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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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.
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