Michener ) out of that grist. It's hard to say that is worse than, say, just-television. One thing we get is actually good television - I consider "Vikings" a great deal of fun, and it has at least legend integrated in to a narrative framework. Somebody has to popularize things or it just dries out. And I can't tell you how much history of things long ago has changed just in the last five decades or so. The things didn't change... but the story did. It's sad how little faith we have in nonfiction mass media.

JumpCrisscross 11y ago

I always saw it as constructing versus running models. Historians dispassionately collect and interpret data. In doing so they can come to surprising conclusions, e.g. around how violence [1] or hegemony [2] propagate. Counterfactualists run these models to simulate decisions, both past and present. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243 http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151... [2 http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/dp/0393349276/ref=la_B001H6RT1O_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449681758&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/d...

mikeash 11y ago
Have there been any serious attempts to generate more rigorous models that can be simulated? I'm sure any such attempt would fall far short of reality, but even a terrible failure would be fascinating.
- benbreen 11y ago
  I basically agree with DanielBMarkham's comment below, but I have nonetheless been thinking about trying to do something like this for awhile now. I've been struck by how many historians my age got interested in history in part because of the Civilization game franchise. When I was a kid I became obsessed with setting up Civ II games to run over night with every civ played by the AI, then seeing which one ended up conquering the New World. At some level, this surely influenced my decision to study the Columbian Exchange in grad school, which is what I work on now. So even if it doesn't yield any usable empirical data, I think it would be an amazing teaching tool. And who knows, maybe in 10 years, some hyper-advanced version of an historical simulation game might end up proving useful in answering certain highly specific historical question (i.e., why did Spanish galleons suffer a lower rate of shipwreck than Portuguese ones, or the like). At any rate, if anyone knows about projects along these lines, I'd be very interested to hear about them. I think the trouble would be 1) convincing funding agencies that it's not a fool's errand and 2) arranging for an effective collaboration between historians and computer scientists/game designers/whoever else would have relevant expertise. But it does strike me as something which could be fascinating.
  - zardo 11y ago
    In away, this is what economic models are trying to do. Develop a system that predicts the past, use it to predict the future(s).

arethuza 11y ago

One area where I find counterfactuals interesting is where they give a fictionalized account of plans that are themselves historical - SIOP at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Nazi Generalplan Ost.

pinewurst 11y ago

A really good (and entertaining) book on how counterfactuals reflect shifting biases is "The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism" by Gavriel Rosenfeld. It collects and analyzes "Hitler won" stories from pre-WW2 until the present.

sjclemmy 11y ago

A really odd alternate history novel I read recently is called 'Pavane'. Worth a read if you're into that kind of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_(novel)