Fog of War

War & Peace | The Black Swan

War & Peace
Modern Library, Constance Garnett trans.

Part 2, ch. XXI, p. 177-78

Prince Bagration thanked the several commanding officers, and inquired into details of the battle and of the losses. The general, whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau, submitted to the prince that as soon as the engagement began, he had fallen back from the copse, mustered the men who were cutting the wood, and letting them pass him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and repulsed the French.

“As soon as I saw, your excellancy, that the first battalion was thrown into confusion, I stood in the road and thought, 'I'll let them get through and then open fire on them'; and that is what I did.”

The general had so longed to do this, he had so regretted not having succeeded in doing it, that it seemed to him now that this was just what had happened. Indeed might it not actually have been so? Who could make out in such confusion what did and what did not happen?

“And by the way I ought to note, your excellency,” he continued, recalling Dolohov's conversation with Kutuzov and his own late interview with the degraded officer, “that the private Dolohov, degraded to the ranks, took a French officer prisoner before my eyes and particularly distinguished himself.”

“I saw here, your excellency, the attack of the Pavlograd hussars,” Zherkov put in, looking uneasily about him. He had not seen the hussars at all that day, but had only heard about them from an infantry officer. “They broke up two squares, your excellency.”

When Zherkov began to speak, several officers smiled, as they always did, expecting a joke from him. But as they perceived that what he was saying all redounded to the glory of our arms and of the day, they resumed a serious expression, although many were very well aware that what Zherkov was saying was a lie utterly without foundation. Prince Bagration turned to the old colonel.

“I thank you all, gentlemen; all branches of the service behaved heroically – infantry, cavalry, and artillery. How did two cannons come to be abandoned in the centre?” he inquired, looking about for some one. (Prince Bagration did not ask about the cannons of the left flank; he knew that all of them had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.) “I think it was you I sent,” he added, addressing the staff-officer.

“One had been disabled,” answered the staff-officer, “but the other, I can't explain; I was there all the while myself, giving instructions, and I had scarcely left there.... It was pretty hot, it's true,” he added modestly.

Some one said that Captain Tushin was close by here in the village, and that he had already been sent for.

“Oh, but you went there,” said Prince Bagration, addressing Prince Andrey.

“To be sure, we rode there almost together,” said the staff-officer, smiling affably to [Andrey].

“I had not the pleasure of seeing you,” said Prince Andrey, coldly and abruptly. Every one was silent.

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Part 10, ch. 1, pp. 637-38

[Tolstoy surveys various current 19th Century historical narratives about Napoleon's war on Russia.]

... [A]ll these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and suppositions are now forgotten that were in current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion. There are always so many presuppositions as to the cause of every event that, however the matter ends, there are always people who will say: “I said at the time that it would be so”: quite oblivious of the fact that among the numerous suppositions they made there were others too suggesting just the opposite course of events.

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Charles Joseph Minard, Tableaux Graphiques et Cartes Figuratives de M. Minard, 1845-1869

see also Wikimedia Commons

The above is the classic of Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), the French engineer, which shows the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia. Described by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence, this combination of data map and time-series, drawn in 1869, portrays the devastating losses suffered in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812.

Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen river, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men.

The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of the advancing army.

Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow. It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.

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Taleb, The Black Swan, p.8:

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what' s inside the body, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves ....

This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen.

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:

• the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;


• the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and


• the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories ...

Nobody Knows What's Going On

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

I was constantly told by adults that the [Lebanese civil] war, which ended up lasting close to seventeen years, was going to end in “only a matter of days.” They seemed quite confident in their forecasts of duration, as can be evidenced by the number of people who sat waiting in hotel rooms and other temporary quarters in Cypress, Greece, France, and elsewhere for the war to finish.

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p. 251: The Ubiquity of the Gaussian

One of the problems I face in life is that whenever I tell people that the Gaussian bell curve is not ubiquitous in real life, only in the minds of statisticians, they require me to “prove it” -- which is easy to do, as we will see in the next two chapters, yet nobody has managed to prove the opposite. Whenever I suggest a process that is not Gaussian, I am asked to justify my suggestion and to, beyond the phenomena, “give them the theory behind it.”...

Theory shmeory! I have an epistemological problem with that, with the need to justify the world's failure to resemble an idealized model that someone blind to reality has managed to promote. ... This ubiquity of the Gaussian is not a property of the world, but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it....

I sometimes get a little emotional because I've spent a large part of my life thinking about this problem. Since I started thinking about it, and conducting a variety of thought experiments ... I have not for the life of me been able to find anyone around me in the business and statistical world who was intellectually consistent in that he both accepted the Black Swan and rejected the Gaussian and Gaussian tools. Many people accepted my Black Swan idea but could not take it to its logical conclusion, which is that you cannot use one single measure for randomness called a standard deviation (and call it “risk”); you cannot expect a simple answer to characterize uncertainty. To go the extra step requires courage, commitment, an ability to connect the dots, a desire to understand randomness fully. It also means not accepting other people's wisdom as gospel.

Then I started finding physicists who had rejected the Gaussian tools but fell for another sin: gullibility about precise predictive models.... I could not find anyone with depth and scientific technique who looked at the world of randomness and understood its nature, who looked at calculations as an aid, not a principal aim. It took me close to a decade and a half to find that thinker, the man who made many swans gray: Mandelbrot – the great Benoit Mandelbrot.

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See also The Geebus (April 14, 2006)