Reddit reviews Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
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I've been reading this book called Everything is Obvious: *Once You Know The Answer that goes over applying historical significance to events as they transpire. Basically, you cannot apply a historical significance or label to a time or event until sometime down the line when the implications are settled.
Here are some quotes from the book:
> History cannot be told while it is happening, therefore, not only because the people involved are too busy or too confused to puzzle it out, but because what is happening can’t be made sense of until its implications have been resolved. And when will that be? As it turns out, even this innocent question can pose problems for commonsense explanations.
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> Choices that seem insignificant at the time we make them may one day turn out to be of immense import. And choices that seem incredibly important to us now may later seem to have been of little consequence. We just won’t know until we know. And even then we still may not know, because it may not be entirely up to us to decide.
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> In much of life, in other words, the very notion of a well-defined “outcome,” at which point we can evaluate, once and for all, the consequences of an action is a convenient fiction. In reality, the events that we label as outcomes are never really endpoints. Instead, they are artificially imposed milestones
Will this time be considered an enlightened time? Maybe. Maybe the world will collapse in a few decades and it'll be considered the apex of humanity. Maybe political and social logjams will free in a few decades ushering in an unimaginable golden age from which this current time will look like a time of stunted growth. Basically, history is hindsight so you can't really discuss history by extrapolating on the present or future.
EDIT: Formatting.
I'll take that as "no, I don't have any evidence that specifically supports my claim."
On the subject of the obvious--turns out it's not all that easy to guess. More here
> she had a good idea (that kids would respond to more complex stories than the publishing industry was putting out at the time) and the skills and determination necessary to see it through.
Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer). I don't think there's a simple one sentence explanation for why HP in particular took off. A lot of unforeseeable things went right.