Friend of mine takes "Butterfly effect" way too seriouslly

[Crossroads Inc.]

Not sure if this is Science or belong in OT, but recently this afternoon I had a conversation that started with "Well, if I had a Time Machine..." That went quickly into ways of screwing over the modern Christian run society that raped Africa and the New World. Eventually I mentioned WWII and give the off the cuff comment about getting ride of Hitler early on. My Friend comes back with a variation of the following:

"Well you can't do that, Someone even worse then him would come along, and the allies might not win." I gave ,some, credence to this, and back things up, fair enough, if you wanted to stop things, you would have to go back to WWI, whose ending screwed Germany so much in invariably led to someone LIKE Hitler taking charge, again he disagreed. "Its impossible to change history like that, you don't know what could happen, the smallest change could make things even worse." Now, Im no historian, but there are certain I can imagine would change the world, just slightly for the better. Perhaps this is me being presumptuous, but I've never ascribed to the theory of "Move a pencil on a desk and suddenly the internal combustion engine was never invented" (an example my friend used).

And, I realize that discussing time travel and changing history as a whole is not exactly an academic field, but certainly there are rational assumptions one can make.. What say the rest of you?

[FireNexus]

His assumption that every change will be a bad one is unfounded and stupid. Perhaps it's simply his nervousness at the idea that any change could lead to his erasure from existence. That would creep me out.

[open_sketchbook]

I've heard the argument put forth that minus just one Hitler, Stalin probably would have made a move on the rest of Europe. I don't know how based in reality that is (it's basically the premise of the first Red Alert, so I'm nervous as to the source) but if there is any evidence towards it then I have to say that we might have gotten the lesser evil. The Nazis killed people they hated; Stalin's communists just killed. 20 million seems a common number; estimates go as high as 30. Stalin was, like Hitler, a rabid anti-Semite and racist, and between starvation he caused, the Gulags, the purges, and population transfers, the war crimes he encouraged... the man was a monster and he lead a nation to monstrous acts.

[Darth Wong]

His assumption that every change will be a bad one is unfounded and stupid.

It's a (possibly unconscious) variation upon the "God has a plan" theme. The idea is that everything unfolds the way it should, and if we use some unnatural means to alter "destiny", then the result would have to be bad because we're disturbing God's Plan.

[Darth Wong]

20 million seems a common number; estimates go as high as 30.

The fact that something is a "common number" or a widely repeated "estimate" doesn't necessarily mean it is based on fact.

[Cyborg Stan]

Couldn't this also apply without the time machine? The here and now? According to this train of thought, we shouldn't deal with injustices today lest they mysteriously and unpredictably lead to greater ones tomorrow?

[Darth Wong]

Couldn't this also apply without the time machine? The here and now? According to this train of thought, we shouldn't deal with injustices today lest they mysteriously and unpredictably lead to greater ones tomorrow?

Well, that's pretty much Calvinism in a nutshell. What I'm describing is watered-down Calvinism.

[Gil Hamilton]

The Butterfly Effect is useless in this way. Someone COULD come along worse than Hitler, but if the smallest change leads to wildly unpredictable random results, its equally likely that the change could be intensely beneficial to the world. You can't make that assumption that things will be worse merely by altering the past. The Butterfly effect is merely chaos theory in action, you can't account for it. All you can account for is the first couple dominos at best and frankly, Hilter getting riddled with bullets in 1932 or dying in prison wouldn't be a bad thing.

[open_sketchbook]

20 million seems a common number; estimates go as high as 30.

The fact that something is a "common number" or a widely repeated "estimate" doesn't necessarily mean it is based on fact.

I don't mean common like "thrown around by laypeople". It's a number the comes up a lot in history textbooks and other researched sources that I browsed before posting (my dad has an interest in the era so resources were on-hand) Also, though I know you academic types hate it, Wikipedia has a (very) brief breakdown of the sources for the numbers.

[Darth Wong]

20 million seems a common number; estimates go as high as 30.

The fact that something is a "common number" or a widely repeated "estimate" doesn't necessarily mean it is based on fact.

