View source for Research:Molecular Democracy/5.1r/1015 pink-elephants

{{BopCSS}}<!--
--><div class="bop top">
<h3 data-datetime="2024-12-19T04:46:39Z">[[Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.2/5021 progress-system|"progress-system"]]</h3>
<div>people have different and sometimes frightening ideas of "what society needs"
what do you say when somebody is convinced that one of the most useful expenses the United States could make is on military vehicles ...
if we truly can't predict what the future holds, and we truly can't use the events of the last decade as data to guess the future, then _how can we really know_ that one day China won't spontaneously fly bomber planes into the United States and start World War III?

<ins>[maybe this is too dark. maybe this concept should be demonstrated using "the fun stuff"]</ins>
</div></div>

<div class="bop">
<h3><time datetime="2025-05-09T00:21:53Z">[[Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.2/1112 tomorrow|"tomorrow"]]</time></h3>
<div>why doesn't history and the creation of tomorrow within reality work the way it works in fantasy novels?
why don't we wake up and spontaneously find out that we can go to a magical alternate world that before today we had no evidence or reason to believe existed? ...</div></div>

<div class="bop"><h3><time datetime="2024-12-19T04:46:39Z">r2</time></h3>
<div>some predictions of the future seem obviously wrong, like if somebody claimed there would be a day in the future the sky would rain pink elephants
other predictions of the future seem at least somewhat wrong, but hard to disprove, like the hypothetical attack on the United States by China
but how do we have any idea what a correct or plausible prediction of the future looks like? what rules might separate a plausible prediction of the future from a clearly incorrect prediction?

for a simple thought experiment, we can put an obviously incorrect prediction next to an obviously correct prediction and compare them.
say we are standing on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_in_the_United_States the year 2000], and for some reason, we can be certain that this year 2000 in question is the same as the real-world year 2000 and the 2020 that occurs after this hypothetical 2000 is exactly the same year 2020 we experienced in the real world.

it is January 2, 2000. Alice predicts that cartoonist Charles Schulz will die in the next two months. Bob predicts that within two months the sky will rain pink elephants. it should not be surprising when Alice returns with an obituary and Bob returns with no pink elephant sightings. one of the claims is mundane, and the other one is extraordinary. people dying is an event that has happened many, many times previously, and every time, there is usually a particular range of ages people most often die at; to attempt to quantify this distribution of ages, fact books publish a measure called life expectancy. if a person lives in a particular country with a particular life expectancy, it is possible to take a statistical distribution of death ages and, depending on how old that person has already survived to be, narrow down which are the most and least common death ages remaining, or begin to guess how high a percentile of death age this particular person could end up in, and what the _minimum_ death age could be.

it is June 1. Alice predicts that in the next two months, an old Confederate submarine will be found on the floor of the ocean. Bob predicts that in the next two months the world's first confirmed time traveler will be discovered, coming from the year 2200 and creating a time loop. on August 8, a Confederate submarine is pulled out of the ocean, but at the end of August there are no reports of time travelers. the submarine, once again, is a mundane claim, because submarines have been lost at the bottom of the ocean before, and various submarines and ships have been found at the bottom of the ocean before. finding a time traveler is an extraordinary claim. there has never been a report of a time traveler before the year 2000, at least as far as anyone can reasonably confirm or verify, and there is no good prior evidence to believe that human beings ending up in time loops is a thing that can happen. falsifying particular claims of the possibility of time travel may be difficult specifically due to science not having a complete understanding of general relativity and thus of time itself, but from the other direction, making a case that time travel definitely _is_ possible is difficult enough that it can be sorted into the kind of claim that can be tentatively dismissed without evidence because the person proposing it has the burden of proof.

now let us say we have rewound to the year 1920, and Leon Trotsky predicts that by the end of the year 2000, all of France will have become a Trotskyist workers' state. how can anyone in the year 1920 have any idea whether this event is likely or unlikely, or whether we should express our confidence in it happening in the form of any nonzero probability whatsoever?
we can begin by saying that workers' states themselves are definitely possible. in 1949 East Germany was founded [https://eastgermany.info/TimeLine.htm following years of occupation] by the United States on one side and the Soviet Union on the other. the existence of East Germany means that even if under somewhat unusual conditions, predicting a workers' state in Europe is not actually extraordinary. perhaps if the Soviet Union had occupied France, there would have been some possibility for a second "East Germany" to have formed in France. in the real world this event did not happen. thus, if Trotsky is predicting that a workers' state will occur in France without any intervention from the Soviet Union, we have some small amount of prior evidence to suggest that Trotsky's prediction is relying on material mechanisms which have not yet been substantiated to occur in reality. if we are standing on the year 1950, we can guess that the prediction of a Trotskyist France is _not likely_ but perhaps has not yet been shown to be entirely impossible. our evidence for a Trotskyist France as distinct from a "Stalinist" France is thin enough that our ability to predict a Trotskyist workers' state mostly lies in _epistemic possibility_ rather than more empirical kinds of already-demonstrable possibility, but either way, we do not yet have enough knowledge to say it is not possible.

