The past is a different country
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Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
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The past misleads us into believing the world is solvable because the past is fixed, complete, all knowable information is known, there can be nothing unexpected. In the past we know what happened.
When the data is in, we can calculate with some degree of confidence the probabilities of the various events that might have caused that cluster of collapses on the ward. there was a serial killer on the ward. But data won’t help us predict what will happen next, because all that closed, static finitude has gone away.
All data is from the past. It can do a tidy job of helping us fill in the gaps about the past by triangulation: we can make sensible Bayesian inferences to work out what must have happened even if we did not see it. But here the sample space is closed, the boundaries are known — these are conditions for probabilistic reasoning.
In the future, they are not. You cannot make expected value calculations about an unknown sample space in the inchoate future of a complex system. We 'make the future when we are in a complex system. It doesn’t happen to us.
This, in a sense, is the unfairness of a referendum. We know about the status quo — it is from the past. We can sensibly judge it on its record. We know nothing about the alternative, which is in the future. We literally do not know what we are voting for. Full Brexit? EEA? Customs Union? Withdraw diplomatic missions?