Sunday, December 6, 2015

in a thousand years from now, if people still remember hockey a thousand years from now, few people will believe gretzky's stats.

various theories will appear to explain how it could be possible. a minority opinion may conclude it had to do with expansion, but it will no doubt be broadly overlooked with arguments such as...

there is no empirical evidence that expansion inflates scoring records

"it's unscientific", they will claim.

other theories will develop, that attempt to take into account occam's razor. some will no doubt argue that it was an honest transcription error that occurred when records were shifted from manual record keeping to digital record keeping, or perhaps that it was some kind of error in binary. are these numbers truly meant to be interpreted in base 10?

others will claim that they were exaggerations by the canadian government to intimidate the russians. cold war propaganda. attempts will be made to compare canadian accounts with russian accounts, and attempt to derive contradictions.

still others will claim that he never existed at all.

the few people that believe the historical record will be written off as lunatics, but will nonetheless angrily hit back at the academics. revisionists! ahistoricisms! it's written clearly in the sources....