Excerpt. ‘The Black Swan’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Consider the following thought experiment ?

Operation 1 (the melting ice cube): imagine an ice cube and consider how it may melt over the next two hours and envision the shape of the resulting puddle.

Operation 2 (where did the water come from?): Consider a puddle of water on the floor. Now try to reconstruct the shape of ice cube that it may once have been. Note the puddle may not necessarily originated from an ice cube.

The second operation is harder. The difference between the two processes resides in the following.

If you have the right models you can predict with great precision how the ice cube will melt ? this is a specific engineering problem. However, from a pool of water you can build infinite possible ice cubes, if there is in fact an ice cube there at all. The first direction, from ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction, the backward process, is much, much more complicated. The forward process is generally used in physics and engineering; the backward process is non-repeatable, non-experimental historical approaches.

History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative, provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help in future, without some caution. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do no try to reverse engineer too much? but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. The more we turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble!