> And yet: what if the course of history as it unfolded was roughly optimal? Sure, but what if it wasn't? It seems like there's a bias to viewing history wher

> And yet: what if the course of history as it unfolded was roughly optimal? Sure, but what if it wasn't? It seems like there's a bias to viewing history where we judge _our_ outcome as the best one even if it had huge downsides. I don't see why we should assume the outcome we have is any better than average or why those decisions generally judged to be "necessary evil"s actually were necessary. They were only necessary to get exactly our outcome, there's nothing saying that it was actually good.