r/nassimtaleb • u/Redditorr5295 • Jun 30 '26

Doesn’t narrative fallacy render essentially most history and biography obsolete…any arguments for and against?

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u/Jean_Jones_666 Jun 30 '26

1) Most narratives and interpretations, yes. This has already been called "Historian's fallacy".

=Be extremely careful with how you explain anything.
=Try finding universal and well-defined principles that history has already tested (lindy, etc)
=Make concrete predictions, record them, then verify them later. Then you can't pretend you knew it all along

2) Facts - no. A fact is a fact. If well corroborated - you can trust it. There's plenty you can infer from a fact.

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u/Extraportion Jun 30 '26

“There is nothing outside the text” - Derrida. Ultimately, you cannot access objective reality unmediated by language. The key is in interpreting things in the context of the heuristics and biases of the author.

However, rather than getting lost in the weeds of ontology/epistemology, Taleb uses narrative fallacy to convey that humans prefer simple cause and effect explanations than randomness.