6 ms·

Sure the world will be completely different, but in high likelihood it will be very similar. To take your examples, the kid born might be completely different,

Sure the world will be completely different, but in high likelihood it will be very similar. To take your examples, the kid born might be completely different, but will likely receive a somewhat similar education that it would have so he won't be too different. Wars that might have been avoided on one occasion might just have been delayed, (WW1 ferdinand assassination comes to mind). In chaos theory, the space of possibilities is usually split up in different regions called basins that each converge towards around its own attractor point. But usually a small change isn't enough to make you change of basin. It only matter when you are close to the boundary, on the edge of chaos. It's kind like re-rolling when playing D&D, you can get luckier and win the fight instead of losing it, but if you are not well prepared it won't matter in the long run. At scale, the law of large numbers average effects out. In science-fiction the theme of order vs chaos is often evoked, because it's one of the most powerful tool for the underdog hero to turn the situation around. By definition the hero must choose the more risky side and chaotic situation that will give him his only chance to get out on top.

anyfoo 7y ago
How can the world be "very similar" if it consists of an entirely different set of people within a relatively short time? Think about it, if not a single one of the politicians, inventors, scientists, or really any plain regular person would have existed. If any tiny change does not stay in complete isolation (which I don't think is physically possible), eventually the world will be entirely different. Even language will completely diverge.
- Retric 7y ago
  The weather patterns, infrastructure, and economic constants are going to be nearly identical. Roll back the clock 2,000 years and you would still see major cities mostly at the same rivers and ports. Major inventions often have several people making the same basic discovery at the same time. You can’t build heavier than air controlled flight without efficient engines. You can’t build efficient engines without high precision manufacturing. Which requires it’s own constraints etc. Replay the last 30 years and Dell might not have been the mail/phone then internet order PC vender to become a household name. But, one of them would because several where trying and efficiency of scale is a major advantage. PS: One if my favorite examples is in a high school science class I was messing around with a power supply and mechanical pencil lead. It ended up making a rather bright light, in a moment of wonder I realized I had become possibly the millionth person to discover a precursor light bulb. Well over a hundred years late by on measure but in terms of the 100,000’s of years history of humanity fairly close.
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    I agree that there would probably still be major cities at the same rivers, but they would not be speaking any language you would recognize. Also, it's not that hard to discover electric light if you have a fully working power supply already... just about any piece of conductive material that is too small to handle the current going through it will make some light of varying intensity, so that realization probably came very very quickly after the concept of electricity was born. (The hard part was then to make that light last.)
    - Retric 7y ago
      Different language but a similar diet at the list of domesticated plants and animals has not changed all that rapidly. Which means at least some aspects of culture would be similar. As to light requiring a power supply that’s my point. Roll back 50 years to 1969 and they had integrated circuits, phones, radios, batteries, CCD, and networked computers. Without WWIII the odds seem high they would end up with highly capable cellphones with cameras, internet access, and reasonably familiar form factors due to human hands. GPS being a free public system links to a specific aircraft being shot down. So that’s questionable, but we had early satellite navigation. Thus, the odds are good the military at least would have a similar system and if nothing else a paid for version via private companies seems likely. Chaos theory uses the term strange attractors to these kinds of situations. Minor changes are generally going to end up in very similar situations.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    On the other hand, going to war (or not) could either accelerate or prevent major technological progress. And that depends on politics. So it seems like that's not all that predictable either?
- foldingmoney 7y ago
  In your example, a falling _might conceivably_ affect one person's conception. But even in that example, the odds are most likely that it doesn't. Let's say 99 times out of 100, a delay of a few seconds doesn't impact whether one person is conceived. There's a pretty big gulf to cross from that, to 'an entirely different set of people in one generation.'
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    > Let's say 99 times out of 100, a delay of a few seconds doesn't impact whether one person is conceived. It does not? Isn't the person that comes out dependent on many many minuscule factors? Aren't all sperm cells, from the same person, different in genetic makeup? Aren't many outside factors influencing how exactly the genes will combine?
