5 ms·

What If Counterfactuals Never Existed?

45 points by samclemens 12y ago

jameshart 12y ago
It seems strange to see all the historians' objections to the exploration of counterfactuals. Much as they may protest that they are only interested in cataloguing what actually happened, to make a jusgement over whether or not a particular event is significant, one has surely to consider what the world might have been like if it hadn't happened. If you can't explore the counterfactual realm at all, then you're unable to make any judgement at all about how important a particular event was, and so as a historian you might as well study what Al Gore had for breakfast the morning of the 2000 election as what led the supreme court to its decision on the Florida recount. We take interest in the Supreme Court decision because history would be very different if it had gone another way. Exploring that counterfactual lets you figure out just how different: it is a worthy question for historians to determine how significant the choice of president was in 2000. Would it even have mattered, since politics for the next decade and beyond would be changed, within a year, by 9/11 anyway?
- tedks 12y ago
  It seems simple why historians would object to speculative fictional counterfactionals. Historians are concerned with the real effects of real events. People do very badly separating fictional evidence from true evidence (bring up AI and see how long it takes your conversational partner to bring up Terminator). As a result, it seems likely that people would discount certain things, or overvalue certain things, based on fictional historical counterfactual evidence. It's also quite possible to consider the impact of an event without fantasizing about what would have happened if it didn't happen; you can see the actual events that it caused and look at their magnitude and effects.
- onion2k 12y ago
  to make a jusgement over whether or not a particular event is significant, one has surely to consider what the world might have been like if it hadn't happened I don't see why that would be the case. If you can't explore the counterfactual realm at all, then you're unable to make any judgement at all about how important a particular event was, and so as a historian you might as well study what Al Gore had for breakfast the morning of the 2000 election as what led the supreme court to its decision on the Florida recount. Yes you can. You can see what impact each event actually had, and determine the more important one from that. You don't need to explore things that didn't happen. We take interest in the Supreme Court decision because history would be very different if it had gone another way. We do, but I'm not sure that's true of professional historians. They try to determine the actual reasons for things that happen that are based in fact. Speculation is more the realm of politicians and philosophers.
  - jameshart 12y ago
    So how do you determine whether something was a 'reason' for something, without considering a counterfactual? The very nature of a 'reason' is, it's something which had to happen in order for the consequence to follow. If the consequence would have happened anyway, then it's not a reason. The impact an event has can only be determined by imagining what would have happened if the event didn't take place, surely? Did America's use of the atomic bomb cause Japan to surrender? Can you answer that question without considering how Japan's leadership would have behaved if the bombs hadn't been dropped?
  - the_af 12y ago
    > You can see what impact each event actually had, and determine the more important one from that. You don't need to explore things that didn't happen. I'm not sure. Suppose event X happens, followed by Y. How do you even know X caused Y? Probably you cannot ever know for sure, but the thought experiment "if X had never happened, then it's very unlikely Y would have happened" is relevant. If you cannot even formulate that thought experiment, then the link between X and Y starts to look weaker. This seems analogous to the scientific method to me, at least as much as can be done with history. So I must agree with the parent post. A historical event is significant if we can see it made a vast difference by happening. In other words, if we can see the world would have been very different had the event not happened.
confluence 12y ago
The title on this article is very clever. I can just see the journalist leaping up in glee when he figured it out.
Jun8 12y ago
Irrelevant to the content of this article, which discusses historical What If scenarios, but this title and another front page story today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353881) reminded me of the following: Not all languages have built in counterfactual constructions, an example is Chinese (Mandarin). Starting in the 80s and continuing into the 90s, there was a big debate about whether Chinese speakers were at a disadvantage in quickly understanding complex counterfactual statements. During those times such suggestions were relatively taboo (especially due to Chomsky's strong anti-linguistics relativism stance) but that has relaxed considerably due to the work of many researchers. A recent paper summarizing the debate on Chinese counterfactuals can be found here (http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentner05.pdf http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentn...). An example from that paper that compares a counterfactual statements in English and Chinese: “If I had gone to the movies that evening, I could not have had dinner with my mom.” The counterfactual mode is signaled by having the verb of the suppositional clause in the past perfect tense and that of the main clause in the conditional form. The Chinese equivalent is “Ru guo wo na tien wan shan qu kan le dien ying, wo jiu bu neng gen wo ma qu chi wan fan.” This translates roughly to the English: If that night I go watch (past particle) a movie, I then cannot accompany my mom to go eat dinner. In Chinese, which lacks verb inflections, a counterfactual is signaled by comparing the tense information—e.g., the past tense particle (le) after the verb—with contextual information as to whether the event actually occurred. The second clause is simply a consequence clause; it has no internal marker of counterfactuality.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  The question is whether the listener understands that the statement is counterfactual. E.g. If an English speaker says, if Gore had been elected in 2000 we never invaded Iraq, most English speakers would get the meaning anyway.
  - Jun8 12y ago
    It's not that Chinese listeners do not understand counterfactuals. The original researcher's (Bloom) hypothesis was that Chinese speakers have more cognitive load analyzing such statements so if asked to analyze complicated small counterfactual stories under time pressure they would perform worse than English speakers.
nkurz 12y ago
The blog "Unqualified Reservations" (a defunct blog you should probably be familiar with, although not necessarily read or agree with) offered an interesting thought extension to the counterfactual: If we want to get really imaginative, we can imagine what I call a "reverse counterfactual." First, imagine that the military dice had fallen otherwise and the American Rebellion was suppressed. Second, perform the standard counterfactual exercise of imagining what an intact British Empire would look like in 2009. Third, imagine the counterfactual universe invents some device that can send invisible observers into our 2009, and make a documentary for the edification of the Imperial audience - showing this awful alternate 2009, in which the Massachusetts disturbances of the 1770s were not quashed with firm, manly vigour. What's neat is that such a documentary could be made, with existing technology, in the real 2009. As a means of changing helping the reader see another perspective, I think it's a brilliant extension: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-...
- Apocryphon 12y ago
  Less wordily: http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/alternate_history/double_blind_what_if http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/alternate_history/...
  - nkurz 12y ago
    Nice link. I'm not familiar with that community, although I think they might be describing something slightly different. Moldbug is asking how an audience from the ATL would interpret the actual fixed events of today ("a documentary"). But I think this link is more about how the ATL group would imagine OTL, without actually being constrained to it. Less wordy, but I think it's different exercise?
    - Apocryphon 12y ago
      Ah, I see. Moldbug's second point is what DBWI's are about- speculating on real world events from the point of view of an alternate history inhabitant. His third point takes it into the realm of further fantasy, of having those inhabitants actually cross into our world to see their reactions. Cross-timeline adventures are not exactly unknown in alternate history sci-fi, and they're quite fun as well, to see the very different cultures interact. Cheap irony is the lifeblood of althist.

