{link » Insecure reasoning}
There are those who believe, for example, that the mayhem of 9/11 would best have been dealt with by ignoring the travesty perpetrated against the thousands of American casualties of that terrorist attack! This kind of thinking holds that in so doing, the United States would have precluded the casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed America's military responses. Notice the glaring absence of consideration given to the vastly different denouement in the real world had that been the actual non-response of the United States. No one can predict what the future would have been in such a postulated alternative scenario, but it is highly probable that 9/11 would NOT have been, in the event, an isolated terrorist attack causing prohibitive loss of innocent lives.
It is not only simplistic but, in fact, wrong to assume that significant differences between alternative futures of our world can only be effected by large-scale and intensive actions. Even "non-actions" on the scale of the fluttering of a butterfly's wings can cause significant consequences in our chaotic, dangerous, and mostly violent world. Directed action will not necessarily alter the degree of intensity or the significance of a future outcome, but it does offer the possibility of effecting a more desirable outcome for those who take the action.
Post #710 Beware of the Butterfly
“I wonder if anyone has ever pointed out to Goekler [The Most Dangerous Person in the World?] the distinction between dying in an accident, or through illnesses brought on by a lifestyle that you've chosen, or through some other process not deliberately intended to harm, and being done to death for no other reason than that someone wants to kill you - or maybe not even you but just anyone, and you will do. Does he think that the money invested in preventing and/or punishing common-or-garden murder is a complete waste? Goekler isn't all that clever.”The specific simplistic view advocated by Goekler, and many others not skilled in scientific thinking, is an instance of a general view of reality that ignores the interconnectivity of actions in a dynamical system (cf., the so-called butterfly effect). Such views are based on the implicit assumption that any destructive act will have negligible effect beyond the neighborhood of spacetime (i.e., local 3-space and during the immediate aftermath) in which it occurs. That assumption is wrong.
— Norman Geras
There are those who believe, for example, that the mayhem of 9/11 would best have been dealt with by ignoring the travesty perpetrated against the thousands of American casualties of that terrorist attack! This kind of thinking holds that in so doing, the United States would have precluded the casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed America's military responses. Notice the glaring absence of consideration given to the vastly different denouement in the real world had that been the actual non-response of the United States. No one can predict what the future would have been in such a postulated alternative scenario, but it is highly probable that 9/11 would NOT have been, in the event, an isolated terrorist attack causing prohibitive loss of innocent lives.
It is not only simplistic but, in fact, wrong to assume that significant differences between alternative futures of our world can only be effected by large-scale and intensive actions. Even "non-actions" on the scale of the fluttering of a butterfly's wings can cause significant consequences in our chaotic, dangerous, and mostly violent world. Directed action will not necessarily alter the degree of intensity or the significance of a future outcome, but it does offer the possibility of effecting a more desirable outcome for those who take the action.
Post #710 Beware of the Butterfly
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