In my opinion, the biggest problem is that I don’t expect predictive history to be able to provide much value apart from general advice like “don’t invade Russia during the winter”. Pure chance has a larger impact on historical events than our intuition would suggest; Erik Durschmied wrote a lot about this. No one can observe the track record of Napoleon until 1815 and confidently predict that he’s definitely going to lose at Waterloo. In the counterfactual world where one tiny detail is different, he would win.
In my opinion, the biggest problem is that I don’t expect predictive history to be able to provide much value apart from general advice like “don’t invade Russia during the winter”. Pure chance has a larger impact on historical events than our intuition would suggest; Erik Durschmied wrote a lot about this. No one can observe the track record of Napoleon until 1815 and confidently predict that he’s definitely going to lose at Waterloo. In the counterfactual world where one tiny detail is different, he would win.