Good mystery novels rarely do the true butler-did-it stunt of making the least likely person the murderer. If by least likely you think most irrelevant. Generally the murderer is important to the plot but the nature of the actual importance and apparent importance are different.
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We feel cheated if a truly peripheral character with few speaking lines, no character development, and no role in the events turns out to be the killer. Spectators and background extras are unsatisfying suspects. We want someone whose actions turn out to have a different meaning.
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Agatha Christie in fact often figures out how to make the most likely person, the spouse, the killer. Even cues it up with Poirot declaring, like a good Bayesian, that it’s most likely the spouse. She takes pains to explicitly have Poirot regect strangers/burglars/servants.
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Often the big reveal is interesting not because the murderer is a surprise (I often guess) but because the actual story beneath the apparent story is a surprise. Like an optical illusion flipping from duck to rabbit.
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As a seasoned consumer of hundreds of murder mysteries I can often guess the murderer early from peripheral cues outside the plot, like storytelling technique tells (one of my favorites in TV is a character introduced early who is played by an actor clearly too good for the part)
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Now here’s the thing. I was wondering if history works the same way. There’s no murderer per se, and “important” and “unimportant” rarely trade places. An individual random peasant will not suddenly turn out to be more important in a revisionist history than a famous king.
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Example. In the history of electricity, Edison and Tesla May trade places as hero/villain in different telling. Some tellings may declare that Samuel Insull was more important than Edison. But it would be a really weird surprise to read a version that centers J. Random Lab Tech.
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History is an underdetermined story-telling challenge where a subset of things are known to be important because of amount of narrative energy they carry. The rules say you can tell the story in many ways so long as you include objectively important (via heat signature) stuff.
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The account has to be relatively complete in terms of narrative energy balance. You can’t leave the peasants out in aggregate because they did nothing in an era. Like the dog that didn’t bark in the mystery, you have to explain why the peasants didn’t revolt.
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Often innovation in history writing takes the form of pointing out a “dark matter” type narrative energy imbalance and appropriately expanding the story to include it and retelling to account for the behavior of the new element and its relative quiescence in old tellings.
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I’m trying to identify and learn to work with the equivalent of physics constants of integration/symmetries in history. For example you don’t have to be an ideological feminist to recognize that histories where women basically do nothing, modulo a couple of queens, are “wrong”.
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Why? Because they represent 50% narrative energy with other factors being roughly equal in a given chapter of history (material prosperity, environment). So a story that doesn’t account for women not being in the story works better with a “power” subplot keeping them contained.
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One reason I think something like psychohistory might be possible, despite chaos butterflies, is the presence of such energy dynamics symmetries. History is lower dimensional than it seems. We can “solve” it like a mystery better than we realize.
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So far historical revisionism has usually been an exercise in applied political philosophy. Ought guiding the rewriting of is. But I strongly suspect we can start to do pre-ideological revisionist thinking on purely technical grounds, relatively mechanically. Not sure how though.
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It will be like a different kind of mystery, the procedural. Historigraphy is moving from cozy era where a genius tells the important story in a more surprising way, to one where a set of techniques, applied with discipline, grind through and get the murderer. Machine solves.
