Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Reads a bit like a 'Connections' episode :-) But I agree with the fundamental premise, the harder you perturb a system, the less predictable the output of the perturbation will be.

This year has shown a lot of people (myself included) that they can live in a very different way in the world. Some of that may become the new normal.

View on HN

I completely agree. For those who haven't experienced Connections-style history, four episodes are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

My favorite is this one about proto-computers that came about due to the Black Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0

Internet archive has them all (3 seasons) and downloadable.

https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke

This was shot on film. Which means that a 4k release is technically feasible. ...

Thank you for this. I've been meaning to check this out since Burke was interviewed on Hardcore History way back when.

It does and I feel the example is just as contrived.

The writer seems to imply that Fritz Haber would not have developed the Haber process without Liebig and effectively without the Mt Tambora eruption.

Nice theory, but I don't know if we can be sure of all that.

And even if that were true, Haber and Bosch were not the only nitrogen chemists and chemical engineers working near the state of the art.

The processes might have different names attached, but we'd still have them.

It probably would get invented eventually, but the timing would be different, throwing off whatever predictions you might try to make.

This sort of thing is a good argument against the idea of anything like Asimov's psychohistory really working in a general sort of way. There are too many random contingencies, and they don't average out.

We have no idea when the next pandemic might be, or who will win the next presidential election, or what new things will be invented. Some preparations can be made, but they have to pretty multi-purpose.

I think a counter-factual is an invention that came along many years after all the precursors were present. And would have been in demand / successful / useful much earlier.

Are there any examples of that? Wheeled suitcases is sometimes cited, even if it is a slightly less profound advancement than the ammonia/nitrogen process.

There's no apparent reason why supermarkets or other self service stores weren't invented until the 20th century. The precursor to railways, the Diolkos in 600 BC, was not developed into wooden mining railways for another 2000 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com