On Feb 21, 2009, at 10:26 AM, Jeffrey Hergan wrote: > But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how one might go about > proving that a > person's ideas influence history. > They're mentioned in history books.
One of the issues here is surely that everybody has an influence, no matter how small. This gets back to the butterfly flapping its wings thing. So really what you're asking is how do you prove that someone has a measurably large influence greater than some -- presumably arbitrary -- amount. For me, Asimov was influential in two regards in thinking about precisely this issue. First, there was the Foundation series. Psychohistory suggests that individuals often don't have much influence on the general flow of events: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)>. Second, there was "The End of Eternity" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Eternity >). Here we see things from the other side -- "Eternals" have to identity "minimum actions" that they can undertake to cause a maximal change in the course of events. For example, simply making someone late for a meeting might have far-reaching consequences. (Then there's the old chestnut(*), suppose Adolf had been killed in WWI, etc.). mmalc (*) Not to be confused with this old chestnut: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6IBiR9m3vY> _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
