I happened to realize today that many if not all results we observe today is outcome of one or the other probable event in the past.
How often we analyze past near miss situations, or car accidents that did happen and change lives.
History is a chain of events, some of which are so prominent that they covered in books or passed through generations as tales.
Recent Same as Ever by Morgan Housel conveys in the first chapter literally this statement: one random thing can change entire history of humankind, especially in wars.
You are trying to place events which happened in the past under a completely different set of circumstances into the circumstances of today and then are drawing a conclusion from that.
Yes - makes me wonder how much of the perception of time and history is influenced by teaching and testing methods such as being required to memorize the dates of events (e.g., 25-Oct-1415) rather than the chains of causation (Why were Henry V and the French fighting, and how did they get there, and what else could have happened).
Also the "near-miss" analysis reminds me of seeing smart companies requiring reporting of near-misses, not only of accidents -- that kind of more nuanced analysis is more likely to prevent accidents even before the first one happens, rather than losing at least one finger/hand/person to a problem type.
while I might buy that the past is strongly influenced by the present (“facts” change over time), I don’t think we have much of a model for the future to say much of anything about how it influences the past.
Or, I guess the point is, maybe it’s the same thing.
Totally agree. History does not repeat And study history is not about prediction. It is about learning. In a sense perhaps we never learn from our mistakes totally and keep on loop on our karma. But still might be helpful. After all we are dealing with complex systems, from human body to society. These artificial one help and by itself interesting.
Hmm. I'll need to think about this one. I can see what you're saying... It's probably true but it definitely messes with my (and everyone's) tendency to see history as a series of monolithic happenings.
Ancient observer here - we all know that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes and people are just hairless (mostly), crazy bonobos at heart. The expectation that things will be different somehow goes away if you pay attention to history.
Definitely interesting to consider how single events have shaped history. Another is the destruction of the library at Alexandria, which was supposedly done by accident, against orders. Had that not been destroyed would we be substantially further ahead now?
There is another thread that attempts to explain history as more closely “deterministic”. And over long time periods this seems reasonable. CF guns germs and steel.
> Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."
Many times it's just luck. The existence of life at all, the death of the dinosaurs, the ice ages, droughts, famines, epidemics (e.g., the Black Plague) ... all luck. From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. And when a set of actions together have large consequences, sometimes it's just (un)fortunate coincidence.
What history can actually teach us is that things that never happened before happen all the time. This is so valid for anything related to global finance.
I think perhaps the narrative, the evidence on-hand, primary sources, etc. could all be considered and as a body of historical evidence we could say the understanding from our perspective continues to evolve; but there's no world in which the history changes. Events, causality, arrow of time, etc.
But these don’t just have local impact. They often entirely change the trajectory of history.
For example: what if Caesar has a son earlier in life and by the time he is killed, this son becomes his heir instead of Octavian? The son isn’t as clever as Octavian, he loses the civil war to Antony, who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire. Rome collapses centuries earlier - or the Senate regains power.
None of this seems like it would lead to the same historical outcome.
What if our entire view of history today is misguided or very much incomplete because of similar events that occurred in the past when there was hardly any redundancy of information?
How often we analyze past near miss situations, or car accidents that did happen and change lives.
History is a chain of events, some of which are so prominent that they covered in books or passed through generations as tales.
Recent Same as Ever by Morgan Housel conveys in the first chapter literally this statement: one random thing can change entire history of humankind, especially in wars.
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