Could’ve Been

Counterfactual sounds like a word you might use if you want to impress someone. It’s a powerful and important tool you can use to help understand a situation, but in spite of its fancy-sounding name, you’re probably already familiar with counterfactuals.

The idea is pretty simple and straightforward: something happens, and then you ask how things might have turned out differently if that one thing hadn’t happened.

Marvel Comics came out with a comic book based on this very notion, and I loved the idea. It was called What If, and just like the title implies, we got to see what might have happened to our favorite superheroes if things had turned out differently.

What if Spiderman had joined the Fantastic Four? What if the Hulk had killed Wolverine when they fought? What if the Hulk had Bruce Banner’s brain?

What if I had never heard of this idea of counterfactuals?

By thinking through very narrow and specific what-ifs, you can sometimes learn lessons that aren’t completely evident. If there were several things going on at once and you’re not sure why something happened, you can modify one variable at a time in your mind, imagining what could’ve been.

This is a bit like asking why repeatedly until you get a satisfactory answer. The five whys method doesn’t use speculation, though, or try to imagine what would have happened if one variable was different. Instead, the idea is to create a causal link from A to B to C.

Imagining a scenario unfolding differently can help you zone in on why something happened. If there’s something we could have done that would have prevented a disaster or made a situation better, it’s worth thinking through what that is so that next time will be better.

This skill is already hard-wired into our biology, and it manifests in the form of regret. Being able to look backwards and wishing we had made a better decision can lead to better decisions in the future. Of course, our biology can also drag us down, since regret can also paralyze you, keeping you from moving forward.

Now, the problem in using a mental model like counterfactuals is that you have to make up a story about what could have been. What if you imagine something that absolutely wouldn’t have ever happened? How could you even know for sure?

In the same way that an LLM can hallucinate and give you information that’s not accurate, a counterfactual can give you a false or misleading result. However, like with LLMs, that doesn’t mean you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If you’re open to considering possibilities, you’ve begun to use the superpower of your imagination. There is more than one way to get to where you’re going, and there was more than one possible path to here.

Expanding your imagination like this can also help you to forgive others much more quickly, since it’s exactly the sort of thinking that helps you see that the story you’ve made up may not be entirely accurate. Instead of imagining sinister intent, you can imagine that someone forgot their keys, for instance.

There are a couple modern television shows I’ll recommend, if you’re interested in exploring counterfactual thinking through the lens of science fiction and fantasy. Both are considered alternative history, which describes quite accurately what the genre is.

Man in the High Castle imagines what the world might look like if the Axis powers had won World War II. In a similar vein, For All Mankind asks: what if the Soviets had won the space race, and not the US? Both of these shows have excellent casts and decent writing, and both are great at building their versions of our world.

Have you read, watched, or listened to any good counterfactual fiction? Have you used these real life what-ifs in your decision making process? Is what could have been really better than what could never be at all?