Why You Don't Hear About the Haitian Revolution

Let me ask you a question that has both nothing and everything to do with Haiti.

How many people do you think died in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2003?

The most commonly cited guess of excess deaths (mostly from disease and malnutrition) is 5.4 million. Obviously there's some standard errors on that number, and other people put it at 860,000, but it's fair to say that the answer is a shit ton.

How much media coverage did you hear about that war? Either now, or at the time?

Would you say that the answer here is approximately zero?

Weird, no? What exactly is going on here?

The standard leftist narrative always used to be that the media doesn't care about black deaths. This seems, uh, shall we say, not exactly operative in the age of George Floyd, where they care about them a great deal, and sometimes seem to care about little else. But fine, this is Sub-Saharan Africans. Maybe people just don't care about black deaths there. 

But in 2012, the internet got briefly and strangely exercised about Joseph Kony, trying to get him arrested for war crimes in Uganda. It's not necessarily weird that they should care about war crimes, mind you, but by the time they cared, the crimes themselves were mostly over a decade in the past. And the press definitely got extremely concerned over the genocide in Darfur, which started around the time that the Congo War was wrapping up.

Evidently there is some capacity for caring about gruesome mass deaths in Africa. So what happened in this case?

Well, to understand it, let's start with Wikipedia's list of belligerents. 

Huh?

Let me give you the summary. It's a complete, absolute mess. It's notable that the wikipedia entry doesn't even attempt to give you a summary of what the war was about. Not only are there a ton of different nations and militias, but most of them are pretty unsympathetic characters. Seriously, read the wikipedia article and try to make sense of it. 

The overall attitude seems to just end up being the line at the end of Burn After Reading

Simple narratives get re-told, and complicated narratives do not. 

You can say people are being lazy, but that's not it. The whole war just seems to be an anti-meme. (So is the English Civil War, at least to me, although not to the same extent). No sooner do you read one bit than it's slipping through your mind like a sieve. The reality is that people just can't retain everything they read. If you remember it, it's because you remember a compressed version of events, especially one that has the important parts to update your mental models of the world. These events also tend to be remembered more easily when they fit the pattern of familiar narrative structures, stories and plotlines that are satisfying to our sense of how drama should proceed. Modernity, being addicted to fairytales and Manichaeism, likes simple stories between good and evil, and where good triumphs in the end. (If it can't have that, it sells ridiculous versions like Kony 2012 where everything that happened in Uganda is just a prologue for the real hero of the story, you, the viewer, to get justice done by posting links to social media to spread awareness). 

But if you can't have a happy ending, the closest narrative that people want to fit mass murder into is the Holocaust. Reduced to its barest symbolic components, a large group of innocent and helpless civilians gets genocided for no military reason by a group who personifies evil. It's very hard to hammer the war into this narrative, because it just seems to be everyone killing everyone else, deaths from disease and malnutrition don't have the same grisly industrial horror as mass executions, and there's no simple descriptions of who exactly was getting killed, or who was doing the killing, other than that everyone was black. So what then?

Modern readers (ha! Let's say "viewers", to be more honest) dislike simple stories between evil and evil. They have no clue whatsoever about what to do with a 20 sided war where you suspect everyone is pretty nasty, and it's hard to even make sense of what they're fighting over.

The Haitian Revolution has a fair amount of this problem. Not as much as the DRC, but a decent amount. You can condense it into a single sentence that would be very popular today. That sentence would be:

A black slave colony rose up in revolt and secured its independence....

Sounds great! As long as you ask exactly zero additional questions, this is a heart-warming tale made for modernity. But it's such a great story, we have to hear more. 

...and immediately genocided all the white French civilians on the island. 

Hmm, that doesn't sit nearly as well. Are the slaves now the bad guys? Did the women and children civilians deserve to be genocided? Avante Garde lefist activists are probably willing to flirt with this line these days, but it still sits pretty uneasily with people. But we'll soldier on regardless. 

The slave armies had fought off the French, but honestly only a small fraction as much as Yellow Fever fought the French...

This part definitely isn't fitting the glorious military victory aspect. It's hard to piece together the exact numbers from the Leclerc expedition to retake Haiti, but it seems like at least 2/3 of the French deaths were from Yellow Fever, and maybe much more. One rather suspects that without this, it would have been a pretty short war to reimpose slavery. 

