to recap: our history is just a story, our analysis of the present may presently be dated, and our forecasts for the future may be confounded by volatility, reflexivity, competing curves, and the limits of predictability. With that said, all models are wrong, but some are useful; so with caveats cataloged and provisos provided, let’s proceed!
Balaji Srinivasan • The Network State: How To Start a New Country
Modern philosopher Nassim Taleb has warned of the “narrative fallacy”—the tendency to assemble unrelated events of the past into stories. These stories, however gratifying to create, are inherently misleading. They lead to a sense of cohesion and certainty that isn’t real.
Stephen Hanselman • The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
In the interest of building a narrative (it's no coincidence that history and story are similar words), you take out everything not relevant, and end up with only a small sliver of the entire state of the world at any given time point. Of course, that sliver may contain some breadth, if you're writing a narrative of something large like "the Americ... See more
Étienne Fortier-Dubois • History in the Space-Time Continuum
Keely Adler added
In The Black Swan, epistemologist Nassim Taleb talks about “narrative fallacy,” or the idea that imperfect stories about the past form our present perceptions and future outlook.
Debra Kaye • Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation
The archives of human cleverness are filled with blunders. When read in a good mood, history is a blooper reel. But it should not be lost on us that history never repeats, and modern technology enables ever more leverage. The more technology you can harness to commit an idea, and the faster your idea can spread, the greater the magnitude of somethi... See more
Simon Sarris • Long Distance Thinking
I think this mixture of narrative bias and survivorship bias explains what we so often get wrong about most human progress. The process in reality involves much more experimentation and failure than we ever like to acknowledge in retrospect.
Sam Tatam • Evolutionary Ideas
Kaustubh Sule added
As per the Yiddish saying: “If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.” These illusions of contribution result largely from confirmation fallacies: in addition to the sad fact that history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers), a second bias appears, as those who write the accounts can deliver confirmatory ... See more
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”74 But remembering isn’t enough. History is an exercise in self-deception if we get the wrong messages from it. Only through the hard work of looking beyond the first-order causes—particularly when we’re afraid of what we might see—do we begin to learn from history. Treating only the f
... See more