Given that overconfidence is one of the big causes of bad policy, maybe a world without Hitler would have worse policies if Stuart’s guesses at the end were true. It would possibly be overconfident about niceness, negotiations, democracy and supra-national institutions. On the other hand, it might be more cautious about developing nuclear weapons. So maybe it would be more vulnerable to nasty totalitarian surprises, but have a slighly better safety against nuclear GCRs.
As a non-historian I don’t know how to properly judge historical what-ifs well: not only am I uncertain about how to analyse the counterfactual methodology itself, but I am uncertain about what historical data we need to know in order to do a proper counterfactual. But looking at how different worldviews depend on particular historical events and doing at least some estimate of how robust those events were, might indeed tell us a bit about where we might have ended up with contingent world-views.
In my own field of human enhancement ethics it is pretty clear that some of the halo effect of Nazism and its defeat in WWII led to a very strong negative value association that is relatively arbitrary but affects current policies. Had they been doing bad sociology instead we might have been decrying sinister social engineering, while happily selecting the genes of our children. If there had been an anti-USSR WWII the same might have happened.
Given that overconfidence is one of the big causes of bad policy, maybe a world without Hitler would have worse policies if Stuart’s guesses at the end were true. It would possibly be overconfident about niceness, negotiations, democracy and supra-national institutions. On the other hand, it might be more cautious about developing nuclear weapons. So maybe it would be more vulnerable to nasty totalitarian surprises, but have a slighly better safety against nuclear GCRs.
As a non-historian I don’t know how to properly judge historical what-ifs well: not only am I uncertain about how to analyse the counterfactual methodology itself, but I am uncertain about what historical data we need to know in order to do a proper counterfactual. But looking at how different worldviews depend on particular historical events and doing at least some estimate of how robust those events were, might indeed tell us a bit about where we might have ended up with contingent world-views.
In my own field of human enhancement ethics it is pretty clear that some of the halo effect of Nazism and its defeat in WWII led to a very strong negative value association that is relatively arbitrary but affects current policies. Had they been doing bad sociology instead we might have been decrying sinister social engineering, while happily selecting the genes of our children. If there had been an anti-USSR WWII the same might have happened.