Honestly, this is one of the maddest aspects of the whole French project there. The French kept turning up at this place that just killed them horribly in a short period of time. It's like nature's way of saying "go somewhere else". But they wouldn't do it. 

Power had also been greatly consolidated after the Slave leaders, principally black leader Toussaint Louverture, defeated and massacred the supporters of colored leader André Rigaud, ...

And at last, no matter how much we try to gloss over it, by about 4 sentences into any possible history of the Haitian revolution, you have to talk about the role of the free coloreds, or the mulattos. The Haitian Revolution was, even in racial terms, a three-sided war, not a two-sided war. Those who had one white parent and one black or mulatto parent, and were thus part black in racial terms, formed a very distinct social group. Their existence is a total repudiation of all of modern, US-centric theories of race. For starters, they didn't see themselves, nor were they seen by others, as straightforwardly "black". They sure weren't white either, but that's not quite the same thing. The US operates on something that's not quite the one-drop rule, but heading in that direction. There are no anguished articles written about whether Barack Obama should be considered black or not. Whereas in Haiti in 1794, there would be no question - he would be a mulatto. (In Kenya, where his father was born, he'd probably be white).

And not only do these guys not think of themselves as black, for most of the history of the revolution, they stubbornly refuse to play the part that modernity would want, of showing solidarity with the blacks. Far from it. In fact, many of the mulattos were very strong defenders of slavery. A number of them had wealthy French fathers and had been educated in France (like Alexandre Pétion, who was 1/4 black and later a president of Haiti). In fact, they were often richer than a lot of the poor whites who worked in town jobs and clerical roles (the "small whites", as opposed to the large plantation owners, the "big whites"). Many of the mulattos owned slaves themselves, and were not at all interested in abolishing slavery. What they were interested in, however, was abolishing explicitly racial distinctions, especially for free coloreds themselves, that would see them face legal impediments to citizenship. 

This leads to some hilarious scenes like when Robespierre is arguing before the Revolutionary government that we need to abolish slavery based on the fundamental rights of man, and then he's followed up by mulatto activist Julien Raimond arguing that France needed to recognize the rights of free coloreds as a way of helping shore up support for the important institution of slavery. 

The coloreds were also willing to do things like arm slaves in revolt against the big whites with promises of freedom, only to later renege on those promises in part because they didn't actually want to set too many precedents of slaves getting freed en masse.

They are a peg that stubbornly refuses to be hammered into either of the "black" or "white" holes that modernity wants. 

Not that the early black slave revolt leaders were much better, mind you. Jean-François Papillon, when attempting to negotiate with the French for an end to one of the early slave uprisings, was willing to trade the slaves in his army back into slavery as long as the terms included freedom for him and the other officers. 

If you go back to the very beginnings of the independence movement, it's actually something like a six sided conflict. In addition to slaves and free coloreds (some of whom were fully black in racial terms, but who had been granted freedom), you had different groups of whites. The big whites in Haiti, the rich plantation owners, were big supporters of independence, chafing against trade restrictions imposed by France, and fancying that they could get a better deal running the country themselves. As Mike Duncan notes, they look and act a lot like the liberal nobles in the French revolution, who also ended up getting eaten by the forces they unleashed. This is a lesson that keeps coming up. The small whites were more driven by the importance of racial distinctions, which were their main source of potential status over the free coloreds. But on top of that, you had the Royal authorities in the colony, who often played one off against the other in order to keep their authority. In the early days of the Haitian revolution, this often meant allying most strongly with the free coloreds, who they saw as the most reliable supporters of monarchy. Finally, you've got the revolutionaries back in France, where developments of political events back in Europe ended up determining a lot of the course of events in Haiti. It's only very late in the story that it sounds like the Haitians being the primary drivers of events. And despite the fact that some of the revolutionaries were often big pushers of abolishing slavery, after the French revolution you also had various slave armies originally claiming to be fighting on behalf of the deposed King! This is without even getting into the role of the Spanish, or the English, or the Americans. 

Like I said - we're not at Congo War levels of confusion, but this is a story that resists simple morality tale narratives, especially if you want these to fit in with contemporary American racial preoccupations. 

But there is one final large and embarrassing reason why you don't hear much about the Haitian revolution. 

If you want this to be a morality tale, you have to end it in 1804. Because the other question you absolutely can't ask is "So what happened after that?", because the answer is that it's a horrible depressing dysfunctional mess for the next 220 years. And this destroys so much of the mythical allure of it all. Half the people who "ended slavery" didn't even mean by that term that you were free to walk off your plantation and do some different kind of work in some other locale. Oh no, you were now part of the Louverture Labor Code, which basically reinstituted slavery in all but name, but with slightly nicer conditions and different colored owners. The plantation system only really came to an end when the country was so completely destroyed that there was no infrastructure left to sustain a plantation. Unsurprisingly, this did not lead to large welfare improvements for the Haitian in the street. And so the whig history progressive has to spend the rest of the time spinning excuses for why none of this is the Haitians' fault, because the French demanded a large debt indemnity, and the Americans lost interest in trade, and then there were all these coups that nobody could have foreseen, and then the US invaded in the early 20th century, and then there was Papa Doc Duvalier who was a complete monster, and recently they had this earthquake...

It's a mess. It's a total mess. If there is anything much optimistic to discuss in the two-odd centuries after independence, it sure doesn't come up in the Mike Duncan brief history. 

I used to actually use this as a trolling example to leftists. Suppose you have a former colony. It finally gets its independence, and it's got problems. Mostly, we attribute those problems to the legacy of colonialism. But this presumably can't last indefinitely. If the place is still a basket case in a 1000 years time, it's probably not the fault of the British. So what's the Statute of Limitations here? What's the maximum length of time you'd need before you'd be willing to say "you know, this probably isn't due to colonialism?"

They will usually start thinking of Africa. They'll estimate how long it's been, then like Sandra Day O'Conner with affirmative action, grant themselves extra breathing room to make sure they're not proven wrong any time soon. "100 years" is a common answer. Maybe 150. 

Well, Haiti (which is almost never the example they have in mind, because nobody hears about Haiti) has been independent for 220. This is quite awkward. 

And what's the latest situation?

Curtis Yarvin was hilarious and scathing in a recent substack:

As a monarchist, I can tell you that Haiti could probably use Emperor Jacques back, genocide or no genocide, since it currently has no elected officials and is under the de facto control of a gang leader known as “Barbecue”—whose Wikipedia page notes:

Chérizier has denied that his nickname “Babekyou” (or “Barbecue”) came from accusations of his setting people on fire. Instead, he says it was from his mother's having been a fried chicken street vendor.

¿Porque no los dos? 

And so, this leads to a nagging alternative worry. What if the problem isn't actually just that the Haitian revolution resists summary? What if the problem is that the one sentence summary that captures the full thrust of events doesn't fit the progressive world view at all? What if the shortest summary of all the events is actually

A nation of slaves rose up in revolt, and after a messy and nasty war, genocided the whites and led to misery and poverty essentially forever.

I do not assert that this summary is true, by the way. Even aside from the general problem that summarizing any revolution in a single sentence is a fraught exercise guaranteed to miss a lot of important detail, a great deal hinges upon how exactly you define "led to". It was certainly chronologically antecedent to it. Whether it was causal is always a much thornier issue, as with everything in history. This is without even getting into what a full range of counterfactuals would be, because there are surely options other than "Haitian revolution" and "Haitian slavery continues forever". 

But even to state such a potential summary is deeply disturbing to modern sensibilities, because reading it simplistically it makes it sound like Haitian slavery was thus a good thing. Nobody, as far as I know, is eager to reinstitute slavery. And while there are serious scholarly works arguing that American tobacco and cotton slavery had material conditions close to that of a free laborer, and likely better than a Welsh coal miner at the same time, I have never heard anyone assert the same thing about French Caribbean sugar slavery. It was hell on earth, where you got worked to death over a short number of years under absolutely brutal conditions. Nobody wants to bring it back. And when I say "nobody", I mean "levels of support seem to be minimal even among people who routinely espouse positions far outside the Overton window". 

Yet the chronological sequence is there, and undeniable. They had a successful slave revolt. They genocided the whites. It has been a complete mess ever since. What you wish to make of those facts is up to you, and there are many other facts you could choose to add to those above, but there are not many good news stories to tell out of it.

