In a world of chaos and chance, I give a storyline to the dance.
I connect dots in a seamless flow, leaving out what disrupts the show.
I hide the complex, the random, the strange, into a neat, tidy package I arrange.
Who am I, with this misleading capacity, who simplifies life with tenacity?
The answer to the riddle is the "narrative fallacy."
The narrative fallacy is a concept presented by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "The Black Swan." It is our tendency to simplify complex realities into neat, coherent stories, thus distorting the messy, random, and multicausal nature of life.
When we experience random events, our brains instinctively seek patterns, connections, and causal relationships. This drive makes us vulnerable to the narrative fallacy - we weave explanatory stories where there may be none. This tendency to over-simplify can mislead us, making us believe in the orderliness and predictability of the world and causing us to overlook its inherent randomness and complexity.
