The last Open Thread was in October 2017, so I thought we were overdue for a new one.
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I recently played two different video games with heavy time-travel elements. One of the games heavily implied that choosing differently made small differences for a little while but ultimately didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. The other game heavily implied that even the smallest of changes could butterfly effect into dramatically different changes. I kind of find both intuitions plausible so I'm just pretty confused about how confused I should be.
I wish there was a way to empirically test this, other than with time travel.
A lot of big events of in my life have had pretty in-the-moment-trivial-seeming things in the causal chains leading up to them. (And the big events appear contingent on the trivial-seeming parts of the chain.)
I think this is the case for a lot of stuff in my friends' lives as well, and appears to happen a lot in history too.
It's not the far future, but the experience of regularly having trivial-seeming things turn out to be important later on has built my intuition here.