All I see here is hindsight. Fine for historians and wannabee historians to argue about, and certainly there was a chain of causation worth trying to understand (tho 96 years later we’re still arguing about it). But I would still tend to side with Taleb that it would have been quite extraordinary for someone to say on June 27, 1914, that it was unsafe of the Archduke and his Mrs to go to Sarajevo because if anything untoward happened to them it would be followed by B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L,…,Z, and finally at AA the Brits would come in on the side of France.

C’mon. I don’t think Taleb or Ferguson would deny that events have causes, but the issue is can you make valid predictions with a high enough degree of accuracy, timeliness, certainty and relevance to DO anything about it? And most of human experience suggests that there are indeed major inflection points that no one saw coming and in the context of the times, it would have been quite extraordinary if anyone had.

By all means try to understand and learn from the past, but don’t kid yourself that you’ll be able to avoid all those Black Swans. The trick is to plan and position yourself so the unexpected, whatever it is, is not catastrophic. At least, that’s what Taleb concluded.

I made my comments because I think that this interesting but esoteric discussion may contribute to the blurring. Perhaps the blurring may in part result from our ability to realize how people who lived in other epochs thought.

The discussion on this post suggests World War 1 was a gray swan, not a black or white one.

I find it fascinating that some super literate intellectuals are essentially arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. After all, we’re not talking about hard science (or engineering) where future interactions can be predicted 99.94% of the time. If Mr. Taleb predicted the financial crash, good for him. I presume he made bazillions of dollars organizing his portfolio to profit from his foresight. Or, did he behave like a prudent man and organize his finances based on the risk that he might be right? As in, reduce exposure to equities, buy more commodities, maybe put larger amounts of cash into FDIC guaranteed banks under the FDIC limit. There is an almost unlimited spectrum of available choices that one could opt for if you had the foresight to anticipate the now famous “black swan” we are living through.

We inhabit a “market place” of six billion people making trillions of choices every day. No one person or organization can effectively game this information problem. And those six billion people are getting feedback every minute. Occasionally, someone gets it right. What more can be said?

This problem dogged biology for over a century as biologist sought to create calculus based models of biological phenomena such as the change in population over time of various interlinked species e.g. predator-prey relationships. Smooth calculus could describe 90%+ of the population changes over time but the graphs were punctuated by sudden discontinuities whose appearance was hard to predict and whose outcomes seemed random.

It turned out that all biological systems, from the biochemical reactions of cells to functioning of entire ecosystems, are governed by feedback loops. The mathematics of feedback loops cannot be described by linear calculus because feedback loops operate in a strongly non-linear fashion. In a linear system, the degree of change in a system that an input causes is directly proportional to the scale of the input. In a non-linear, feedback dominated system, very small inputs can be amplified to dominate the entire system and very large inputs can be reduced to insignificance. At certain points in a system’s history, it reaches an unstable point in which very small inputs are amplified to jump the system to a vastly different state in a very short period of time. It is also quite common that such events create bifurcation after which two (sometimes more) more significantly different states are equally probable. For example, in a predator-prey relationship, a bifurcation has an equal chance of leading to a population collapse as it does to a population explosion. Any minor inputs, usually to small to measure, can drive the system to an extreme.

I think it legitimate to view history (and all other studies of humanity) as a subset of biology. As such we can view history as governed by non-linear feedback loops. Long periods of seemingly linear progression are suddenly interrupted by non-linear change. The source of such discontinuities can often be traced back to a small number of otherwise minor events that get amplified by feedback loops into the dominant input for the system.

WWI would fit this pattern. The militarism that gripped the continent was a source of instability that dampened the negative feedback against going to war. Then the assassination of the archduke, a minor input at most times, was amplified into a world changing event. The inherent vagaries of war (for want of a nail) created many, many opportunities for minor events to become magnified into hinges of history.

The problem with these non-linear systems is that in hindsight you can in principle identify almost all the inputs, no matter how small that drove the system to its real-world state. This leads to the illusion that system is predictable and that you can use the system’s behavior in the past to predict it’s behavior in the future.