And so the glorious one sentence successful slave uprising ultimately gets ignored in favor of fictional slave uprisings that never happened. Which is a shame. Because the Haitian Revolution is a fascinating story if you have an attention span longer than a summary of three sentences. 

Living History Forwards

I have recently been working my way through the excellent History of Rome podcast series. I had been meaning to do this for some time as my previous knowledge had been mostly from another excellent series, The Fall of Rome , which I've written some thoughts from before. I realized in hindsight that I was doing things in a mistaken order. Perhaps due to my own slightly pessimistic nature and preoccupation with the current political situation, the narrative of decline and why it happened was very appealing. But before you can delve into the big picture forces (which Wyman does well in the Fall of Rome), it's helpful to understand the basic sequence of what happened when. Not only that, but you can't really hope to understand the fall of Rome unless you also understand its rise, and all the times when it could have fallen, but didn't. Going through the story made me want to go back and read all sorts of things again with a better knowledge of the events, from the Asterix comics, to Horatius at the Bridge by Macauley, to The God Abandons Antony by Cavafy, to Blog.Jim's posts on normality bias.

One of the interesting challenges when listening to the narrative is to try to invert the ex post story back into the ex ante perspective at the time - what people would have or should have thought, knowing only what they knew at the time. History is told backwards, but must be lived forwards. The simplest version of history tells things as a story, describing the important events that happened. But quickly students of history want to move from what happened, to why it happened. In the language of statistics, this means fitting the right ex-post model to the data, so you can understand what variation drove what outcome. Even this is hard to do - you might overfit the model, or select the wrong variables (and you don't get to re-run things to find out if you're right.) The causes you identify are probably there, and perhaps even contributed, but are they actually the important ones? This is a lot of the challenge of historians. But from a statistical point of view, the next step is the ex-ante one. If you'd run this same model using only the data you'd observed up to that point, even if you'd thought of the same variables, what relationship would you have estimated? Price to dividend ratios predict market returns reasonably well at long horizons ex-post, if you believe Campbell and Shiller. If you run it out of sample, Goyal and Welch say they don't.

The statistician's version of this is quite easy - just run the same model on less data, and see what it produces. So why is it so hard as a historian to do the same? Because you're not really running models, you're evaluating things according to your own judgment. This isn't a knock on the field, per se. Some bits of history lend themselves to quantification, like Robert Fogel did, but others (including a number that you really care about) simply don't. When you form your own judgment of things, it's hard not to fall victim to the curse of knowledge. That is, when you know something, it is very difficult to credibly put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know the thing. It will always seem like things that you know after the fact should have been easy to forecast at the time, but they often aren't. 

In history, we always know how the story ends, so identifying what counts as a major event, or a turning point, or a transition, is always made with the benefit of hindsight, so as to give the most informative narrative. This leads people to make a significant mistake when translating history into their own lives. They assume that when some major shift occurs, there will be lots of signs to indicate this fact. But there might not be. Maybe what's important won't be obvious until much later. Reading about the last days of the Roman republic, one of the interesting aspects is that what in hindsight seem like important turning points. When the Gracchi brothers started using mobs of plebians as threats to get their political will, it might not have seemed that shocking. But it draws a line to Marius becoming consul seven times and leading an army into Rome to institute a reign of terror, and then Sulla being declared dictator for life. Except Sulla stepped down, and attempted to restore the Republic. You can imagine that things might have seemed back to normal then. But instead, this is described as more steps towards empire. Even Caesar Augustus, who consolidated power single-handedly more than anyone since Tarquin, kept a lot of the forms of the Republic, and only changed his status quite gradually. There was still a senate, and consuls, and praetors. To someone wanting to convince themselves that things weren't actually that different, it was probably easier than you might think. Indeed, one narrative of Julius Caesar's downfall is that he attempted to shift power to himself too quickly, and got stabbed to death by the Senate for his troubles, even after all his triumphs. This seems to suggest that the prudent strategy is probably to maintain the old forms, and pretend like they're still in operation, even as they're gradually undermined.

