Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Welcome back to the Filter It Through a Brain Cell Podcast! Let’s start off with a quick review of a fallacy we covered earlier this season, The Kafka Trap. The KafkaTrap happens when someone is accused of something, and they deny it, but their denial is considered proof that the thing they’re accused of is true!
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 148.
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Alright, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy, the Ludic Fallacy. Now, the word Ludic is probably unfamiliar to you, like it was to me. It comes from the Latin word ‘ludus’, which means ‘play, game, sport, or pastime’. So the Ludic Fallacy happens when someone applies rules & probabilities that apply to games to people and to real-life situations. It’s misunderstanding the role of chance and overestimating the predictability of outcomes in games or other situations.
Let me explain where this fallacy comes from and it’ll help it make more sense. The Ludic Fallacy comes from the book The Black Swan. And I’m going to sum this up to make the whole scene a little shorter. The scene is between Dr. John, who is a logical thinker and kind of a scientific nerd and a man called Fat Tony. Fat Tony is street-smart, not a scientific thinker, more of a person who goes off his common sense & gut feeling on things. Anyways, in the book, someone approaches them with a thought experiment. He challenges them to a little challenge about the odds of a coin being flipped landing on either heads or tails. Since you’re a listener of this podcast, you may remember The Gambler’s Fallacy from episode 45, which says that in a game of chance like a coin toss, the chances of each toss are always the same, 50:50, the odds don’t built up with each toss.
Anyways, back to Dr John & Fat Tony. The person tells them this: “assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get heads each time. What are the odds of me getting tails on my next throw?” Well, Dr. John, being a logical man, knows the Gambler’s Fallacy and is determined that he won’t fall for it and says that the chances of it being tails are 50:50, after all, they were told to assume that the coin is fair.
However, Fat Tony isn’t falling for it. He says, “You are either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that ’50 percent’ business. The coin gotta be loaded. It can’t be a fair game.” And he was right. It was a trick coin. Ok, do you see what happened there? Dr. John followed the “rules of the game” and assumed that normal probabilities would apply in spite of the physical evidence that it was a trick coin. He committed the Ludic Fallacy. But not Fat Tony. Fat Tony used his street smarts to realize he had been lied to. They weren’t playing by the rules of the game. They had been tricked. He knew you can’t always apply the rules of games to humans and real-life situations.
The problem behind the thinking in the Ludic Fallacy is that games aren’t like real-life. Games have rules that are supposed to be followed, and there are very specific probabilities that can be figured out and applied accurately to games. But people are very different. We don’t come with rules and we have free will, the ability to make our own choices, even when they don’t make sense or we make bad decisions. We don’t act logically all the time and probabilities can’t be applied to people & real-life situations.
Another example of what the Ludic Fallacy could look like would be if you and I were sitting on a park bench enjoying an ice cream cone and decided to play a game of “guess who’s going to walk out the door next”, as one does. I say, well, about half the people in the world are men, so I’m guessing that a man is going to walk out the door next, I have a 50:50 chance, right? Well, according to the coin-tossing probabilities, sure, I have a 50% chance. However, what I failed to notice is that the door we’re watching is to a Barber Shop, which gets primarily male customers. See how the rules of games can’t always be applied to real life situations?
So, the question to ask yourself if you think you might be facing or committing the Ludic Fallacy is this: “Do those odds really apply to this real-life situation?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
