Quotes About Counterfactual

Hindsight history, sometimes call counterfactual history, is usually not history at all, but most often a condescending game of oneupmanship in which the living play political tricks on the dead, who are not around to defend themselves.

Poignancy (a close cousin of regret) is a counterfactual feeling, which

How different our national perspective would be had Johnson, rather than Nixon, served from 1969 to 1973.

you don't get far in political discourse with counterfactual arguments that "it would have been even worse.

But rather than producing doubt, the absence of "counterfactual" versions of history tends to have the opposite effect—namely that we tend to perceive what actually happened as having been inevitable.

Look closer at the stress in your own life and you can identify that negative emotions are always built on counterfactual statements.

Blending consensus historical events and personages with imaginary occult forces is a strong recipe for counterfactual storytelling goodness that combines the best of two worlds: resonant history with wild-eyed fantasy.

counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion.

There is an important lesson to be taken from this research on counterfactual thinking, and it's not that we should stop doing it; counterfactual thinking is a powerful intellectual tool. The lesson is that we should try to do more downward counterfactual thinking.

Most people can suppress counterfactual thoughts before they spin too far down a spiral, those who suffer from clinical depression may not be able to. When a student who didn't study much does badly on an exam, he could take responsibility for not having studied more. But the exam could have been easier, or more focused on the material the student knew.

The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.

otro morirá.37 La tercera clase de tabú de Tetlock es el contrafáctico herético.

Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual.

Counterfactual reasoning, which deals with what-ifs, might strike some readers as unscientific. Indeed, empirical observation can never confirm or refute the answers to such questions.

They decided that their hides would be saved by the countries that had bungled their pandemic response. They'd be able to point to them and say, "Look! That's what would have happened to us!" They never imagined that other countries would use the United States to demonstrate their own counterfactual. "We are the bad example for the rest of the world," said Carter. "That's what is so embarrassing.

To understand the true impact of a treatment, we need to know the "counterfactual," which is what would have happened in the absence of that treatment or intervention.

The purpose of any program evaluation is to provide some kind of counterfactual against which a treatment or intervention can be measured.

In the case of a randomized, controlled experiment, the control group is the counterfactual

Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that 'But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. 'But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like […] she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless.

Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only. The source of its power, scientists are discovering, is that it muddles the conventional pain-pleasure calculus.[10] Its very purpose is to make us feel worse—because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.

Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only.