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100 sats \ 12 replies \ @siggy47 10 Dec 2023 \ on: Will World War 3 Start Next Year? oracle

I know it's just for fun, but who will decide if a conflict qualifies as a world war?

192 sats \ 10 replies \ @SwearyDoctor 10 Dec 2023

historians, years later. They might well decide that it started years earlier with regional wars that will draw in more countries. Also, we're hung up on the idea of large land wars involving great powers as a "world war", which might not be what the next one looks like. Also, the last ones were quite Europe-centered; WW1 was only a World War because Europe thought itself The World...

100 sats \ 8 replies \ @siggy47 10 Dec 2023

Yes, of course. That's why I asked. I meant specifically with regard to a prediction market wager.

43 sats \ 6 replies \ @SwearyDoctor 10 Dec 2023

yeah, the prediction market thing only really works if you have uncontested assignments of value or decide by whose assessment it will trigger. "When will bitcoin reach 100000 on gemini" only delivers a clear value only because you specified who gets to decide it. Without the qualifier, do you won if it reaches it only on bitfinex but nowhere else?

This breaks down.. well, almost immediately, especially if we take this whole thing here seriously and don't think that a Knowledge Pope gets to say it for everyone. What's a world war will remain contested for decades. Some historians and political scientists are already calling what we have now a World War. The point is not if they're right or wrong; World War isn't something that just is. It's a contested ascription. It's never clearly right or wrong, it's a contested world out there.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @ek OP 10 Dec 2023

What's a world war will remain contested for decades.

First time I hear of this

64 sats \ 1 reply \ @SwearyDoctor 11 Dec 2023

It often comes up in media that the first world war was of course not called the first world war when it happened, but they get hung up on the word "first". Time travel movie trope, "ah, this is the first world war!" - "what do you mean, first..."

But it also wasn't called a, or the, world war; it was the "great war" at the time. It only became the first world war when the other one happened, and historians tied them together as two sequential conflicts. The second one now made a new template, and because of that, we only even think of the possibility of another "world war". There were conflicts before both could quite well qualify as conflicts of a similar scope than the first one. The Seven Years War extended to north america, as did the napoleonic wars. Ancient wars spanned the width of the known world. They weren't called a world war because historians hadn't come up with that yet, and it was never applied retroactively, though it well could have been. It's all... wobbly.