Ada Palmer

Not certainty about specifics, but clarity about the shape of the possible.

Interestingly, Palmer has independently arrived at both major methods where the forecasters use for ensemble prediction, though for entirely different reasons.

For one, she perturbs the initial conditions by moving historical figures in time.

cardinals who never overlap now competing for the same throne, creating configurations that never actually existed.

And she also runs multiple models, each time different students inhabit the same roles, bringing different judgment and risk tolerance.

One student playing Cardinal de la Rovira might ally with France.

Another might seek Spanish protection,

Same constraints, different decision-making models.

Palmer developed these techniques for pedagogical reasons, to prevent students from seeking incorrect answers and to explore the range of human responses, but the result is structurally identical to what meteorologists spent decades developing to work around chaos.

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Military planners have long grappled with the same problem.

Wargaming exists because commanders cannot predict how battles will unfold.

Chaos, friction and human decision-making make deterministic prediction impossible.

But unlike meteorologists, military planners lack the resources to run true ensemble predictions.

A major wargame is expensive, it involves hundreds of personnel and equipment over weeks and a single scenario can be executed once, rarely twice.

History, we are told, is more like wargaming than meteorology or physics.

We cannot do experiments.

What happens, happens once.

There is no going back to try different initial conditions.

There is no way to rerun 1492 with different actors to see how it plays out.