Which perhaps should make you wonder - has this... happened in America? Almost certainly. As Moldbug describes, America has gone through at least four versions of the Republic since its founding. The main reason people don't notice this is that they all swear fealty to the same piece of paper. But look around! Does the paper actually describe the government? If it does, why is the government so radically different, even as the paper is the same? Try explaining the CIA to George Washington, or the modern interpretation of the Commerce Clause to Thomas Jefferson. (As a party joke, I enjoy asking law students to list as many hypothetical pieces of legislation as they can that they're sure would not be justified by the Commerce clause. There's, uh, gun-free school zones? And ... hmmm, did I already mention gun-free school zones?). 

Is FDR delivering his inaugural address, which basically demanded absolute authority from Congress under threat he'd just take it anyway, and threatening to pack the Supreme Court when he didn't get his desired judgments, and serving an unprecedented four consecutive terms, breaching the 150 year old norm of only two, basically equivalent to a less violent form of a Caesar? The case is at least arguable, but you can be damn sure that you won't read this argument in your high school civics class. Was Nixon a corrupt figure that was justly impeached, or was he stitched up in a deep state coup? Also at least arguable.   

Or, to take one that's not yet a fait accompli in where it will end. You can also observe a gradual breaking down of existing norms and compromises that served to keep the parties' relationships with each other civil. The Democrats breach the previous norm that presidents basically get their Supreme Court nominations, by filibustering the eminently qualified Robert Bork. Republicans targeted Clinton, first with special prosecutors empowered to go on endless fishing expeditions (like starting out looking into dodgy Arkansas land deals and ending up looking into semen-stained dresses), and impeachment over purely process crimes like perjury when the underlying events were not actually criminal. Or the FBI illegally wiretapping the Trump campaign and Carter Page. Or Trump calling mobs to the capital to protest what he (and I) saw as election fraud. I happened to think that the January 6th mob was obviously going to be useless for anything other than theater with no coherent plan. But still, it is a notable shift from previous norms. Just like the Gracchi brothers. Maybe this is one more step towards perdition. Maybe it's just rumblings that will eventually settle down, like the secession of the plebs.  

In other words, we expect changes of government to look like America and Russia turning up in Berlin in 1945 - the game is over, and everyone knows it. But even the collapse of the western Roman empire doesn't quite work like this. One might think that when Rome gets sacked, that's basically the end. But Rome got sacked by the Gauls in 390 BC and bounced back. It got sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD which was bad, but things still limped along. It got sacked again by the Vandals in 455 AD, by which time things were looking pretty dire indeed, but Odoacer declaring himself King was still twenty years away.

The challenge, in other words, is to be able to estimate the versions of history that could have happened but didn't, and the probabilities one should have attached to them. 

And when people imagine the idealised version of what this could be like if done well, those with a sci-fi bent will immediately think of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory. Imagine a fully worked out statistical model of psychology, sociology, and economics. Asimov's idea was that the perfect version of the social sciences should operate akin to the gas laws. The behavior of any one person is random, just like the movement of any one gas molecule. But the behavior of quadrillions of gas molecules or people is highly regular, and thus can be predicted quite well.

I am a huge Asimov fan, and found his writing highly influential in my teenage years. But the more I've pondered it, the more I think the idea of psychohistory has a tendency to lead people badly astray as to what ought to be possible, even in theory.

The version of psychohistory in the first foundation novel starts out with a version that presents the science as statistical, in the sense of assigning probabilities. 

Gaal said, "Indeed? In that case, if Dr. Seldon can predict the history of Trantor three hundred years into the future -"

"He can predict it fifteen hundred years into the future."

"Let it be fifteen thousand. Why couldn’t he yesterday have predicted the events of this morning and warned me. -No, I’m sorry." Gaal sat down and rested his head in one sweating palm, "I quite understand that psychohistory is a statistical science and cannot predict the future of a single man with any accuracy. You’ll understand that I’m upset."

"But you are wrong. Dr. Seldon was of the opinion that you would be arrested this morning."

"What!"

"It is unfortunate, but true. The Commission has been more and more hostile to his activities. New members joining the group have been interfered with to an increasing extent. The graphs showed that for our purposes, matters might best be brought to a climax now. The Commission of itself was moving somewhat slowly so Dr. Seldon visited you yesterday for the purpose of forcing their hand. No other reason."

Gaal caught his breath, "I resent -"

"Please. It was necessary. You were not picked for any personal reasons. You must realize that Dr. Seldon’s plans, which are laid out with the developed mathematics of over eighteen years include all eventualities with significant probabilities. This is one of them. I’ve been sent here for no other purpose than to assure you that you need not fear. It will end well; almost certainly so for the project; and with reasonable probability for you."

"What are the figures?" demanded Gaal.

"For the project, over 99.9%."

"And for myself?"

"I am instructed that this probability is 77.2%."

In other words, psychohistory predicts a range of outcomes, and their associated probabilities. This sounds like something I can imagine in the hyper-competent social sciences. But you can already see the tension in the paragraph - how is it that the death of a major figure has a 77.2% probability (three significant figures!), but the model also predicts events in 1500 years without the error bars blowing up to infinity? Admittedly, the project itself was predicted to succeed with 99.9% probability, and that was (in the book) the more important driver, so maybe it's not totally inconsistent, but still.

As the books go on, the mention of probabilities barely rates a mention again. Instead, the recurring narrative of the book is how Hari Seldon, the father of psychohistory, has recorded hologram messages for people hundreds of years into the future, explaining to them that the dramatic events that just happened were all foreseen and were part of the plan. The initial tension between probability and horizon gets resolved into the more satisfying plot device of the perfect forecast.

Asimov understands the idea of model risk. In one of the plot twists (I won't give much in the way of spoilers), eventually there appears the character of the Mule - a random structural break that couldn't have possibly been foreseen. But the general pattern is that the model works almost perfectly well in forecasting at very long horizons, right up to the point that the world has a dramatic and one-off shift.

Asimov later said that he should have actually called his science "psychosociology", not "psychohistory". I actually think this is a very revealing admission, and gets to the heart of the matter. History, in the popular version, is about predicting the ex-post path of exactly what happened. When you conceive of the task as being to predict history, it suggests knowing the precise series of events that the historian could narrate. Sociology, even when it works at all, is much more uncertain in its predictions - the 77.2% chance of death version, not the precise predictions in 500 years time version. The wrong choice of name was not innocuous - it showed an ambivalence, if not confusion, about the scope of the task.

Because Asimov's version of psychohistory is fatally flawed for two reasons. One of them he should have known at the time, the other one he probably couldn't have. 

Where Asimov should have known better is that he reveals himself to be a great storyteller, and an excellent scientist, but a poor statistician. In his conception of the gas laws, he emphasized the importance of there being millions of planets in the galaxy, in order to get a sufficiently large number of humans that he felt his statistical concept would work. But he also saw that democracy simply won't scale at that level, so he imagined the existence of an emperor.

The problem is that Asimov misunderstood the statistics behind the gas laws. The crucial factor that enables prediction is not that you have Avogadro's number of molecules. Rather, the crucial thing is that the molecules are essentially independent. This, not sheer number, is the crucial thing that makes the individual noise cancel out. If things aren't independent, you can keep adding more and more observations, and it won't help you. If one molecule is the emperor, it doesn't matter how many subjects you add.

And human beings simply aren't independent. Indeed, his own conception reveals this. If the Emperor has any actual power at all, then they're susceptible to being laid low by a bacterial infection, or killed from falling down stairs, or having a bad night's sleep due to some weird dream on a crucial day, or a thousand other random and idiosyncratic events that no model of psychohistory will ever be able to capture. The only way it can work is if the emperor is in fact not an emperor at all, and 100% of his choices, literally every single thing that matters, are already pre-determined by impersonal forces. If he dies, he will be replaced by someone else who will then do the same.

As long as the great man theory of history has even a kernel of truth, which it surely does, your chances of making eerily accurate hologram images for 500 years' time goes roughly to zero. You knowledge will only ever be probabilistic, and its accuracy will decline with time, like almost every statistical model. In many ways, this is the big danger of inferring things from fictional evidence - if your premises are subtly incorrect, you'll still write the whole story as if they were right. 

All of which might make you wonder - why wasn't this mistake obvious to Asimov at the time? 