In reality, we can’t measure all the inputs of historical systems and we don’t know what other outcomes where equally probable past the bifurcation point. For example, the same conditions in the lead up to WWI might have triggered a long period of peace and demilitarization if the archduke had never been shot or if some other, even smaller and ignore input had been different.

Niether can we predict future events with any reliability because our ability to measure minor inputs and assign them the proper weight in our models is largely non-existant. We cannot predict the consequences of our actions when our human systems reach bifurcation points.

I imagine it will take historians another couple of decades to start thinking of history in biological terms.

The American Civil War was fought with the tactics of the Napoleonic Wars but the Minie’ ball had made those tactics obsolete. That was the proximate cause of the massive casualties. Repeating rifles were actually available but ignored by Union ordnance authorities. They thought soldiers would waste ammunition. In the few instances where units equipped themselves with Henry repeating rifles, they proved that widespread use by the Union would have ended the war in a year. WWI introduced the machine gun yet French tactics hadn’t changed. Only the tank broke the stalemate. Tactics did not deal with the machine gun except for trenches, which were widely used in the Civil War for similar reasons.

Most of the deaths in South Africa were from typhoid. Fortunately, vaccines were available for WWI. Tetanus was a major problem in 1914 until a tetanus antiserum became available. Interestingly, there were no tetanus cases in the American Civil War because the South, where most of the war was fought, did not use horse manure as fertilizer whereas, it was widely used in Belgium where much of WWI was fought.

Given the opportunity to strike, they did.

I firmly believe that the German nation made a decision that caused their opponents to make decisions and at any time prior to the invasion of France, war could have been avoided.

Having been joined, the war had toi be concluded and it is a pity that the Germans, who were roundly defeated were not conquered.

“A huge war breaks out in the summer of 1914, to the great surprise of nearly everyone.”

I vote equivocation. The war was huge in 1914 only in that involved so many important nations. But it was destructive in 1918 in that it lasted years, slew millions, and collapsed many governments. Even if the outbreak was the result of long-term trends combined with a semi-unpredictable event (the assassination*), the consequences were not foreseeable. “Black swan” arguments trade on our knowledge of disastrous consequences to elevate the importance of the the war starting. If it had been over in six months, with Servia crushed and Russia chastised, would it still have been a black swan or just an Agadir with more shooting? (And Agadir wasn’t the only European crisis between 1900 and 1914.)

* The assassination should have been better anticipated. The terrorists were funded by governments bent on assassination as a policy tool and it’s not as if Franz Ferdinand was the first Austro-Hungarian noble assassinated, or the only European noble the target of assassins. As best I can guess right now, the assassinations of European nobles ceased after the 1934 assassination of the King Alexander. Assassins then moved onto non-nobles (e.g.Ernst vom Rath).

In cryptography there is this method called a ‘one-time-pad’ which is impossible to crack (not very difficult like RSA or other encryption algorithms, but mathematically proven to be impossible). You digitise your message, multiply it by a random number, and the result is then transmitted in the open. Anyone intercepting the result cannot by any method of analysis or brute force (even if they manage to invent a quantum computer) reconstruct your message unless they know what the random number was; they cannot even approximate what the message was. Call it the Second Law of Thermodynamics for numbers: random always wins.

Back to History:

“Taleb is correct that history jumps instead of crawling. But it’s also true that history’s jumping is occasionally hobbled or accelerated by a force that does crawl instead of jump: narrative.”

It does not really matter how strong and deterministic the narratives of the individuals are; the opportunity for those individuals to act upon their narratives (and the shaping of those narratives over time) is random*, and hence it is impossible to predict what their effects will be. The randomness of life and death kills any predictive value there may be in individual (or collective) narratives. Historians trying to predict the present from the events of the past cannot avoid this no matter how much scholarship they pour into their books: random always wins.

This does not mean that any of the events described in, for example, “Dreadnought” are not true (the life of Wilhelm II did shape the way he saw himself and his nation, and did affect how he behaved in 1914), just that they have no predictive power, that is, it was impossible to consistently predict in 1870, 1900 or 1912 that those events would lead to WWI. Only the actions in 1914 can be tied to the start of WWI with any degree of predictive causality. That means that if History is “a fable agreed upon”, the moral of the WWI fable is not “do not have insecure heads of state” but “do not give blank cheques”; causality cannot be stretched any further.