I don't mean common like "thrown around by laypeople". It's a number the comes up a lot in history textbooks and other researched sources that I browsed before posting (my dad has an interest in the era so resources were on-hand) Also, though I know you academic types hate it, Wikipedia has a (very) brief breakdown of the sources for the numbers.

You mean like the common fact in history textbooks that Hitler hated Christianity? The countries we know today as NATO collectively took a giant shit on historical integrity in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, in their effort to produce an ideologically correct interpretation of what happened. There is considerable room for doubt as to the source of some of these numbers.

[Simon_Jester]

His assumption that every change will be a bad one is unfounded and stupid.

It's a (possibly unconscious) variation upon the "God has a plan" theme. The idea is that everything unfolds the way it should, and if we use some unnatural means to alter "destiny", then the result would have to be bad because we're disturbing God's Plan.

It sounded more like he was saying that every change has an outcome so unpredictable that you can never be guaranteed of success, not that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Could go either way, I guess, since I can't exactly ask him.

You mean like the common fact in history textbooks that Hitler hated Christianity? The countries we know today as NATO collectively took a giant shit on historical integrity in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, in their effort to produce an ideologically correct interpretation of what happened. There is considerable room for doubt as to the source of some of these numbers.

What numbers would you use for a lower bound on the number of victims of Stalin?

[Darth Hoth]

Not sure if this is Science or belong in OT, but recently this afternoon I had a conversation that started with "Well, if I had a Time Machine..." That went quickly into ways of screwing over the modern Christian run society that raped Africa and the New World. Eventually I mentioned WWII and give the off the cuff comment about getting ride of Hitler early on. My Friend comes back with a variation of the following:

[. . .]

And, I realize that discussing time travel and changing history as a whole is not exactly an academic field, but certainly there are rational assumptions one can make.. What say the rest of you?

Any althist that significantly interests itself with "screwing over the modern Christian run society that raped Africa and the New World" will very likely result in a shittier "present" time, given that Europe was the society that continued historical progress at the time. Destroying it would entail perpetuating primitivity, or at the least significantly retarding the development of science and technology (and thus also standards of living).

I've heard the argument put forth that minus just one Hitler, Stalin probably would have made a move on the rest of Europe. I don't know how based in reality that is (it's basically the premise of the first Red Alert, so I'm nervous as to the source) but if there is any evidence towards it then I have to say that we might have gotten the lesser evil.

The credibility of that argument depends upon your view of the massive Soviet military build-ups in the late 1930s/early '40s. Some see this as evidence that Stalin was planning an attack, contending that such a large military would be unnecessary for anything but offensive war; others would have it that the Soviet leadership was merely paranoid and grossly overestimated the possible threats against it. The question has, to my knowledge, as yet to be conclusuvely answered.

I don't mean common like "thrown around by laypeople". It's a number the comes up a lot in history textbooks and other researched sources that I browsed before posting (my dad has an interest in the era so resources were on-hand) Also, though I know you academic types hate it, Wikipedia has a (very) brief breakdown of the sources for the numbers.

Twenty to twenty-three million does seem to be the number generally agreed upon by historians; there are various other proposed figures, ranging from less than 10 million through 28 million and up to to R. J. Rummel's calculated 60 million.* I predict that Gospodin Stas will be around shortly and make his case for lower figures.




*Which I mention here as an upper end, as compared to the lower, not because I particularly credit his methodology.

[salm]

If something worse results from changing history you can just use the time machine again and change history again. Only if you assume that changing history allways has a worse outcome than original history there´d be a point. But that assumption makes no sense.

[Junghalli]

Any althist that significantly interests itself with "screwing over the modern Christian run society that raped Africa and the New World" will very likely result in a shittier "present" time, given that Europe was the society that continued historical progress at the time. Destroying it would entail perpetuating primitivity, or at the least significantly retarding the development of science and technology (and thus also standards of living).

Well you could try to speed up the pace of human technological advance and create trends toward democratic rational societies, and if you could significantly alter world history by ~0 CE Christianity would probably not happen by default. If I had a time machine and wanted to make human history better the obvious way to do it would be try to get scientific, industrial, and democratic revolutions off the ground as quickly as possible.

