"...the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another…In fact, the people who knew the period best – those alive at the time – were the most clueless of all. For the average Roman in Constantine's time, the future was a fog. It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time."
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"...the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is." -Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
"...we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations. But silent evidence masks this fact.....we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness." -Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan