Amusing political advertisement (NSFW!)

[Echnaton]

The real question is "can an individual change the course of events?"  The answer to that seem to me to be "yes, within a limited scope."  If John Kerry had not inadvertently opened the possibility of a hand over of Syrian chemical weapons, would the US have made a military strike? It certainly looked like we were heading that way before Kerry's statement.  Of course one never knows for sure, so it is always speculative.  But there is some rational for the notion that an individual can change or at least affect the course of events.

[ka9q]

The gold medal goes to gillianren, who understood exactly what I meant by that line.

I was surprised to learn this a few years ago while talking to a friend who had become very knowledgeable about IVF. I knew you could influence the gender of your baby so I asked how and she explained the centrifuge to me. I had no idea it was so simple; I had visions of lab technicians in white coats sitting at a microscope, sorting sperm one by one by hand. If it was even possible to tell them apart.

I came up with the Henry VIII connection myself, because I thought his quest for a son was one of those "focal points in history", to use a Star Trek reference. Major world events have often swung on seemingly tiny random outcomes, like whether one of Henry's X or Y sperms happened to get to an egg first, or whether a few chads were completely punched out in Florida. Obviously there's no way to run a controlled experiment to know for sure how things would have turned out, unless we find some way to confirm and apply the "many worlds" hypothesis in quantum theory, but it takes no great leap to say that the consequences of some of these events could have been very different. And the election of George W. Bush over Albert Gore in 2000 was certainly one of those things.

We can't say 9/11 wouldn't have happened, along with most of our (mostly unfortunate) reactions to it, but I think it fairly certain that Gore would not have invaded Iraq. And a lot of things would be different.

[ka9q]

When it comes to technology, if it's something in or close to my field and I've studied and become knowledgeable about it, my predictions are usually right. I was in college when the Intel 8080 microprocessor appeared. Right away I saw that it and its successors would be big. Same with the Internet (I got involved around 1985) and digital mobile telephony (1991). But when it comes to predicting human behavior, especially political behavior, I'm almost always dead wrong.

A few months into the Iraq War, when it was starting to look like there were no WMD after all, I began to think it inevitable that Bush would be impeached and removed from office. We got rid of Richard Nixon for far less, and a strong case could be made that Bush had committed the very same crime of aggressive war for which we've prosecuted and sometimes executed (losing) leaders of other countries. I felt that maybe getting rid of both Saddam and W. Bush wouldn't be such a terrible outcome after all. So It was to my surprise (and horror) that not only didn't this happen, he was actually re-elected in 2004.

And then when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke shortly after W was re-elected, followed by revelations of officially approved torture, another crime which we have prosecuted and even executed others for doing, I thought the dam had finally burst. W (and Cheney, Rumsfeld and others) would finally get their due. Dictators in third-world banana republics may torture but we, the United States, call them on it at least some of the time. We certainly didn't do that sort of thing ourselves, the people simply wouldn't stand for it.

Boy, was I wrong.

[ka9q]

But there is some rational[e] for the notion that an individual can change or at least affect the course of events.

Certainly when the individual is already a political or industrial leader. A more interesting question is what a more "ordinary" individual can do. Many people with no political power or family connections and very little money have nonetheless had a major effect on world affairs, good or bad. Often they have some particular talent, especially writing and public speaking, but not always. But they all know what they want and confidence that they can get it.

Such people often become politicians but I distinguish between those seeking general political power for its own sake and those strongly motivated by some specific issue, like the US civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s. Some do become politicians (e.g., Jesse Jackson), but not all do well (e.g., Jesse Jackson). An example close to home is our (former, thankfully) mayor here in San Diego, Bob Filner. Aside from his voting record, I was impressed that he had been a Freedom Rider in 1961-2. That took a lot of personal courage, but it seems that his character also includes some less desirable traits.

[gillianren]

As I said before, the best example in living memory of a person who wasn't already a leader who changed the course of history is the security guard at the Watergate Hotel.  Had it been two different guards spotting that tape.  Had he only spotted it once.  Had he spotted it twice and assumed it was, I don't know, housekeeping or a guest with a habit of losing keys.  Any one of these would have changed history--to the point that, yes, it's a plot point on an episode of Quantum Leap.

[ka9q]

I agree, that's an excellent example of a "focal point in time" by someone who didn't even intend to be one.

On the other hand, one could argue that if Frank Wills (who died in 2000, btw) hadn't noticed the taped lock, another guard just might have -- if not that time, then at another. This was the second break-in at the DNC; the bugs they installed the first time weren't working. (So another "focal point" was the incompetence of whoever designed, made or installed the bugs). And had they not been caught on the second break-in, they might have been caught doing something else.

"Always in motion, the future is!" - Yoda

[ka9q]

The sheer randomness of history is something the conspiracy fans often overlook. I'm fond of pointing out to JFK conspiracists that Dallas was hardly JFK's first motorcade. He was practically addicted to public adulation (c'mon, be honest, who wouldn't be?) and despite the known risk (he mused about a sniper the morning of his assassination) he had passed many thousands of unscreened windows before Dallas. His luck just ran out.

But tell that to a JFK conspiracy fan who keeps chanting about the "many so-called coincidences" that brought JFK past Lee Harvey Oswald's window that day. Even when you prove through simple causality that event 'a' (LHO's employment at the TSBD) could not possibly have been caused by event 'b' (the decision to route the motorcade past the TSBD) because 'a' happened first, they just repeat their mantra.

[smartcooky]

The sheer randomness of history is something the conspiracy fans often overlook....

