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MichaelGR comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong
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It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs. -Stanislaw Ulam
Can they really? I have my doubts. Most of those scribbles on a blackboard were either an inevitable result of outside forces or would have been made on a different blackboard had they they not been made there. (Although to be fair the butterfly and mere chance will play their part at least some of the time.)
Scribbles on maps, particularly in 1815 and 1919, had some largish effects.
In 1923, England and France divided between them the previously Turkish territories of what are modern Syria, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. They drew a pencil line on a map to mark the treaty border.
It turned out that the thickness of the pencil line itself was several hundred meters on the ground. In 1964, Israel fought a battle with Syria over that land.
People were killed because someone neglected to sharpen their pencil. That's "scribbles on a piece of paper" for you.
Ref: a book found by Google. I originally learned about this from an Israeli plaque at the Dan River preserve near the border.
I suppose it would be in bad taste to find that rather amusing. Or at least to admit it.
In circumstances like that I find I have to laugh, if only to keep from weeping.
"The 350-mile detour in the Trans-Siberian Railway was caused by the Tsar, who drew the proposed route using a ruler with a notch in it." -- Not 1982
What's the source for this? Googling "Not 1982" is not helpful... I did find the following amusing quote though:
"The Trans-Siberian Railway". In The Living Age, seventh series volume five, 1899
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_the_Nine_O%27Clock_News#Books_and_miscellaneous
My google-fu is strong-ish. Still, not a particularly reliable source.
I wonder if Nicholas was acting in the same spirit as King Canute and likewise has been subsequently misinterpreted. (I've seen the Canute story mentioned as an example of being power-mad.) Nicholas's intention could have been something like 'Gentlemen, you were chosen for your competence in engineering and expertise in dealing with such details; I have made my general wish known to you; kindly implement it and do not bother me with what is your job.'
The partitions of Korea and Vietnam are some more recent examples; nor have we seen the last of the largish effects of the former.
He could have also been thinking about the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and various other documents. (I'd list the Magna Carta, but it didn't really have the effect it's credited with. It was a few lines in a larger document that was more concerned with the hunting privileges of nobles than with the rights of man, and that was nullified before the year was out.)
I think he had things like the development of physics in the 20th century that led to the creation of the A and H bombs. I got the quote from Richard Rhodes history of the making of the atomic bomb.
It doesn't matter exactly which blackboard or wrote wrote what, in the end, a bunch of people making calculations and experiments changed the course of human affairs pretty significantly.