John Kay wrote a good book about this called Radical Uncertainty. It's annoying that there is an increasing tendency to frame what is a purely narrative stateme

John Kay wrote a good book about this called Radical Uncertainty. It's annoying that there is an increasing tendency to frame what is a purely narrative statement in quantitative terms. As the author points out war is not historically predetermined, at least in any way we could convincingly figure out, and pulling numbers out of thin air only serves the purpose of trying to talk about the future with less uncertainty than is appropriate. Talking about events in terms of probabilities should be reserved for events that are not dominated by 'unknown unknowns'. You can attach a probability to a volcano outbreak, a transaction in an ordinary functioning market, a game of blackjack. That is to say 'small worlds' where outcomes are known, rules well defined and inputs quantified. You can't predict the overthrow a government in 5 years in numerical terms. That doesn't mean you can't talk about it. It's okay to say something is unlikely or very likely, but it makes more sense to explicitly talk about these things in qualitative terms rather than trying to be 'mathy' to make a prediction appear more objective than it is.