A central aspect of my philosophical work these days is this: to warn against over-estimating, for example, how much one can learn from past financial crises, in thinking about future financial crises. How much, to put it in more general – and philosophical – terms, one can learn inductively. There is plenty one can learn; but there is also a severe limit on what one can learn. There is a limit, in other words, on the value of evidence.

The danger of not being continually aware of this point is that one may think, at least unconsciously, that there are specific lessons to learn and that, once one has learnt them, then one's job is done and one has genuinely ensured as best one can that there will not be further such crises in the future.

This would be a hubristic stance. Hubris, in the long run, inevitably leads to nemesis.

For we are always going to be living in a social world that defies full comprehension and control. A world that we do not and never will fully understand, as my colleague Nassim N. Taleb puts it, in his 2012 book Anti-Fragile.