Let’s assume the many worlds hypothesis is correct and consider all of the branches of the multiverse that share our 1946. In how many of them did the cold war turn hot? For what percentage would it have been better to make the threat?
Given that a massive amount of quantum-scale randomness would have to go systematically in a different direction for it to have any noticeable macro-scale effect, and that even then most macro-scale effects would be barely even noticeable, isn’t the default answer to questions like this always “in the overwhelming majority of branches, history never noticeably diverged from ours”?
Wouldn’t quantum effects have some influence on who gets cancer from background radiation, and wouldn’t the impact of this ripple in a chaotic way throughout the world so that, say, Petrov isn’t the one on duty on 9/26/1983?
Human minds are a lot more stable than they feel—a decision that feels “close; 60/40” would still fall on the 60% side >>60% of the time—but chaos will quickly bubble up through other channels.
Given that a massive amount of quantum-scale randomness would have to go systematically in a different direction for it to have any noticeable macro-scale effect, and that even then most macro-scale effects would be barely even noticeable, isn’t the default answer to questions like this always “in the overwhelming majority of branches, history never noticeably diverged from ours”?
Wouldn’t quantum effects have some influence on who gets cancer from background radiation, and wouldn’t the impact of this ripple in a chaotic way throughout the world so that, say, Petrov isn’t the one on duty on 9/26/1983?
Absolutely.
Human minds are a lot more stable than they feel—a decision that feels “close; 60/40” would still fall on the 60% side >>60% of the time—but chaos will quickly bubble up through other channels.