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I think that you misunderstood my comment. I’m not arguing about probability, I’m saying that the toss of coins have already been done, and cannot be repeated or changed. That’s exactly what defines the past. You can spend time studying the details of why you got a specific result of your toss of coin (wind strength, forces applied to the toss, etc), and you can speculate that changing a parameter would have given different results, but you cannot change the toss that you did.

Now, let’s say that you have an actual toss of coin at one point in history that results in a missile being launched. The missile has been launched, that cannot be changed. The fact that tossing the coin n times more results in differents results doesn’t change the fact that the missile has been launched. Sure you can speculate what would happen if the result would have been different the first time, and your educated speculation may even be pretty good and based on strong facts, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now in a fictional scenario.

That seems to be a rational point of view to defend, I would be interested to know what flaws you see.

1 comments

But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.

Also, random is just random. It's not "too many parameters for me to keep track of and account for". That's a very important distinction. Many people believe "chance" is a word used to cover our ignorance. But that's not what it means.

> But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.

That’s a very reductionist summary of what I wrote that I wouldn’t consider accurate.

I disagree that there is nothing to learn from what happened, even without considering alternative reality (by the way, I’m not arguing against that, as I said that’s just closer to fiction than history, but that’s still an interesting tool). You can see patterns and systems, name and describe them, try to see if we can find similarities with other events. But you cannot change their output, because it already happened.

Randomness is defined by the lack of patterns and predictability, in practice a system chaotic enough will be considered random (see your toss of coin, in fact it’s just a physic problem with a very high number of parameters).

I believe that you give way too much credit to the concept of pure chance (that you don’t define). I personally believe that human history is mainly the result of high level systems interacting with each other (thus can be described and analyzed), studying them backward seems to be prone to a lot of bias as we are trying to make them reach what we consider to be the contemporary state.