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Comment by jpwagner | Hacker News Reader

I claim that you could quite reasonably argue "we'd be better off" if you were allowed to alter any single event in past history. It should be called "proof by fantasy land".

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It's called counterfactual reasoning actually. And of course you can make an argument for any event. But I doubt you can make a convincing one.

You are literally suggesting that it's impossible to learn from history.

Even further, if we can't speculate about the past, with everything we know now, then we can't possibly change the future. That is, you can't possibly predict if any decision will lead to a good outcome or not.

E.g we can't know if starting a war will be good. Or that you should prevent global warming.

As someone above mentioned, you can't even say that genocide is bad.

The corollary is that if you're allowed to argue that things are the best they can possibly be (or better than alternatives) because of a single event/condition, this is also "proof by fantasy land".

"Thank god we tightened up security or there would be another 9/11!"

How would you "reasonably argue" that we'd be better off if Germany and Japan had won World War II?

Depends on the single event that led to their victory but you could easily argue that the British Empire would have been better off if it had never gone to war with Germany in 1939. Its a war that basically bankrupted Britain, caused the collapse of the empire, pushed Britain from being the major superpower into second division status, led to the dominance of its major rival (America), and has generally blighted the last 60 years of British history.

Humanity is better off because Germany lost, but Britain? Not so much.

except for the small part you're missing where Britain wouldn't exist at all because it'd be called Germany?

Based on what? The fact that Hitler was an Anglophile and never really wanted to go to war with Britain anyway?

On the front page of HN today funny enough. I'm not sure Hitler liked Britain that much actually.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9608528

Actually, WW1 is what led to the demise of the UK, not WW2. WW2 was just the denouement. The generations that were lost on the Somme and Flanders crippled the empire.

WWI was the cause of the demise of pretty much all of Europe, directly resulting in heavy generational damage to Western Europe, kickstarting the communist revolution in Russia (which might have been tolerable in and of itself under Leninist or Trotskyist rule, but was then classifiable as "demise" once Stalin was in power), and (in the end) imposing excessive punishments on Germany post-war that caused severe economic problems and spurred the desire for a return to glory - one promised (and briefly realized) by the Nazi party.

It also led to more centralized economies, and suppression of dissent in the U.S. as well.

Well, maybe someone who happens to be Jewish will turn out to be a blood thirsty dictator in the future and destroy the world, and that person would have never been born if his ancestors had been killed by the nazis. It's really far fetched, but one could argue lots of things by making assumptions about changing the past.

You can't convincingly argue it because it requires knowledge too far in the future. Who knows what would have happened a hundred years down the line? Maybe shortly after winning, Nazism would fall to another German political party. Maybe a Europe unified under Germany would be a more powerful Europe able to lead the world and avoid the missteps the USA has made. Maybe global conquest, despite short-term suffering, really does lead to the greater good under one government.

IMO it's impossible to say what the long term result of a German victory would have been.

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