"But things do appear to happen by chance, of course, because we simply don't know all the factors large and small that are involved in the flow of events, both personal and global."

What I should have said, in response to the above quote, LH is that Taleb acknowledges the difference between 'deterministic chaos' and randomness. But he reckons that the difference is academic and that there is no effective difference in the real world i.e. a butterfly flapping it's wings in Dehli might, eventually, cause a hurricane in South Carolina - but you can't work backwards from the hurricane and identify the exact butterfly wot did it.