    - foldingmoney 7y ago
      You assumed that the woman who was delayed would go on to conceive that night. I suggested that, generously, 99 times out of 100, the branch falling doesn't slow someone down and/or that person doesn't go on to conceive that very night.
      - anyfoo 7y ago
        So? You assume that with the end of the day, the person gets magically reset, and will next day behave exactly as without the change, without the slightest difference? Despite having arrived a few seconds later, had different conversations because of that, went to bed slightly differently, had more and more diverging thought trains...? In a more physicalist sense, you are somehow assuming that all the state that exists in her brain and body in general, all the synapses, electricity pulses, cells etc. have a chance to get back to the same state that it would have been without the change. I think that's pretty much impossible. In fact, if anything, things will be even much more different the next day, and the further you go into the future, imposing more and more differences onto her own environment, rippling out exponentially. Even more generally, every particle is subject to the same, with or without people in the equation, bounded only by the Light Cone emanating from the change (due to light speed being the limit on everything, including information; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone ).
- Terr_ 7y ago
  It may be we have a warped or view of "similar" because it's so close to us -- how do we calibrate it? As far as we know, no causation goes faster than light, so even if the "small change" was "an utter tide of total destruction of all matter", most of the observable universe can't be affected.
- frobozz 7y ago
  Siblings born years apart can turn out to be similar to one another as adults, both in appearance and temperament, despite the fact that the parents have changed and learned in that time, and they grow up with a different peer group. Someone born from the same batch of sperm, with parents at the same stage in their lives, is likely to be pretty similar. There may be significant differences at the individual level e.g. a child of a different gender is born to a family with certain ideas about gender roles, or stillbirths/miscarriages/disabilities occur or fail to occur due to this falling branch, but in aggregate, the people of the next generation will be pretty similar to the ones who would have existed otherwise. A lot of inventions get attributed to individual geniuses, but in many cases society was ripe for them, if Joseph Swan didn't exist, or became a ballet dancer instead, we would still have had electric light bulbs around the same time. I am not just the product of my parents, but of the centuries of history of society leading up to now. So in a few generations, you are right that all those small changes will result in all the people being different, society as a whole is likely to be fairly similar.
- GistNoesis 7y ago
  At the grand scheme of things level, most of the time, the world is very resilient. For example if a cosmic ray hits RAM and flips a bit, well we have correction codes, and it will be as if nothing ever happened, the error will be corrected and the change will lose all its oomph by being transformed into useless heat. Even before error correcting codes we would have just got a crash and rebooted. This universe with a sightly angrier developer would still most likely be the same once he vented it out with a few swear words. People once were looking for signs in the skies, and acting upon it to inject chaos into their lives, but random act of chances take time to make an impact whereas Order is effective and to the point. Once the world has favored order over chaos, it builds itself to be resilient to small changes, it submit itself to the law of large numbers, and once it has mastered it, it submit itself to the rules it has chosen for himself. That may be the great filter of Order to explain the Fermi Paradox. Order is so effective, that it can convince itself there is no Fermi Paradox using basic statistics, and march in order towards its own doom, because the doom is in the order itself. Hopefully once we storm area 51 in September, we will know for sure that aliens exist and that there is no reason to worry about Order being a great filter. Take the problem from the other perspective, imagine you are given the opportunity to re-roll something in the world, but just one single thing locally to create a brand new universe, would you still choose to break a branch in a random forest ? Would you try to find a camel just before the last straw breaks its back, just to see the camel owner pick-up the fallen straw once again. At what point in time should you rollback for the world to be receptive to your divine intervention ?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Think about it, if not a single one of the politicians, inventors, scientists, or really any plain regular person would have existed. The world would look more-less the same. We like to ascribe inventions to lone brilliant geniuses, but the truth is, inventions are made on schedule. Whenever the "time is right", all the necessary preconditions are met, someone makes the invention. Usually multiple people simultaneously, but we tend to credit the first one that manages to tell the world about it. In our timeline, relativity is attributed to Einstein, but if a time traveller killed him when he was a child, someone else would still have published more-less the same thing around 1905. Maybe some time later. Similar things seem to apply to economies too. People predominantly follow incentives, and those don't tend to flip randomly. So if you traveled back in time a hundred years and thrown a rock at a random squirrel, the world today might be populated by completely different set of actors, but the scene would be roughly the same.

