#Counterfactuals
If the possible worlds treatment of counterfactuals, modals etc is right, does that mean that the subjunctive mood isn't really a mood but just a fancy declarative?
November 18, 2025 at 9:27 AM
anyway the great thing about counterfactuals is that they can’t be disproven.
November 18, 2025 at 5:06 AM
3/ Pearl's argument: DNNs trained on “passive” observations using statistical prediction objectives are fundamentally limited to associations (L1) and cannot reason about interventions (L2) or counterfactuals (L3).
November 18, 2025 at 2:11 AM
"Counterfactuals. At planetary scale."
The Planetary Causal Inference (PCI) book launches soon:
planetarycausalinference.org/book-launch/
November 17, 2025 at 2:57 PM
I'm honored to have my article, "Counterfactuals and the Tumblr Aesthetic: Allegories of Reading in _Frankenstein_ and _The Locked Tomb_" included in this special issue!
New issue of @c21literature.bsky.social: Journal of 21st-century Writings, Volume 12, Issue 2, is out now! Novel Media/Media Novel, edited by Dong Xia and Sandro Eich: c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1286/i...
November 17, 2025 at 2:28 PM
And talking about counterfactuals gets us very quickly into heavily speculative territory. I think a few hundred votes going "right" in 2000 still leaves us a ticking time bomb that very likely blows up inside 25 years. Can't prove it, but you also can't prove we get a 200-year Pax Gore.
November 17, 2025 at 1:39 PM
... 'Labour Together' faction, it may well be that the 2017 election would have been won by Corbyn.

Counterfactuals become difficult. Things would have been so markedly different with a 2017-2022 Corbyn Labour government that there's no saying where we would be today.

That was precisely what...
November 17, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Counterfactuals are called that for a reason.

They are counter to the facts.
November 17, 2025 at 8:59 AM
Really makes me wonder about counterfactuals like “what if the US was in a climate zone where all states were equally capable of growing the same crops” and how that plays out constitutionally
November 17, 2025 at 7:17 AM
We are well into counterfactuals already I think
November 16, 2025 at 11:13 PM
Now you’ve got me thinking that (certain) video games are one of the hardest cases for wholesale skepticism that counterfactuals can have truth conditions
November 16, 2025 at 4:08 PM
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November 16, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Counterfactuals are always difficult, and in this case nostalgia plays a big part.
Born now I'd miss out on affordable housing, final salary pension, free university & Action Man.
I know what I experienced. I don't know what someone born today will experience, or how they'll perceive it.
November 15, 2025 at 4:17 PM
When to Use Counterfactuals in Causal Historiography: Methods for Semantics and Inference According to the interventionist framework of actual causality, causal claims in history are ultimately claims about special types of functional dependencies between variables, which consist
#sociology link
November 15, 2025 at 8:30 AM
With respect, I don't deal with counterfactuals. Enough to think about in the world as it is.
November 14, 2025 at 2:58 PM
🚨 New publication alert:
📢 “Attri-Net: A Globally and Locally Inherently Interpretable Model for Multi-Label Classification Using Class-Specific Counterfactuals.”
🖊️ S Sun, S Woerner, A Maier, L M Koch, C F Baumgartner.
⬇️
November 14, 2025 at 2:39 PM
You can think of many counterfactuals where contact happens differently, but ultimately the pressures that led to contact were baked in by the same material realities I mentioned before
November 14, 2025 at 2:55 AM
The Granny Weatherwax counterfactuals theory
November 14, 2025 at 12:28 AM
Even though I'm not an instinctive political same-pager as Ed M, I felt very at home in his Labour party, and "what if he'd won in 2015" is one of the great counterfactuals
November 13, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Hi Dave,
I am interested to know more,
more about Cthulu,

is It the destroyer of all the
all the counterfactuals'
universes?
November 13, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Keyword: “organizational counter-knowledge”

Definition: groupthinks, misinformation, errors, and other counterfactuals that get cemented as true knowledge in organizations due to internal social dynamics, despite diverging from actual reality
November 13, 2025 at 4:09 PM
A list of counterfactuals to this theory would take more posts than the number of actual examples provided
November 13, 2025 at 2:57 PM
Did you say “rounded down”? Why are we leading with counterfactuals?
November 13, 2025 at 12:34 PM