Why I Don’t Believe in the Butterfly Effect, Part 7
Part 7 of 12: Three Wrong Ways to Discuss Alternative History
People often wonder about what might have happened if something had happened differently in the past. The quintessential example is the question, “What if Kennedy hadn’t been killed?” But there are so many other examples, too. These sorts of “what if” questions show up in many different contexts, from world history to sports games to the events of our own lives.
There is a right way and a wrong way to answer these alternative history questions. In fact, there are three wrong ways to answer them. When people try to answer, “What would have happened if……”, there are three wrong answers that they often give:
Wrong Answer #1: Everything would be completely different.
That’s the butterfly effect: the idea that if you changed one little thing, then before long, everything would be different. And it is a logical fallacy, as I explained in Part 4. In reality, changing one little thing usually does not change everything.
Wrong Answer #2: Everything would be the same, except for the one thing that was changed.
The second wrong answer is basically the opposite of the first. Instead of saying that everything would be different, you say that nothing would be different, except for the one thing that was changed.
I very often hear this wrong answer when people talk about sports. You might even call it the Sports Fan’s Fallacy. I can think of three common examples of where this wrong answer shows up, and they’re all from the world of football:
a. “We would’ve won if ……” Let’s say that your football team lost a game by one point, and let’s say one of your players lost a fumble in the first quarter. The next day, a commentator on a talk show would probably say, “If he hadn’t fumbled, we would’ve won.” That is, if that player hadn’t fumbled, then we would have scored, and after that, the entire sequence of the game would have happened exactly as it did in real life. And when you tack on that one score that didn’t happen in reality, that’s enough to give the victory to your team. Thus, if he hadn’t fumbled, we would’ve won. That’s what that commentator is really saying.
b. “We would’ve made the playoffs if ……” Let’s say that Team A misses the playoffs by a single game. Let’s say they went 9–7 while Team B went 10–6 and got the last playoff spot. Let’s say there was one game back in Week 5 in which Team A suffered a heartbreaking loss to Team B at the last second. After the season ends, many fans of Team A would probably say, “If we had just won that one game, we would’ve made the playoffs.” The assumption there is that if they had won that game, then everything else would have transpired exactly as it did in real life — except for the outcome of that one game.
c. “It made the difference.” Conversely, let’s say your team won a game by one point. And let’s say that one of your wide receivers, let’s call him Johnny Jones, made a spectacular one-handed 60-yard touchdown catch in the third quarter. After the game, when being interviewed by reporters, the coach would probably say, “I gotta give a big shout-out to Johnny Jones. That catch made the difference in getting us the win.” Again, the assumption is that if Jones had dropped the ball, everything else would have happened exactly as it did — except that your team didn’t get that one score. And thus, they would’ve lost the game.
To be sure, this second wrong answer is not unique to the world of sports. We also make it when we lament how our lives have turned out. Examples include, “I would’ve turned out normal if it hadn’t been for my father,” or “I woulda gone pro if it hadn’t been for my bum knee.” To be honest, I make these kinds of statements all the time.
I also hear this second wrong answer in acceptance speeches. Think of an acceptance speech at the Oscars or the Grammys. The recipients often say something like, “Without the help of X, this would not have been possible,” or, “If it hadn’t been for X, I never would’ve gotten off the ground.” I think there’s a little bit of the second wrong answer in those statements (maybe a hint of the first wrong answer, too).
However, I hear this wrong answer more often when people are discussing sports than in any other context. That’s why I call it the Sports Fan’s Fallacy. I also think the sports examples do a better job at showing exactly where the fallacy lies than the other examples do.
Anyway, the problem with this second wrong answer is the same as the problem with the first: it assumes that there’s only one node in history, that there was only ever one alternate timeline. And that’s not correct. If the universe is deterministic, then there are zero nodes in history. There was never any alternative to what happened. Meanwhile, if the universe is not deterministic, then there are millions of nodes in history. If one thing had happened differently, there were still countless ways that the future might have turned out (see Part 4). Thus, there is no reason to think that things would have turned out exactly as they did in reality except for the one thing that was changed.
There’s no reason to think that if that one player hadn’t fumbled, or if Johnny Jones hadn’t caught that pass, the remainder of the game would have unfolded exactly as it did in real life. And there’s no reason to think that if Team A had won that game in Week 5, all their other games would have turned exactly as they did in reality. That is the fundamental fallacy behind the second wrong answer.
In many cases, fallacious arguments for the butterfly effect (the first wrong answer) start out as the second wrong answer, but then as the argument keeps going, it develops into the first wrong answer. So the argument moves from one logical fallacy to another.
