The black swan (Nassim Taleb) p 63-69
NARRATIVE FALLACY “We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimensions of matters…the fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our mental representation of the world…narative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or…forcing a logical link…explanations bind facts together. They make them more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.” “While narrativity comes from an ingrained biological need to reduce dimensionality, robots would be prone to the same process of reduction. Information wants to be reduced.” “…information is costly to obtain…is also costly to store…the more orderly, less random, patterned, and narratized a series of words or symbols, the easier it is to store that series in one’s mind or jot it down…by finding the pattern…you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern… A pattern is obviously more compact than raw information” “The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is”
