I just finished reading the full post this links to. Interesting work, thanks for posting it.
I’m not sure if you’re still pursuing this sort of question or plan to return to it later, but if you are, or if other readers are, a book I imagine would be quite relevant and interesting is Tetlock and Belkin’s Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. The Amazon description reads:
Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume-including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast-find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.
Unfortunately I haven’t read this book, and doubt I’ll get to it anytime soon, partly because I don’t think there’s an audiobook version. But it sounds like it’d be quite useful for the topic of how tractable changing the course of history is, so I’d love it if someone were to read the book and summarise/​apply its most relevant lessons.
Unfortunately I haven’t read this book, and doubt I’ll get to it anytime soon, partly because I don’t think there’s an audiobook version.
FYI, you can turn virtually any text file into a machine-read audiobook with the Voice Aloud Reader app (Android, iOS). Not as nice as an audiobook read by a professional actor, but still pretty good, in my opinion (I use Google TTS Engine with ‘English (India)’ as the voice; I just like the Indian accent, and also get the impression that the speech synthesis is better than some of the other accents’).
I just finished reading the full post this links to. Interesting work, thanks for posting it.
I’m not sure if you’re still pursuing this sort of question or plan to return to it later, but if you are, or if other readers are, a book I imagine would be quite relevant and interesting is Tetlock and Belkin’s Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. The Amazon description reads:
Unfortunately I haven’t read this book, and doubt I’ll get to it anytime soon, partly because I don’t think there’s an audiobook version. But it sounds like it’d be quite useful for the topic of how tractable changing the course of history is, so I’d love it if someone were to read the book and summarise/​apply its most relevant lessons.
FYI, you can turn virtually any text file into a machine-read audiobook with the Voice Aloud Reader app (Android, iOS). Not as nice as an audiobook read by a professional actor, but still pretty good, in my opinion (I use Google TTS Engine with ‘English (India)’ as the voice; I just like the Indian accent, and also get the impression that the speech synthesis is better than some of the other accents’).