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Punoxysm comments on Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Sometimes, however, there is no big, deterministic reason for the status quo - it can be historical accident. A lot of intellectual effort can go into story-telling about why things are the way they are and be dead wrong.
If a status quo is stable then there are forces that keep it stable.
Of course that doesn't mean that you can't be wrong if you try to identify those forces.
They can be local minima, stable but arbitrary. People turn "for want of a nail" into "inconceivable it could have turned out otherwise".