
What if? On the value of counterfactual history - benbreen
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-historians-started-taking-the-what-if-seriously
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JumpCrisscross
I always saw it as constructing versus running models. Historians
dispassionately collect and interpret data. In doing so they can come to
surprising conclusions, _e.g._ around how violence [1] or hegemony [2]
propagate. Counterfactualists run these models to simulate decisions, both
past and present.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-
Nature/dp/149151...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-
Nature/dp/1491518243)

[2 [http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-
Updated/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-
Updated/dp/0393349276/ref=la_B001H6RT1O_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449681758&sr=1-1)

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mikeash
Have there been any serious attempts to generate more rigorous models that can
be simulated? I'm sure any such attempt would fall far short of reality, but
even a terrible failure would be fascinating.

~~~
benbreen
I basically agree with DanielBMarkham's comment below, but I have nonetheless
been thinking about trying to do something like this for awhile now. I've been
struck by how many historians my age got interested in history in part because
of the Civilization game franchise. When I was a kid I became obsessed with
setting up Civ II games to run over night with every civ played by the AI,
then seeing which one ended up conquering the New World. At some level, this
surely influenced my decision to study the Columbian Exchange in grad school,
which is what I work on now. So even if it doesn't yield any usable empirical
data, I think it would be an amazing teaching tool. And who knows, maybe in 10
years, some hyper-advanced version of an historical simulation game might end
up proving useful in answering certain highly specific historical question
(i.e., why did Spanish galleons suffer a lower rate of shipwreck than
Portuguese ones, or the like).

At any rate, if anyone knows about projects along these lines, I'd be very
interested to hear about them. I think the trouble would be 1) convincing
funding agencies that it's not a fool's errand and 2) arranging for an
effective collaboration between historians and computer scientists/game
designers/whoever else would have relevant expertise. But it does strike me as
something which could be fascinating.

~~~
zardo
In away, this is what economic models are trying to do. Develop a system that
predicts the past, use it to predict the future(s).

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DanielBMarkham
Counterfactuals are great for students, for readers of popular fiction, for
philosophers and pundits.

They just suck for historians. That's because a historian is fortunate to
concentrate on what actually happened, removed from his or her opinion about
things at large. When engaging in a counterfactual, all of that subjective
"nonsense" (in strictly historical terms) comes to the surface and the
historian is just engaging in a form of intellectual self-stimulation.

I love reading them, and coming up with my own, but they're a form of polemic,
not an academic pursuit of their own. I think most professional historians
understand that.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Historians' "customers" are other historians. We do have people building
historically-rich entertainment product ( in the manner of Michener ) out of
that grist. It's hard to say that is worse than, say, just-television. One
thing we get is actually good television - I consider "Vikings" a great deal
of fun, and it has at least legend integrated in to a narrative framework.

Somebody has to popularize things or it just dries out. And I can't tell you
how much history of things long ago has changed just in the last five decades
or so. The things didn't change... but the story did.

It's sad how little faith we have in nonfiction mass media.

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arethuza
One area where I find counterfactuals interesting is where they give a
fictionalized account of plans that are themselves historical - SIOP at the
time of the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Nazi Generalplan Ost.

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tantalor
See also, "What If Counterfactuals Never Existed?"
[https://newrepublic.com/article/119357/altered-pasts-
reviewe...](https://newrepublic.com/article/119357/altered-pasts-reviewed-
cass-r-sunstein)

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sjclemmy
A really odd alternate history novel I read recently is called 'Pavane'. Worth
a read if you're into that kind of thing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_\(novel\))

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pinewurst
A really good (and entertaining) book on how counterfactuals reflect shifting
biases is "The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of
Nazism" by Gavriel Rosenfeld. It collects and analyzes "Hitler won" stories
from pre-WW2 until the present.