That said, a time traveller changing history under the simplistic assumption that getting rid of Christianity or screwing over Christian Europe = world will automatically be better even if you don't make any changes to make the situation definitely objectively better like introducing advanced technology strikes me as one who might very well end up actually creating a worse history.

[Zixinus]

This just doesn't work.

A nation floats atop its own economy and stability. Germany was in a piss-poor position before WW2 and militarization was an attractive option, with or without Hitler.

There are a thousand factors that influence how things would work if you do a historical change. Moving a pencil would likely only resort in someone searching for it for a second. But killing the most charismatic to-be head of the nationalist party might have repercussions that you cannot account for.

You might, for example, get the communist party on power by some weird set of circumstances and that party might want to align with Stalin, thus shifting the balance of power.

Or you might get a far more incompetent Third Rich that was far less anti-Semitic.

The issue isn't what you might do, but whether you know what you are doing. If you have a deep enough knowledge of history and social dynamics, or are willing to follow your changes closely enough, you can do, in potential, quite a lot of good. The real question is whether is there a person capable of doing this and whether its within even in human limits.
This is, ignoring of course, the problem of paradoxes.

EDIT: If I made some serious stupidity about the pre-WW2 political situation, I apologise. It's been years since I studied that subject.

[Darth Hoth]

Well you could try to speed up the pace of human technological advance and create trends toward democratic rational societies, and if you could significantly alter world history by ~0 CE Christianity would probably not happen by default. If I had a time machine and wanted to make human history better the obvious way to do it would be try to get scientific, industrial, and democratic revolutions off the ground as quickly as possible.

That much is obvious; whether it can be accomplished in a way that works is more questionable, but the basic idea is correct. However, from the description given by the original post, it sounded very much as though the tune was set for some self-righteous anti-European crusade on the order of "Mwahahah, I'll avenge racism/sexism/anti-homosexualism, this time the white, middle-aged Europeans will FEEL TEH PAIN!" with little regard for objective improvement.

That said, a time traveller changing history under the simplistic assumption that getting rid of Christianity or screwing over Christian Europe = world will automatically be better even if you don't make any changes to make the situation definitely objectively better like introducing advanced technology strikes me as one who might very well end up actually creating a worse history.

Introducing technology on a wider scale may not be feasible, given the unspecified mechanism of time travel and its limitations (as noted so far, the scenarios that have been considered have mostly been limited to using future knowledge to affect politics and/or religion). If this is your typical Wellsian time machine, you cannot bring extensive facilities to significantly upgrade a technological infrastructure. You will be limited to the theoretical knowledge you possess, and whatever books you can send.

Though I agree with the essence of your second paragraph, otherwise.

[K. A. Pital]

Twenty to twenty-three million does seem to be the number generally agreed upon by historians

By which historians? None of the more or less serious academia (Harrison, Ellman, Davies, Getty, Paul Gregory, Applebaum, etc.) never generally agreed upon a number so outrageous and impossible. Unless you mean the total number of people who at some point in history were imprisoned of course.

The very mention of Rummel as a "historian" makes poor Stanislav cringe along with all academic history.

The breakdown of documented deathtolls for famines, penal system deaths and executions one can find in the recent monographies based on the archives. Of course, neither of which provides anything even close to "20 million", like I said, unless you mean the entirety of people imprisoned at some point in time.

[The Spartan]

Isn't the 20-30 million dead the number of Soviets that died in the war?

[Darth Wong]

Twenty to twenty-three million does seem to be the number generally agreed upon by historians

By which historians?

I think that the phrase "generally agreed upon by historians" actually means "that's the number from my high school history class".

[open_sketchbook]

Because my high school's shitty-ass history class ever bothered talking about Stalin in the roughly three weeks we spent on World War 2, right? The only time I saw saw Stalin's name was alongside Churchill and Roosevelt in what amounted to a name drop, and we spent the rest of the time talking about Deippe and and debating conscription.

