The Greatest Human Fallacy

Before I get into the meat of this entry (the title gives it away), I want to identify one of my biases. I'm a product of my modern environment and most of my thoughts and views are modern in nature. A couple hundred years from now, my views will probably seem quaint, and that's fine.

What does my relative modernity have to do with the tile of the post? Everything. Modern (western and/or industrialized) society has gotten extremely complex and my take on our greatest fallacy flows directly from that premise. If we were to identify a key human fallacy from a couple of hundred years ago (a simpler time, in theory), it would be very different than what I'm suggesting here today.

Our greatest fallacy is a multiple-choice problem where you get to fill in the blank.

Our greatest fallacy is that we believe we can _____________ complex systems. There are many answers to this fill-in-the-blank problem, but ones that immediately come to mind are manage, manipulate, control, or the worst possible answer: fully understand.

This is a fairly obvious take, especially for those who have read any of Taleb's works. What's different about my premise, and debatable, is that I think this false belief around understanding or accounting for complex systems is truly our greatest fallacy. There are certainly arguments for others. I'll lay out my case for this fallacy being our greatest one in later entries. But in my next entry on this subject, I'll provide two textbook examples of very smart people failing to account for complexity. 

And yes, this stuff ties into fitness and I'll explain how (eventually!).