Ferguson on Black Swans

Niall Ferguson,"We can see the causes of Cho's rampage now, so why not before?" Independent, 22 April, builds on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

... it is Taleb's assault on traditional historiography that is most relevant here. Since Thucydides, it is true, historians have encouraged us to explain low-probability calamities (like wars) after the fact. Such story-telling helps us to make sense of a random disaster. It also enables us to apportion blame. Generations of historians have toiled in this way to explain the origins of great calamities like, say, the First World War, constructing elegant narrative chains of causes and effects, heaping opprobrium on this or that statesman.

There is something deeply suspect about this procedure, however. It results in what Taleb calls the"retrospective distortion". For these causal chains were quite invisible to contemporaries, to whom the outbreak of war came as a bolt from the blue. The point is that there were umpteen Balkans crises before 1914 that didn't lead to Armageddon. Like Cho Seung-Hui, the Sarajevo assassin Gavrilo Princip was a Black Swan - only vastly bigger.

Non Sequitur: Congratulations to the winners of the Bancroft Prize for 2007, Robert D. Richardson for William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism and Jack Temple Kirby for Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. Here's a brief interview with Richardson about his study of James:

Hat tip.