Quote from scriabinop23:
'Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it' perhaps needs to be statistically evaluated - I think the findings would likely indicate no correlation with 'things seem to repeat in history.' Furthermore, just because you studied something and are obsessed with avoiding repeating it, doesn't mean you will somehow increase your chances of avoiding it, especially if you do not understand the underlying causes of why it happened. And Taleb would say it is impossible to precisely understand why anything happens - it is our explanations after the fact (look to the news media) that give us a (false) sense of grasping events outside our control.
With that said, I think there is little evidence that history repeats nor we have any meaningful way of preventing it from rhyming. And any decisions based on the expectation that history repeating will result in success outcomes are likely no more highly probable than a coin toss. I really believe that - at least with respect to future events that are more to do with political economy vs the hard sciences.
With the economy and politics, it is a matter of human survival, and thus gaming and competition come into play. That changes the dynamic to beyond comprehensible when you throw in real world data sets.
Very unlike seeing what happens when you mix baking soda and vinegar and predicting the same thing to happen next time around.
