History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what’s inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist

The Black Swan, Part 1, ch. 1 “The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic” (2007)
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