Ludic Fallacy

The Ludic Fallacy gets its name from the Latin word for playing games or engaging in pastimes, ludus, and refers to the tendency of mathematicians, economists, futurists, statisticians, and military strategists to rely upon models for their predictions and plans that are—according to this fallacy, at least—too simplistic to be useful in the real world.

This fallacy was posited by the author of the book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb, who among other things writes about outlier events and the explanations we use to explain such events.

The Ludic Fallacy points at the shortcomings in some of these post hoc explanations, but also at how we try to map potential future happenings using what amounts to coin flips and dice rolls: many of our models are reduced in complexity so they can be easily utilized and graphed, but wielding them as we do makes it seem as if we’ve captured all the necessary variables and other data in our models, which we absolutely have not.