Avoiding Narrative Fallacy to Optimize Decision-Making
Connecting the dots is sometimes easier, but often leads us far astray.
Key points
- Narrative fallacy developed so we can make quick guesses without all the facts.
- Narrative fallacy allows us to “connect the dots” but is often inaccurate.
- Knowing when we can take shortcuts and when we need to slow down and do the work is key.
Recently I’ve been deep-diving into a model of brain, mind, and behavior-active inference and the free energy principle-developed by a leading neuroscientist and computational psychiatrist Karl Friston, one of the world’s greatest minds [1].
Through these investigations, I had the pleasure of meeting Alexey Tolchinsky, a clinical psychologist and researcher who originally studied physics in his undergraduate program and later on pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology. He is one of the authors investigating the clinical practice of psychology and psychiatry using the framework of dynamical systems, including Chaos Theory. He currently is working on papers exploring depersonalization and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In this interview, we focus on “narrative fallacy,” which helps explain a common way people create…
