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Elon Musk certainly sails close to the wind. In this talk he says that SpaceX would no longer exist if the fourth spaceflight had not succeeded. And during th

• confluence 14y ago
  That's why I attempt to mitigate the halo effect by using counterfactuals, historic branch extensions and alterations. For example: Steve Jobs, an art school college dropout, doesn't meet Wozniak - Where is he now? Steve Jobs gets himself killed in India. Steve Jobs doesn't get hooked onto computers or doesn't hang out with the right hobbyist crowd at the right time, in the right place, with few other options to pursue. When you look at history you'll see a bunch of events that could have - and most probably - should have happened and things get a whole lot less certain. Things are only guaranteed to people because they happened - but at the time - not so much. Once you see the world through this light - it's difficult to make the kind of statements that others make about the past and the future. It also reduces the effect of both the halo and hindsight biases and just generally lets you get a feeling for the anthropic principle and its constant interference with daily life (aka we would not be discussing this had Elon not been a success). These are called mistakes of omission (could have happened) and not commision (did happen). The deeds of omission far out weight all the deeds of commission.