45 points by samclemens 12y ago

It seems strange to see all the historians' objections to the exploration of counterfactuals. Much as they may protest that they are only interested in cataloguing what actually happened, to make a jusgement over whether or not a particular event is significant, one has surely to consider what the world might have been like if it hadn't happened. If you can't explore the counterfactual realm at all, then you're unable to make any judgement at all about how important a particular event was, and so as a historian you might as well study what Al Gore had for breakfast the morning of the 2000 election as what led the supreme court to its decision on the Florida recount. We take interest in the Supreme Court decision because history would be very different if it had gone another way. Exploring that counterfactual lets you figure out just how different: it is a worthy question for historians to determine how significant the choice of president was in 2000. Would it even have mattered, since politics for the next decade and beyond would be changed, within a year, by 9/11 anyway?

tedks 12y ago
It seems simple why historians would object to speculative fictional counterfactionals. Historians are concerned with the real effects of real events. People do very badly separating fictional evidence from true evidence (bring up AI and see how long it takes your conversational partner to bring up Terminator). As a result, it seems likely that people would discount certain things, or overvalue certain things, based on fictional historical counterfactual evidence. It's also quite possible to consider the impact of an event without fantasizing about what would have happened if it didn't happen; you can see the actual events that it caused and look at their magnitude and effects.
onion2k 12y ago
to make a jusgement over whether or not a particular event is significant, one has surely to consider what the world might have been like if it hadn't happened I don't see why that would be the case. If you can't explore the counterfactual realm at all, then you're unable to make any judgement at all about how important a particular event was, and so as a historian you might as well study what Al Gore had for breakfast the morning of the 2000 election as what led the supreme court to its decision on the Florida recount. Yes you can. You can see what impact each event actually had, and determine the more important one from that. You don't need to explore things that didn't happen. We take interest in the Supreme Court decision because history would be very different if it had gone another way. We do, but I'm not sure that's true of professional historians. They try to determine the actual reasons for things that happen that are based in fact. Speculation is more the realm of politicians and philosophers.
- jameshart 12y ago
  So how do you determine whether something was a 'reason' for something, without considering a counterfactual? The very nature of a 'reason' is, it's something which had to happen in order for the consequence to follow. If the consequence would have happened anyway, then it's not a reason. The impact an event has can only be determined by imagining what would have happened if the event didn't take place, surely? Did America's use of the atomic bomb cause Japan to surrender? Can you answer that question without considering how Japan's leadership would have behaved if the bombs hadn't been dropped?
- the_af 12y ago
  > You can see what impact each event actually had, and determine the more important one from that. You don't need to explore things that didn't happen. I'm not sure. Suppose event X happens, followed by Y. How do you even know X caused Y? Probably you cannot ever know for sure, but the thought experiment "if X had never happened, then it's very unlikely Y would have happened" is relevant. If you cannot even formulate that thought experiment, then the link between X and Y starts to look weaker. This seems analogous to the scientific method to me, at least as much as can be done with history. So I must agree with the parent post. A historical event is significant if we can see it made a vast difference by happening. In other words, if we can see the world would have been very different had the event not happened.

