On Feb 21, 2009, at 2:09 PM, mmalc Crawford wrote: > > 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.
Yes, to some extent. What I'm also getting into is "Why does it matter?" Who cares if the light bulb changed history? The real question, perhaps, is, did it change history in some positive way? If my car saves me 1000 hours of time each year, the question becomes--what did I do with my free time? If I used it to find a cure for cancer, well, good. But what do the cancer survivors do with their lengthened stay on earth? If the cured people use all of their newly won time to burn ants with a magnifying glass and sunlight, then the cure for cancer perhaps, although in itself a good thing, has not perhaps had a positive change on history. Living longer, or having free time are desirable things, but maybe only insofar as they afford the opportunity to do _better_ things. No? Of course, you can see the giant can of worms I've opened here, right? I can prove Steve King took up 140 million hours of his readers' time. And I can prove that Edison's bulb provided x million hours of free time. But getting from that, to the the question "How did their contributions change history, for the good"? That's the more complicated issue. especially when trying to put it in a 6th grade 2500 word report. I guess it all seems so self-evident to me that trying to _prove_ it becomes more difficult than I thought. But I definitely will include your suggestions, and see how they fit in. Maybe Asimov would have been an easier author to choose? Thanks, mmalc. Jeff > > 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/ _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
