Meditations and Learnings

Meditations and Learnings

Ludic Fallacy

In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Talen defines the “ludic fallacy” as the misuse of games to model real-life situations.

Best example:

Steven is a science and logic-driven thinker.
Michael navigates the world using his wits and intuition.
They are both told that an impartial third party flipped a fair coin 99 times, and each had been heads. Each must guess the probability of the next throw also being heads.
Steven, being logical, points out it is still 50/50 because that is the law of probabilities.
Michael, living in the real world, calls bullshit on the idea a fair coin can come up heads 99 times in a row and refuses to play these stupid games.
Sometimes logic can get in the way of rational thinking. It can blind us to what even a 5-year-old might notice.