confluence 12y ago

The title on this article is very clever. I can just see the journalist leaping up in glee when he figured it out.

Jun8 12y ago

Irrelevant to the content of this article, which discusses historical What If scenarios, but this title and another front page story today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353881) reminded me of the following: Not all languages have built in counterfactual constructions, an example is Chinese (Mandarin). Starting in the 80s and continuing into the 90s, there was a big debate about whether Chinese speakers were at a disadvantage in quickly understanding complex counterfactual statements. During those times such suggestions were relatively taboo (especially due to Chomsky's strong anti-linguistics relativism stance) but that has relaxed considerably due to the work of many researchers. A recent paper summarizing the debate on Chinese counterfactuals can be found here (http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentner05.pdf http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentn...). An example from that paper that compares a counterfactual statements in English and Chinese: “If I had gone to the movies that evening, I could not have had dinner with my mom.” The counterfactual mode is signaled by having the verb of the suppositional clause in the past perfect tense and that of the main clause in the conditional form. The Chinese equivalent is “Ru guo wo na tien wan shan qu kan le dien ying, wo jiu bu neng gen wo ma qu chi wan fan.” This translates roughly to the English: If that night I go watch (past particle) a movie, I then cannot accompany my mom to go eat dinner. In Chinese, which lacks verb inflections, a counterfactual is signaled by comparing the tense information—e.g., the past tense particle (le) after the verb—with contextual information as to whether the event actually occurred. The second clause is simply a consequence clause; it has no internal marker of counterfactuality.

Tloewald 12y ago
The question is whether the listener understands that the statement is counterfactual. E.g. If an English speaker says, if Gore had been elected in 2000 we never invaded Iraq, most English speakers would get the meaning anyway.
- Jun8 12y ago
  It's not that Chinese listeners do not understand counterfactuals. The original researcher's (Bloom) hypothesis was that Chinese speakers have more cognitive load analyzing such statements so if asked to analyze complicated small counterfactual stories under time pressure they would perform worse than English speakers.

nkurz 12y ago

The blog "Unqualified Reservations" (a defunct blog you should probably be familiar with, although not necessarily read or agree with) offered an interesting thought extension to the counterfactual: If we want to get really imaginative, we can imagine what I call a "reverse counterfactual." First, imagine that the military dice had fallen otherwise and the American Rebellion was suppressed. Second, perform the standard counterfactual exercise of imagining what an intact British Empire would look like in 2009. Third, imagine the counterfactual universe invents some device that can send invisible observers into our 2009, and make a documentary for the edification of the Imperial audience - showing this awful alternate 2009, in which the Massachusetts disturbances of the 1770s were not quashed with firm, manly vigour. What's neat is that such a documentary could be made, with existing technology, in the real 2009. As a means of changing helping the reader see another perspective, I think it's a brilliant extension: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-...

Apocryphon 12y ago
Less wordily: http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/alternate_history/double_blind_what_if http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/alternate_history/...
- nkurz 12y ago
  Nice link. I'm not familiar with that community, although I think they might be describing something slightly different. Moldbug is asking how an audience from the ATL would interpret the actual fixed events of today ("a documentary"). But I think this link is more about how the ATL group would imagine OTL, without actually being constrained to it. Less wordy, but I think it's different exercise?
  - Apocryphon 12y ago
    Ah, I see. Moldbug's second point is what DBWI's are about- speculating on real world events from the point of view of an alternate history inhabitant. His third point takes it into the realm of further fantasy, of having those inhabitants actually cross into our world to see their reactions. Cross-timeline adventures are not exactly unknown in alternate history sci-fi, and they're quite fun as well, to see the very different cultures interact. Cheap irony is the lifeblood of althist.