Sure, the butterfly is really minor compared to everything else going on, and so only “causes” the hurricane if you unnaturally consider the butterfly as a variable while many more important factors are held fixed.
But, I don’t believe the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is in the same category. While there’s certainly a danger that hindsight could make certain events look more pivotal than they really were, the very fact that we have a natural seeming chain of apparent causation from the assassination to the war is evidence against it being a “butterfly effect”.
Yeah, I’m quite curious to understand this point too—certainly not sure how far this reasoning can be applied (and whether Ferdinand is too much of a stretch). I was thinking of this assassination as the “perturbation in a super-cooled liquid”—where it’s really the overall geopolitical tension that was the dominant cause, and anything could have set off the global phase transition. Though this gets back to the limitations of counter-factual causality in the real-world...
It not determined by reality, it’s determined by your interests. The geopolitical tension and the assassination are both reasonable answers, depending on the exact question.
Sure, the butterfly is really minor compared to everything else going on, and so only “causes” the hurricane if you unnaturally consider the butterfly as a variable while many more important factors are held fixed.
But, I don’t believe the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is in the same category. While there’s certainly a danger that hindsight could make certain events look more pivotal than they really were, the very fact that we have a natural seeming chain of apparent causation from the assassination to the war is evidence against it being a “butterfly effect”.
Yeah, I’m quite curious to understand this point too—certainly not sure how far this reasoning can be applied (and whether Ferdinand is too much of a stretch). I was thinking of this assassination as the “perturbation in a super-cooled liquid”—where it’s really the overall geopolitical tension that was the dominant cause, and anything could have set off the global phase transition. Though this gets back to the limitations of counter-factual causality in the real-world...
It not determined by reality, it’s determined by your interests. The geopolitical tension and the assassination are both reasonable answers, depending on the exact question.