This can be seen in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life, in the scenes where we see an alternative history in which George (the protagonist) was never born. In the real history (of the movie), as a child, George saves his younger brother Harry from drowning. In the alternative history, in which George doesn’t exist, Harry is placed into exactly the same situation, and he drowns because his brother isn’t there. That’s the second wrong answer: the writers of the movie are assuming that in George’s absence, his brother would still have ended up in precisely the same situation as he did in reality — except that George wasn’t there.
But as this scene goes on, we see that in this alternate timeline, since Harry died as a child, he didn’t get to save his comrades in World War II, as he did in the real timeline (of the movie). Thus, in the alternate timeline, all of Harry’s comrades died in the war, because Harry wasn’t there, because George wasn’t born. And that’s where the movie shifts into the butterfly effect. Now they’re arguing that a whole chain reaction wouldn’t have happened if George hadn’t been born. The movie shifted from the second wrong answer to the first wrong answer. They shifted from one logical fallacy to another. It’s a Wonderful Life is an excellent movie, but it’s not very logical.
Wrong Answer #3: We’ll never know, because it didn’t happen.
Some people are wise enough to know that we can’t know exactly what would have happened if something had happened differently, but then they take it a step further, and they conclude that it’s impossible to know anything about alternative history. They consider all speculation about alternative history to be a waste of time. “We’ll never know what would’ve happened, so there’s no use in thinking about it,” they might say.
Of the three wrong answers, this one is the closest to the truth, but it’s still wrong. It is true that if something had happened differently in the past, then there were still many different possible ways that things could have turned out. And it’s also true that we could never know exactly what happens on any of these branches of alternative history. But that doesn’t mean there’s no point in thinking about them.
First of all, in some cases, it is quite obvious what would have happened if something had happened differently. Consider the following statements:
1. If Al Gore had won the election in 2000, we would not have gone to war with Iraq in 2003.
2. If the Seattle Seahawks had run the ball on that notorious play at the end of Super Bowl XLIX, they would have won the game. They would have been back-to-back Super Bowl champions.
3. If Kennedy hadn’t been killed on November 22, 1963, he would’ve still been alive on November 23, 1963.
All of those statements are almost certainly true, especially the last one. To be sure, there may be a small chance that they wouldn’t be true. President Al Gore might have invaded Iraq anyway, the Seahawks might have somehow ended up losing anyway, and Kennedy might have died of a heart attack on the night of November 22, 1963. But those are all unlikely. In the case of the last statement, if Kennedy hadn’t been shot and killed on November 22, 1963, the probability that he still would’ve been alive the next day would’ve been about 99.99999%. That is so close to 100% that we can take it as given, and we can say, “If Kennedy hadn’t been killed, he still would’ve been alive the next day.” There is nothing wrong with saying that. Thus, in some cases, it is perfectly acceptable to say that if X had happened differently, then Y would have happened. Sometimes, that’s the truth.
But there is a more important reason why I don’t agree with this third wrong answer: for any alternative scenario, it is fine to talk about what would have happened, as long as you speak in terms of probability, rather than presenting just one alternative timeline. When I tell people that I dislike the alternative timeline scenes found in sci-fi movies (like The Butterfly Effect), they often respond by saying, “Yeah, there’s no way of knowing what would have happened.” But that’s not quite my point. I think it’s fine to talk about what would have happened, as long as you’re talking about how the probability of something would have been different, rather than saying, “If that one thing hadn’t happened, then X, Y, Z would have happened.”
If someone tells you, “If Kennedy hadn’t been killed, then John Kerry would’ve won in 2004,” then that’s ridiculous. I think most people (except YouTube hosts) would agree that that’s ridiculous. But the reason it’s ridiculous is not because they speculated about alternative history. It’s fine to speculate about alternative history. Rather, their mistake was in assuming that there was only one alternative to what happened. In reality, there were many things that could have happened if Kennedy hadn’t been killed, just as there were many things that could have happened given that he was killed.
But you can compress all these possibilities into one by using the concept of probability. You can talk about how the probability of something would be different if something had happened differently in the past. If you think in terms of probability, it is indeed possible to talk about what would have happened. This will be the subject of my next essay, Part 8.
Other parts of this series:
Part 2: The Butterfly Effect in Pop Culture
Part 3: The Wrong Way to Disprove It
Part 5: Responding to Arguments in Favor of the Butterfly Effect
Part 6: Exceptions (And Why They Aren’t Really Exceptions)
Part 8: The Right Way to Discuss Alternative History
Part 9: How I Would Interpret Lorenz’s Observations
Part 10: The Butterfly Effect and the Slippery Slope
