We compress the past into stories that feel explanatory and predict nothing — coherence is not evidence.
We cannot store raw sequence, so we store causation and invent it where it is missing. The uncomfortable part is that the invented version feels like understanding.
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supports →Judge a decision by the distribution of outcomes it could have produced, not the one that happened to occur.The story is what hides the other branches. Once a coherent account of what happened exists, the ninety-nine worlds that did not happen become very hard to hold in mind.
← has exampleComparisons to past technologies establish the range of possible outcomes, not a probability over them.
The fallacy caught in the act and then resisted. Evans notes every AI conversation ends in a hunt for metaphors, and does the rare thing of denying his own analogies probative force rather than riding them.
← supported byIdeas are replicators under the same selection pressure — an idea spreads because it is good at spreading, not because it is true.Explains the persistence Taleb only describes. Stories are selected for transmissibility, and coherence is what makes them transmissible — so the fallacy is not a bug in cognition but the predictable output of a selection process.