History is Like Sports Betting
The Secret of Success - Ch.13
HOW vs WHY
We know exactly HOW the world ended up being mostly English speaking. We don’t know WHY.
HOW is about understanding the events that led to a specific outcome.
WHY is about understanding causation of how those events happened and not others instead.
“To describe ‘how’ means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain ‘why’ means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of others.” (Sapiens, 265)
The WHY is harder to answer. The problem is we often confuse the two. We go around thinking we know WHY, when we really only know HOW.
Why did Christianity become the religion of the Roman Empire?
Economy
Geography
Population Density
Other smart people things…
In reality these are HOW answers made in hindsight. They don’t explain all the other paths that could have been taken but were not.
It’s like looking back on a the winner of March Madness and saying, “oh it was obvious they were gonna win, look at their defense, their coaching and their star player.” It wasn’t obvious before. It wasn’t even obvious during. It was only obvious after. The same is true in history.
What If You Were There
Before the rise of Christianity, it was far from obvious it would take over the empire. DURING the rise, it was still not obvious to the majority of people, even the ones living under Roman rule. Even when Rome fell, there were many faraway regions that still thought they were under Roman rule for decades.
These people weren’t stupid, we’re probably doing the same thing. At some point in the future, historians might decide the fall of the United States was when Trump was elected or Biden was elected. They might decide that was the beginning of the end. Or maybe the creation of Bitcoin marks the beginning of a new age of human history. Today, we have no idea.
“It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.” (Sapiens, 266)
Why Can We Never Know With Certainty - Chaotic Systems
The problem isn’t that it’s just hard to predict big events, it’s actually borderline impossible because of chaos. There are two types of chaotic systems
Level one: a system with impossibly many variables contributing to it, with large swings, making it hard to predict. Example - the weather
Level two: the same but it actually changed based on any predictions. Example - predicting stock prices makes people buy/sell accordingly making the predicted price come true before the predicted date
If I had been a trusted advisor to the Emperor of Rome before the rise of Christianity and I told him Christianity was about to take over, he may have began mass expulsions and killings of Christians in the kingdom. Then my prophecy would never have become true and he would turn around and kill me too for lying to him.
Stop Predicting, Start Building
Making predictions is hard for the same reason understanding history is hard. There’s so many factors, many of them we don’t consider and couldn’t even measure if we wanted to.
We can’t predict if something terrible will happen next year, next month or even later today. But we can still prepare. We just need to be more broad in our preparations.
We can’t build a wall everywhere we think a potential problem might be. Instead, we need to develop the strength to get hit and not fall. This is the difference between avoiding each food “the experts” tell you to stop eating and preemptively eating healthy and taking care of your physical health.
Question of The Day
What can you do today to prepare for an uncertain tomorrow?
Your Biggest Fan,
Noah “BigNerd” Sochaczevski