cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
You can count cards when the mechanics of the game are transparent, and you can identify situations (based on past play) that give you a statistical edge.You're most likely correct. There are many variables that guide how and where society goes, and any single event could completely alter everything. With that being said, we can observe what has happened in society in the past and use it to make an educated guess on what is likely to occur next. To continue with your analogy, it's counting cards in Vegas.
Our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying large-scale sociopolitical human activity, what becomes “history”, are not. The high incidence of utopian hypothetical models from intelligent, worldly observers suggests this to me.
I was thinking the slots are the better analogy. They’re more like the opaque forces actually driving history. You can’t count cards, since the next event is designed to be nearly random, though a large sample of lever pulls converges on a single loss value: the programmed house take.