While I didn't realize that the figure was so widely disputed, the fact remains that there are at least 3 million recorded death by the Russians alone. Add in the famine deaths, you get several million more. The mistreatment of PoWs during WW2? Stack another million or so onto the figure. Forced relocations? It gets muddled, but another few hundreds of thousands up to a few million get thrown in. Most of the academic dispute I'm seeing here is whether or not to attribute the death's to Stalin, not whether or not these people died thanks to the godawful policies of his country at the time, when the fact of the matter seems to be that wherever Stalin went, body counts started climbing into seven digits.

[Spoonist]

Not sure if this is Science or belong in OT, but recently this afternoon I had a conversation that started with "Well, if I had a Time Machine..." That went quickly into ways of screwing over the modern Christian run society that raped Africa and the New World. Eventually I mentioned WWII and give the off the cuff comment about getting ride of Hitler early on. My Friend comes back with a variation of the following:

"Well you can't do that, Someone even worse then him would come along, and the allies might not win." I gave ,some, credence to this, and back things up, fair enough, if you wanted to stop things, you would have to go back to WWI, whose ending screwed Germany so much in invariably led to someone LIKE Hitler taking charge, again he disagreed. "Its impossible to change history like that, you don't know what could happen, the smallest change could make things even worse." Now, Im no historian, but there are certain I can imagine would change the world, just slightly for the better. Perhaps this is me being presumptuous, but I've never ascribed to the theory of "Move a pencil on a desk and suddenly the internal combustion engine was never invented" (an example my friend used).

And, I realize that discussing time travel and changing history as a whole is not exactly an academic field, but certainly there are rational assumptions one can make.. What say the rest of you?

First a historical note. The allies where considering assassinating Hitler but thought better of it. His assassination could have galvanized the nazis and it was likely that someone more competent would take over the strategic decisions of the war.

But to your topic of time travel. There are plenty of fiction in this field. The latest one I read had exactly the dystopian plot suggested by your friend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_History_(novel)

Now for some 'rational' assumptions.
-Changing the past would have unknown effects on the future.
-However a small change, would probably have little to no effect on the outcome of history. (Like moving a pen)
-Killing of an individual would not necessarily prevent the effects of the individual because of parallel cultural/social evolution. (Like killing darwin would not stop evolution theory, it would just be published by someone else)
-When writing fiction or drama which most of our "knowledge" of time travel comes for the narrative demands a big effect. So our cultural bias should be that something dramatic should happen if time travel occurs.

So your friend is just influenced by the cultural bias, while if you would go back in time you would probably end up in dead space since the earth moves. So your timetravel would have zero effect on the outcome of history. (Which has also been covered in a sci-fi short story =)

[Samuel]

And, I realize that discussing time travel and changing history as a whole is not exactly an academic field, but certainly there are rational assumptions one can make.. What say the rest of you?

Rome eternal! Er, I think it is possible to make beneficial alterations to history- of course forseeing the effects is alot harder but there are some things are that are almost certainly benefits (medicine, industrialization, age of reason, etc).

I've heard the argument put forth that minus just one Hitler, Stalin probably would have made a move on the rest of Europe.

Given that would require fighting all of Europe I don't put alot of stock into it. Seriously, communist hordes attempting to conquer the world is a really good reason for a continent wide alliance.

The Nazis killed people they hated; Stalin's communists just killed. 20 million seems a common number; estimates go as high as 30. Stalin was, like Hitler, a rabid anti-Semite and racist, and between starvation he caused, the Gulags, the purges, and population transfers, the war crimes he encouraged... the man was a monster and he lead a nation to monstrous acts.

Hitler ruled for 12 years and killed most of his victims in a span of 4 years (41-45). Stalin ruled for 28 years and was more consistent. While being under Stalin would not be pleasent, there is a difference between a man who had large numbers of people put in the gulags due to paranoia and a man who set up extermination squads that managed to get kill rates measures in minutes.

You might, for example, get the communist party on power by some weird set of circumstances and that party might want to align with Stalin, thus shifting the balance of power.

How could the communists take power? Wasn't the German army and a large portion of the population against them?

