Ludic Fallacy

The ludic fallacy, proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, is the misuse of games to model real-life situations. Taleb describes the fallacy as basing studies of chance on the narrow, cleanly bounded world of games and dice, rather than on the messier and less quantifiable uncertainty of real-world events; the term's adjective, ludic, derives from the Latin noun ludus, meaning play, game, sport or pastime. The fallacy names the specific error of assuming that the tidy probabilities that govern a game of chance also govern situations whose true uncertainty is far less structured and far less knowable.