Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Says FCC Official

Re:Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Say... by tamana on Saturday August 06, 2016 @03:29PM (#12239505)

That wasn't the question.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Say... by shawn-butler on Saturday August 06, 2016 @07:59PM (#12240443)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional

Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions.

I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Say... by yongjik on Saturday August 06, 2016 @08:17PM (#12240483)

Huh? Actual causality is meaningless without counterfactuals. "Hitler caused Holocaust" means that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust wouldn't have happened.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Say... by shawn-butler on Sunday August 07, 2016 @01:54PM (#12242888)

Not really but sort of. Counterfactual historiography at best represents a sort of "reproducibility" for historians. They can't conduct experiments on the past.

So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens.

That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.

[ Parent | on HN ]