I think this gets to the second part, which Asimov probably couldn't have known. Specifically, he was writing in the 1940s and 50s, before the age of cheap computing power and large, easily available datasets. That is to say, Asimov almost certainly had no experience actually constructing and testing statistical models. He couldn't have! Unless he was inverting the matrixes for the OLS estimator by hand. 

And as a result, he missed out on the single most important lesson you get from actually testing quantitative models. Namely, you find out how often your intuition about the world is just completely wrong. Or the effects are kinda-sorta there but much weaker than you thought. Or you start to worry about which of the many variations on some predictor variable you should be coding up, or whether there might be data errors, or whether linear models really are the right choice here, or whether there's reverse causality going on, and a thousand other things. You learn, in other words, that predicting almost anything you actually care about is surprisingly hard. And the work of doing so doesn't look at all like psychohistory, where one mathematical genius comes along, and suddenly you've got perfect predictions. Rather, it's about the slow grind of finding one new variable to improve the R-squared, or some new estimation technique to get the mean-squared error down. Sometimes a new discovery improves things a fair bit. But you never have a sense that you'll get the R-Squared to one, until your number of predictors equals the number of observations, at which point you've played yourself, as the Beastie Boys put it. Indeed, you quickly hit the law of diminishing returns on this type of thing. Initially, you add the large, big picture effects that have the most predictive power. But then what's left over is increasingly random and noise-driven, coming from outside forces and quirks mostly orthogonal to what you're interested in studying. Like Zeno's paradox, you might get closer and closer, but there's no hope of getting to the final goal. 

Even this is in the idealized version! Often you come away just convinced of your own deep epistemic uncertainty about the universe. You'll never really even perfectly explain what happened in a dataset, let alone forecast out of sample, because the world is just a shockingly complicated place. And all the bits you leave out end up in your residual term.

Nobody who has ever run a regression could really believe in psychohistory, if they thought about it hard. But many, (like me until very recently), suspended their disbelief in the face of the wonderful story, and just didn't think about it. But when you do, you realize it's just not how prediction works. Not in practice, and without independence, not even in theory. Models don't fail just because the Mule comes along. They fail because the task itself can only be statistical and uncertain. 

But if you never actually run these tests, you'll evaluate your theories of history on a heuristic basis, and make all sorts of kludges and exceptions, and be surprised when the world doesn't work out with as much certainty as a history book. 

What does genuine, significant, high stakes predictions actually look like, in the heat of the moment? Before you actually know how it's going to go down? 

When Russia first invaded Ukraine I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what the probability was that this would turn into a nuclear exchange. Because if the probability were non-trivial, it was time to get out of America, for at least weeks, to see how it was going to pan out. The important question is not "was it going to happen". Rather, the better question was, and is, "what would be the trigger events that I could observe at the time that would indicate a significant increase in the probability of dramatic escalation?" 

My guess was that the highest probability path to large scale war between Russia and America (and thus potentially going nuclear) was the US imposing a no-fly zone. Which is to say, shooting down Russian jets. The chances that this might spiral out of control, and quite fast, seems decent. Large overt NATO troop present in Ukraine would also be in the category. Other wild-card events like Poland unilaterally sending troops might also could, but it's harder to know where that goes. 

As it turns out, thankfully none of this seems likely any more. Whether it was ever likely is a separate question, but the identification of trigger events doesn't hinge on this question hugely, except for the question of whether the mental exercise is worth your time. Fortunately, the Biden administration repeatedly said early on that it wasn't interested in a no-fly zone, something we can all be very grateful for. But even if he had declared one, I suspect you probably would have had time to get on a plane out of America within 24 hours if you acted immediately, as things probably don't go nuclear at the first downed plane. On the other hand, it seems highly likely to me that most people wouldn't act, and would just sit there. Which is lucky really - the plane capacity to leave America each day is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. The plan only works if nobody else acts. But this in turn means that you need to act, and quickly, exactly at the point when everyone else thinks you're weird and paranoid. How else could it work? If you wait until the air raid alerts are being sent out, you will probably just die getting incinerated in your car, stuck in the biggest traffic jam in the soon-to-be-concluded history of the city. 

This is why forecasting things usefully ex-ante is hard. People expect there to be a big glaring sign that everyone will see. But there probably won't, at least until the historians write about you in 200 years' time.