"It’s true that you have little to no ability to predict the future on your own" -- the author misses Ferguson's point entirely. Ferguson would use history to understand the present and to illumine the future.
However, a timeline's unpredictability (despite seeming like an obvious concatenation of events) frustrates this goal and leaves us to hedge our bets on the future.
The author has no such qualms, though. No matter how history turns out, he can alway generate a fact-filled story that sounds completely reasonable.
