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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Quotations about:
outcomes
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Politics is, among other things, the art of anticipating consequences, and even trying to anticipate unfamiliar consequences.
Irving Howe (1920-1993) American literary and social critic [b. Irving Horenstein]
“The Agony of the Campus,” Dissent #16 (Sep-Oct 1969)
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