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Ludic Fallacy: Why It’s a Mistake to Use Games to Model Real-Life Situations

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Hey there! Thanks for visiting. But I’ve shifted to Substack as of 2022 and don’t actively publish here anymore. In your adult life, if you have talked to enough people, or have attended few conferences and keynotes, you must have heard people starting a sentence with, “Like in a game of chess,” or “Think of it as a game of poker.” Analogies are helpful in communication, but life is neither a game of chess, nor a game of poker. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains the difference between everyday randomness, and randomness in the context of games or casinos. Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to refer to “the misuse of games to model real-life situations.” Games are far more constrained, and follow certain rules. Games have clearly defined probabilities. For example, an AI system can be used to examine all possible outcomes of a chess game at any point by backwards induction to determine future moves that are likely to win. Real-life situations, on the other hand, are fu

In your adult life, if you have talked to enough people, or have attended few conferences and keynotes, you must have heard people starting a sentence with, “Like in a game of chess,” or “Think of it as a game of poker.” Analogies are helpful in communication, but life is neither a game of chess, nor a game of poker. In The Black Swan , Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains the difference between everyday randomness, and randomness in the context of games or casinos. Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to refer to “the misuse of games to model real-life situations.” Ludic Fallacy: It is a capital m

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