I recently saw a really interesting programme about the killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby. It effectively debunked any chance of that being a conspiracy as well, through the simple occurrence of pure chance. At the moment Ruby shot Oswald, he had only just arrived in the basement of the Police building, but Oswald was late because he was cold and had asked one of the Policemen to go back for a jersey. That delayed his emergence into the basement by over three minutes. Had Oswald not asked for the jersey, he would already have been in the car and it would have been driven away (Oswald inside) before Jack Ruby arrived.

[qt]

I agree, that's an excellent example of a "focal point in time" by someone who didn't even intend to be one.

On the other hand, one could argue that if Frank Wills (who died in 2000, btw) hadn't noticed the taped lock, another guard just might have -- if not that time, then at another. This was the second break-in at the DNC; the bugs they installed the first time weren't working. (So another "focal point" was the incompetence of whoever designed, made or installed the bugs). And had they not been caught on the second break-in, they might have been caught doing something else.

Yes, we don't observe what would have happened had some event occurred differently, we can only speculate.

We can write a detailed alternative history of what would have happened had some security guard not noticed some minor anomaly, provided we assume that such small, random history-changing events cease to occur from that point on.

[ka9q]

Yes, we don't observe what would have happened had some event occurred differently, we can only speculate.

We can't know for sure what would have happened, but we don't have to speculate in the dark either. Given that we now know many of the other illegal things CREEP and the Plumbers did, we can combine the detection probability of each to get an overall probability of Nixon being forced out of office. I.e., his people were involved in so many dirty tricks that Nixon would have tried to cover up that he would have gotten in trouble over something.

We can write a detailed alternative history of what would have happened had some security guard not noticed some minor anomaly, provided we assume that such small, random history-changing events cease to occur from that point on.

But that's just the point, you can't assume that small random events would just stop.

Some events, such as an unprovoked attack on Iraq, certainly seem extremely unlikely had W not been president. The thought that Saddam might have been involved in 9/11 did occur to me shortly after the event, and I would have expected that to lead to a US attack no matter who was president. But I never dreamed we'd invade on wholly fabricated evidence until right before it happened.

You can even apply this to everyone's favorite what-if alternate history: what if someone had killed Hitler before seizing power? Germany was so screwed up in the 1920s that had Hitler not been around, someone like him might well have taken his place. Was he that unique, or did he just come along at the right (or wrong) time? He certainly didn't invent German antisemitism or German militarism, and the punitive WW1 reparations paved the way for someone like him to appear.

[gillianren]

Once the Treaty of Versailles was ratified, World War II was pretty well inevitable, in my opinion.

[qt]

But that's just the point, you can't assume that small random events would just stop.

It's certainly my point!

We might frame the hypothesis under consideration as "seemingly small random innocuous things can profoundly alter the course of history".

If you reject the hypothesis, then the answer to "what would have happened if this particular guy didn't stop to blow his nose at that precise moment" would be, "something quite similar to what did actually happen".

If you accept the hypothesis, then there isn't really much point to painting a detailed picture of what the world would look like if some small random event had come out differently, apart from maybe entertainment purposes.  You could claim that the world would be dramatically different, no problem there.  If you try to assert that some very specific alternative scenario would have occurred, then you're accepting the chaotic nature of history at the time of the event in question, and then rejecting it thereafter.  I suppose one could believe that history is highly chaotic up to the time of a specific event, and then suddenly stops being chaotic after that, but that strikes me as a very strange belief system.

[ka9q]

Once the Treaty of Versailles was ratified, World War II was pretty well inevitable, in my opinion.

I agree. It carried lessons for the future that I don't think have been well understood.

[Peter B]

But that's just the point, you can't assume that small random events would just stop.

It's certainly my point!

We might frame the hypothesis under consideration as "seemingly small random innocuous things can profoundly alter the course of history".

If you reject the hypothesis, then the answer to "what would have happened if this particular guy didn't stop to blow his nose at that precise moment" would be, "something quite similar to what did actually happen".

If you accept the hypothesis, then there isn't really much point to painting a detailed picture of what the world would look like if some small random event had come out differently, apart from maybe entertainment purposes.  You could claim that the world would be dramatically different, no problem there.  If you try to assert that some very specific alternative scenario would have occurred, then you're accepting the chaotic nature of history at the time of the event in question, and then rejecting it thereafter.  I suppose one could believe that history is highly chaotic up to the time of a specific event, and then suddenly stops being chaotic after that, but that strikes me as a very strange belief system.

I'm pretty sure that Skeptic Michael Shermer proposes a concept of contingent history - something along the lines that trends drive history, but less influential players have the ability to affect the course of history with a steadily decreasing probability in proportion to their influence; in other words, the less influential you are, the less likely you are to be able to affect events, but that probability is not zero.

One example I can think of is a fellow called Cleitus the Black. He saved the life of Alexander the Great at the Battle of the Granicus River, which occurred at the start of the Macedonian invasion of Persia. Had Alexander died at that battle the invasion would never have happened and Macedonia would have quickly reverted to its feudal squabbling: no spread of Greek culture influence in India; no Library of Alexandria (no Alexandria!); the major conflict a century later would probably have been Rome versus Persia (the Romans acquired a lot of their eastern provinces from minor kingdoms which were formerly part of Persia, and only really ran into trouble when they reached Parthia); potentially no fanatical Maccabean Judaism and consequent zealotry...

Archaeologists talk about how if Earth's history was replayed it would be very unlikely to follow the same path. While major trends like the warming of the Sun and the movement of continents play the big roles in driving evolution, minor random events have also occasionally had big effects. The classic example is the meteor which struck Chicxulub 65 million years ago. Yes, big meteors hit the Earth at intervals, but if the dinosaurs had survived we might still be small and easily-scared tree-dwellers.

[Al Johnston]

Shades of Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity...