3 Comments

This seems useful. Anyone who tries to explain the outcome of that war should also try to explain the contemporary predictions. Ideally, one should do this before predictions have been extracted from markets.

Two natural follow-up questions: (1) how does this compare to other predictions made explicitly (though qualitatively) at the time?

(2) What information was revealed at Gettysburg? Two distinct classes of information occur to me:a. the quality of the Union generalsb. the relevance of industry to war

Given how bad Lincoln was at judging generals, (a) was probably information only available from battles, but (b) is information that someone paying close attention might have figured out without ahead of time.

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If you believe in determinism, everything that ever occurs is inevitable. Probabilities reflect our lack of information. Under some interpretations of relativity I've read, everything that ever occurs in a certain sense has already occurred but we merely perceive events to occur after one another.

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That doesn't mean the outcome wasn't inevitable, it could just mean that it took the battle of Gettysburg/Vicksburg for information on the war's likely outcome to become generally available.

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