But to your topic of time travel. There are plenty of fiction in this field. The latest one I read had exactly the dystopian plot suggested by your friend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_History_(novel)

The Nazis with nukes in '38. Yeah, I'm not seeing that.

[K. A. Pital]

Because my high school's shitty-ass history class ever bothered talking about Stalin in the roughly three weeks we spent on World War 2, right? The only time I saw saw Stalin's name was alongside Churchill and Roosevelt in what amounted to a name drop, and we spent the rest of the time talking about Deippe and and debating conscription.

So wait, you admit to having a shitty history class and still you manage to spurt out bullshit like that? With a complete lack of knowledge on the subject?

Stalin probably would have made a move on the rest of Europe.

For which no evidence outside of lunatic speculation exists.

I don't know how based in reality that is (it's basically the premise of the first Red Alert, so I'm nervous as to the source) but if there is any evidence towards it then I have to say that we might have gotten the lesser evil. The Nazis killed people they hated; Stalin's communists just killed. 20 million seems a common number; estimates go as high as 30.

So you basically spouted a speculation based on Red Alert (we had a wise policy in the History forum of kicking threads out if they mention that game), then proceeded to claim with certainity a number that you hardly understand the origins of. Bravissimo.

While I didn't realize that the figure was so widely disputed, the fact remains that there are at least 3 million recorded death by the Russians alone.

"At least 3 million"? There's at worst 3 million deaths combined from both the penal system for the entire 1930-1953 period and the Great Terror of 1937-1938 (which would be the most contributing factor here by leading to the death of c. 800,000 men in the space of a single year, hence the name Great Terror).

Add in the famine deaths, you get several million more.

Quite so. Your idea as to why Russia deserves special liability for million-killing famines, but say not the British Empire of the same age?

The mistreatment of PoWs during WW2? Stack another million or so onto the figure.

"Mistreatment of POWs"? Which POWs? The Axis ones? Most of them died in 1942 due to the hunger they themselves inflicted on Russia by attacking it and pillaging it's agricultural regions. Moreover, there's not even a million. The total number of all Axis POWs dead in Soviet captivity for whatever reasons is 580,548. For a more full explanation: Axis POWs

Forced relocations? It gets muddled, but another few hundreds of thousands up to a few million get thrown in.

Several hundred thousand at worst, several dozen thousand as a practical reality, I think. Forced relocations had excess mortality, but it wasn't even remotely comparable to the mortality of people in the penal system. Moreover, once again, how is Russia specifically liable for forced relocations? Sure, it's scale of forced relocations (~ 6,000,000 men) is greater than that of other nations, but Russia was also the more brutal society. The industrial paragon of virtue known as America likewise employed forced population transfer, so did the British Empire without much remorse.

Most of the academic dispute I'm seeing here is whether or not to attribute the death's to Stalin, not whether or not these people died thanks to the godawful policies of his country at the time, when the fact of the matter seems to be that wherever Stalin went, body counts started climbing into seven digits.

And where did bodycounts climb into the seven digits? How did they "climb" there? No, I want to hear some explanations for your claims. You can't wiggle out now after admitting your "knowledge" of history is based on a shitty class and Red Alert.

Maybe it's time to concede the ridiculous claims, or just go read a history book, I dunno?

[K. A. Pital]

Isn't the 20-30 million dead the number of Soviets that died in the war?

~25 million to be more precise, of them >8,000,000 are deaths in combat and dead POWs annihilated in Nazi captivity, and ~17,000,000 are civilians who died due to the Nazi invasion, either by starvation, Nazi mass murder, executions or other such causes directly connected to the war. This whole number of people was annihilated in a timeframe of ~3 years that the Nazis occupied the Soviet territories.

[open_sketchbook]

My god you're a lunatic. First, you make the assumption that one is incapable of educating themselves outside of high school history class. Then, you assume that a theory I've heard brought up in various places, some of the academic or otherwise researched in nature, MUST come from a game I listed as an expression of caution over the idea, due to potential pop culture contamination. While I might defer that you are better informed on actual figures, you're otherwise an insane jackass and you need to learn to calm the fuck down.