Changing circumstances

Charlie dated his suspicion of routine to his National Service, and the war games staged to show the Russians just how prepared for attack the West was; men with red arm bands running around straight-faced and calling their mates in green arm bands the enemy. He admitted the basic usefulness of such exercises, of course, training people how to move tanks and equipment and men about. But like a complicated dance which looked effective once you’d got the steps right, it worked because people learned a pattern and then always conformed to it. And the danger of conforming to routine or categories or patterns was that, like the dancing lessons or model railways, things always went from A to B to C in an undisturbed logic. Charlie couldn’t dance and had never collected train numbers. And in the world in which he had lived for such a long time, men didn’t wear arm bands to identify themselves as the bad guys any more than they obeyed rules so that everyone would know what everyone else was doing.

Add Taleb on luck and replacement theory of urns and marbles