History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) lik… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed — but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

So analyze me, surprise me, but can't magmatize me
Scannin' while you're plannin' ways to sabotage me
I leave 'em froze like her-on in your nose
Nas'll rock well, It ain't hard to tell

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.