* What if Bismark, who did not like Moltke The Elder, decided to hobble Moltke The Younger’s career just to annoy his uncle; what if Churchill had died in one of the innumerable occasions he almost ‘bought it’; what if the doctor who crippled Wilhelm II’s arm had been a bit more careful and the Kaiser had grown up a bit less insecure, and a bit less paranoid about his English relations; what if…

However, the conventional “result of trends that built up over the preceding decades” explanatory model of WWI would suggest that the possibility of war was already priced into bonds by investors; therefore no dramatic August 1914 bond price jump would confirm the conventional model rather than refuting it as Ferguson and Taleb suppose.

However, the conventional “result of trends that built up over the preceding decades” explanatory model of WWI would suggest that the possibility of war was already priced into bonds by investors; therefore no dramatic August 1914 bond price jump would confirm the conventional model rather than refuting it as Ferguson and Taleb suppose.

I will extend my initial remarks to say that everyone expected a quick war*, so the extended nature of what actually occurred, with its frightful number of casualties, was definitely a Black Swan type of thing.

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*Should they have expected it? That’s not so certain, but it does seem like no on really paid attention to the lessons of the American Civil War or that little tussle down in southern Africa.

It seems to me that the fatal strategic flaw in the Schlieffen plan, the equation of mobilization with attack, is hard to pin on the younger von Moltke. Even more relevant is the fact that the Schlieffen plan didn’t appear mysteriously or spontaneously. It was a reasonably natural outgrowth of Germany’s strategic situation, as it had developed gradually since 1870. The fact that it led to war when the mobilization plans of other countries led only to more diplomatic folderol should not have been a surprise, certainly not to the German diplomatic corps. So whose fault was that? Was it the fault of the Kaiser and Berchtold, for being unaware that German mobilization automatically meant war? But why should they have been so unaware? It was hardly a new plan. Schlieffen retired in 1906; the essential features of the plan had remained static. And I have trouble seeing von Moltke as a scheming spider pulling strings of deception from the center of a web of darkness. The uncle, possibly; but not the nephew. Similarly, the geopolitical position of Germany and the Franco-Russian treaties which ringed it with enemies were no surprises, either. The start of the war looks like a mix of long-term and short-term causes, none of which should have been terribly unexpected.

http://www.germaniainternational.com/gducorps.html

Follow the link and you can see that the eagle on top of the helm is wearing this little crown on it’s own feathery head.

Well, Wilhelm II certainly considered himself a studmuffin although you never know what goes on behind closed doors.

Often enough, doing nothing will sufficiently set events in train. When Hitler re-occupied the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936, contrary to the Treaty of Versailles, the German General Staff prepared to remove Hindenberg’s reviled “Bohemian Corporal” at the first sign of French resistance. But France was in thrall to Popular Front dissension, and British appeasers thought of the territory as “Germany’s backyard.” Thirty-two thousand Wehrmacht troops marched in, entirely unopposed.

Had France mounted even token force, there would have been no World War II– no Manhattan Project, no Iron Curtain, no perilous decades of Cold War. But who could know?– and sheer inertia always plays a part. Action and inaction both entail grave risks, perhaps not right away but soon enough. Alas, default to zero is a decision in and of itself.

Perhaps the key, then, is to act consistently on principle, seeing prevention as the only cure. But this too is destabilizing in terms of potentially damaging a status quo. Since 1946, Western European nations have experienced their longest remission of major-state hostilities since the Fall of Rome (1814 to 1870 was a decade less).

Fault lines accumulate… when seismic geopolitical crisis comes, it will undoubtedly have been “foreseeable in hindsight” and yet remain a scandalous surprise. But since 1914, times if not human nature have fundamentally changed: Amidst a demographic cataclysm, as our 12,250-year Holocene Interglacial Epoch fades, nuclear holocaust allied with bacteriological and chemical WMDs will make our next Swan very black indeed.