anyfoo 7y ago

How can the world be "very similar" if it consists of an entirely different set of people within a relatively short time? Think about it, if not a single one of the politicians, inventors, scientists, or really any plain regular person would have existed. If any tiny change does not stay in complete isolation (which I don't think is physically possible), eventually the world will be entirely different. Even language will completely diverge.

Retric 7y ago
The weather patterns, infrastructure, and economic constants are going to be nearly identical. Roll back the clock 2,000 years and you would still see major cities mostly at the same rivers and ports. Major inventions often have several people making the same basic discovery at the same time. You can’t build heavier than air controlled flight without efficient engines. You can’t build efficient engines without high precision manufacturing. Which requires it’s own constraints etc. Replay the last 30 years and Dell might not have been the mail/phone then internet order PC vender to become a household name. But, one of them would because several where trying and efficiency of scale is a major advantage. PS: One if my favorite examples is in a high school science class I was messing around with a power supply and mechanical pencil lead. It ended up making a rather bright light, in a moment of wonder I realized I had become possibly the millionth person to discover a precursor light bulb. Well over a hundred years late by on measure but in terms of the 100,000’s of years history of humanity fairly close.
- anyfoo 7y ago
  I agree that there would probably still be major cities at the same rivers, but they would not be speaking any language you would recognize. Also, it's not that hard to discover electric light if you have a fully working power supply already... just about any piece of conductive material that is too small to handle the current going through it will make some light of varying intensity, so that realization probably came very very quickly after the concept of electricity was born. (The hard part was then to make that light last.)
  - Retric 7y ago
    Different language but a similar diet at the list of domesticated plants and animals has not changed all that rapidly. Which means at least some aspects of culture would be similar. As to light requiring a power supply that’s my point. Roll back 50 years to 1969 and they had integrated circuits, phones, radios, batteries, CCD, and networked computers. Without WWIII the odds seem high they would end up with highly capable cellphones with cameras, internet access, and reasonably familiar form factors due to human hands. GPS being a free public system links to a specific aircraft being shot down. So that’s questionable, but we had early satellite navigation. Thus, the odds are good the military at least would have a similar system and if nothing else a paid for version via private companies seems likely. Chaos theory uses the term strange attractors to these kinds of situations. Minor changes are generally going to end up in very similar situations.
- skybrian 7y ago
  On the other hand, going to war (or not) could either accelerate or prevent major technological progress. And that depends on politics. So it seems like that's not all that predictable either?
foldingmoney 7y ago
In your example, a falling _might conceivably_ affect one person's conception. But even in that example, the odds are most likely that it doesn't. Let's say 99 times out of 100, a delay of a few seconds doesn't impact whether one person is conceived. There's a pretty big gulf to cross from that, to 'an entirely different set of people in one generation.'
- anyfoo 7y ago
  > Let's say 99 times out of 100, a delay of a few seconds doesn't impact whether one person is conceived. It does not? Isn't the person that comes out dependent on many many minuscule factors? Aren't all sperm cells, from the same person, different in genetic makeup? Aren't many outside factors influencing how exactly the genes will combine?
  - foldingmoney 7y ago
    You assumed that the woman who was delayed would go on to conceive that night. I suggested that, generously, 99 times out of 100, the branch falling doesn't slow someone down and/or that person doesn't go on to conceive that very night.
    - anyfoo 7y ago
      So? You assume that with the end of the day, the person gets magically reset, and will next day behave exactly as without the change, without the slightest difference? Despite having arrived a few seconds later, had different conversations because of that, went to bed slightly differently, had more and more diverging thought trains...? In a more physicalist sense, you are somehow assuming that all the state that exists in her brain and body in general, all the synapses, electricity pulses, cells etc. have a chance to get back to the same state that it would have been without the change. I think that's pretty much impossible. In fact, if anything, things will be even much more different the next day, and the further you go into the future, imposing more and more differences onto her own environment, rippling out exponentially. Even more generally, every particle is subject to the same, with or without people in the equation, bounded only by the Light Cone emanating from the change (due to light speed being the limit on everything, including information; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone ).
Terr_ 7y ago
It may be we have a warped or view of "similar" because it's so close to us -- how do we calibrate it? As far as we know, no causation goes faster than light, so even if the "small change" was "an utter tide of total destruction of all matter", most of the observable universe can't be affected.
frobozz 7y ago
Siblings born years apart can turn out to be similar to one another as adults, both in appearance and temperament, despite the fact that the parents have changed and learned in that time, and they grow up with a different peer group. Someone born from the same batch of sperm, with parents at the same stage in their lives, is likely to be pretty similar. There may be significant differences at the individual level e.g. a child of a different gender is born to a family with certain ideas about gender roles, or stillbirths/miscarriages/disabilities occur or fail to occur due to this falling branch, but in aggregate, the people of the next generation will be pretty similar to the ones who would have existed otherwise. A lot of inventions get attributed to individual geniuses, but in many cases society was ripe for them, if Joseph Swan didn't exist, or became a ballet dancer instead, we would still have had electric light bulbs around the same time. I am not just the product of my parents, but of the centuries of history of society leading up to now. So in a few generations, you are right that all those small changes will result in all the people being different, society as a whole is likely to be fairly similar.
GistNoesis 7y ago
At the grand scheme of things level, most of the time, the world is very resilient. For example if a cosmic ray hits RAM and flips a bit, well we have correction codes, and it will be as if nothing ever happened, the error will be corrected and the change will lose all its oomph by being transformed into useless heat. Even before error correcting codes we would have just got a crash and rebooted. This universe with a sightly angrier developer would still most likely be the same once he vented it out with a few swear words. People once were looking for signs in the skies, and acting upon it to inject chaos into their lives, but random act of chances take time to make an impact whereas Order is effective and to the point. Once the world has favored order over chaos, it builds itself to be resilient to small changes, it submit itself to the law of large numbers, and once it has mastered it, it submit itself to the rules it has chosen for himself. That may be the great filter of Order to explain the Fermi Paradox. Order is so effective, that it can convince itself there is no Fermi Paradox using basic statistics, and march in order towards its own doom, because the doom is in the order itself. Hopefully once we storm area 51 in September, we will know for sure that aliens exist and that there is no reason to worry about Order being a great filter. Take the problem from the other perspective, imagine you are given the opportunity to re-roll something in the world, but just one single thing locally to create a brand new universe, would you still choose to break a branch in a random forest ? Would you try to find a camel just before the last straw breaks its back, just to see the camel owner pick-up the fallen straw once again. At what point in time should you rollback for the world to be receptive to your divine intervention ?
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Think about it, if not a single one of the politicians, inventors, scientists, or really any plain regular person would have existed. The world would look more-less the same. We like to ascribe inventions to lone brilliant geniuses, but the truth is, inventions are made on schedule. Whenever the "time is right", all the necessary preconditions are met, someone makes the invention. Usually multiple people simultaneously, but we tend to credit the first one that manages to tell the world about it. In our timeline, relativity is attributed to Einstein, but if a time traveller killed him when he was a child, someone else would still have published more-less the same thing around 1905. Maybe some time later. Similar things seem to apply to economies too. People predominantly follow incentives, and those don't tend to flip randomly. So if you traveled back in time a hundred years and thrown a rock at a random squirrel, the world today might be populated by completely different set of actors, but the scene would be roughly the same.