We spent the morning musing on the Maginot Line. The French built this elaborate line of fortifications along its border with Germany in the 1930s to thwart an invasion by its Great War enemy. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, Adolf Hitler’s armies simply bypassed the line and invaded France through neighbouring Belgium. The Maginot Line proved to be an elaborate dud.

As Nassim Taleb points out in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:

The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific. The French, after the Great War, build a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion – Hitler just (almost) effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned with too much precision.