between the year 1950 and the year 2000, many more events provide more information about what kinds of transformations can occur to countries. many countries end up dismantling parts of Bolshevism or all of Bolshevism for various reasons, but no country transforms itself into a Trotskyist workers' state. we know that the claim of a Trotskyist workers' state lies in the realm of falsifiability because if a Trotskyist workers' state were ever to exist, then at least one Trotskyist periodical or theorist would fail to print negative opinions about it and begin praising it as an acceptable Trotskyist workers' state. because Trotskyist sources have almost unfailingly said negative things about every single workers' state that has appeared after the Soviet Union, we can be relatively confident that by the year 2000, and even by the year 2020, the world has not yet seen a Trotskyist workers' state, and has not produced evidence of any particular conditions under which we could expect a Trotskyist workers' state to become more likely. in terms of prior evidence, the amount of evidence we have for a Trotskyist workers' state being an event that could occur more than once across several or many countries is similar to the amount of evidence we have for time loops. we cannot say for sure based only on empirical experience that the world will never see a time loop, but that alone also does not mean that the world _will_ experience a time loop. this particular kind of reasoning simply cannot fully tell us whether a previously unlikely event does or does not have a possibility to occur, and to attempt to determine this, we will need other tools.
</div></div>

<div class="bop bottom"><h3><time datetime="2024-12-19T06:58:15Z">r2</time></h3>
<div>there's unfortunately a very interesting connection here with Free Will
the claim that a Trotskyist workers' state could occur in France without Soviet occupation is to claim in a certain sense that the people of France could spontaneously build Bolshevism "of their own free will" because they believe Bolshevism is a good idea. if Stalin's government shepherds the creation of a French workers' state, then it is unprovable whether the people of France would have decided the same thing independently, but if we lived in the world where France _did_ spontaneously become a Trotskyist workers' state without Soviet intervention, then it at least could not be said that Stalin's government forced the people of France to build a Soviet-style workers' state against their will. whether the people of France _possess_ Free Will or whether they would have decided to build a Trotskyist workers' state _based on_ that Free Will is a separate question, but it would at least be impossible to say that Stalin's government forced France to build a workers' state _according to the Soviet people's will_ in the absence of any kind of localized French will.

unfortunately, if we make any attempt to characterize what a "French will" is, this is where a lot of further problems come up. if we speak of a "localized French will", _which_ will is French will? if there is a group of French Communists, do they represent French will? if there is a group of French reactionaries that announce a plan to kill all the Communists but otherwise live with everyone else in peace and harmony, do these people represent French will? if there is a section of French people who have no idea what Communism is yet would never kill a Communist, are these the only people who are actually French? does the action of announcing a particular group of people's will as the only valid will of France actively _make somebody not French_? if that were true, would it not also be true that the act of announcing nobody can say their will is the only valid will of France is also an act of defining a group of people who holds the only valid will of France, thus making literally nobody French?

the concept of avoiding totalization is ridiculous and impossible.
it is true that few people outright phrase the argument in these terms, of "being French" or "being Russian", but the argument itself is ubiquitous: the Bolsheviks improperly took over Russia when clearly Russia could have built "a democracy" without it being controlled by Bolshevism, French Communists have no right to take over France and limit the presumed rights and freedoms of other sections of the French population. the unstated subtext: French Communists are not especially French and have no special claim to being French, while as long as they kill nobody French nazis have every claim to being French and every claim to vote and nominate a president because they are French.

here is why this is a very bad idea: if nobody has a special claim to being French, nobody ever has a special claim to being the only valid will of the United States, even if the division line is between an oppressive majority and an oppressed minority. if Black people have a claim to make about structural racism, their will can never be called inherently more valid than the will of White Southern Baptist Christians who are convinced they are lying about their experiences. Difference Existentialism becomes impossible.
</div></div>

<div class="bop-foot">

<dl class="bop-meta">
{{BopVer|Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.2/5021 progress-system| v4.4 scraps/ societal system of progressivism is precarious [unreleased] }}
{{BopRev|Philosophical_Research:MDem/5.2/1111 FreeWill| v5.2/ okay, relativity is nice, but do we have free will?? }}
{{BopRev|Philosophical_Research:MDem/5.2/1112 tomorrow| v5.2/ The materialism of tomorrow [unreleased] }}
<!-- ; -->{{BopComment}}
{{BopCreated|2024-12-19T04:46:39Z}}
{{BopHandle|pink-elephants}}
{{BopHandle|v5-1_1015_pink-elephants}}
{{BopCommentTitle|v4.4-5.1 scraps/ how do we know the sky will not rain pink elephants?}}
</dl></div><!--
-->[[Category:MDem v5.1 entries]]  __NOTOC__