re: #387 keloyd

History without counterfactualism isn’t just “a list of names, battles and dates.” Counterfactualism is an over-extrapolation from the observation that in regular history, very brief ‘what if’ scenarios are played out— what if Patton hadn’t been removed from command.

However, serious historians keep these ‘what ifs’ to as limited a scope as possible, since once you move beyond the immediate, the level of interactions grows exponential, as does uncertainty, until quickly it is simply an exercise in story-telling, with no relationship to history.

Its basically historians taking a look at alternate historical fiction, getting jealous, and wanting to write about that stuff because that sounds like way more fun than trying to figure out why what actually happened happened.