Part One: Umberto Eco's Antilibrary, or How We Seek Validation, Chapter 6: The Narrative Fallacy Summary and Analysis

Summary

The narrative fallacy was explained as our penchant to tell stories to ourselves and others rather than to think about randomness and why causes have been assigned to effects. The author expressed disdain for cause-effect thinking, although he admitted to sometimes using the relationship. His main complaint was about how people changed actual information for what best fitted the story. Additionally, stories changed as they aged.

Narratives have been useful for compressing a great deal of information into memorable stories, but that usefulness turned into disadvantages when Black Swan incidents were considered. An observation was presented that showed how a statement can overly simplify a complex situation by limiting possibilities via modifiers. "The king...