Another subtle concept from Nassim Taleb’s Incerto series:
He invents the concept of “Platonicity” from Plato’s approach to the world. Plato was good at dividing the world into distinct objects and concepts, which made them easier to analyze and discuss and think about. And Plato’s approach has had a profound effect on human thinking and theorizing ever since, especially in the Western world (Joseph Henrich’s 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World shows that not all cultures do this; many perceive the world in a more wholistic manner. Indeed, we in the West are outliers). The problem is that the world is immensely complex, far more complex than a human mind can encompass, so we perforce must simplify it. We divide it into graspable concepts, models, maps, theories, etc., simple enough for our minds to work with. And this is often useful for practical day-to-day matters, even if we have simplified things a great deal.
But since the real world is really immensely complex, whatever ways we choose to simplify it are in some sense arbitrary. We pick some features to model or embed in a concept or theory or mental construct and ignore many, many others. Which features we choose to include in our concepts and mental constructs, and which we choose to ignore, shape our (distorted and incomplete) view of the world. Beyond that, as physicist Carlo Rovello argues in his most recent book Helgoland, it is often the relationships between objects that really matter, not the objects themselves.
The Platonic fallacy is to begin to believe that our simplified models and theories and concepts are truly comprehensive, to believe that our maps of the terrain are the terrain itself, rather than just a much-simplified representation of some few arbitrarily-selected salient features of the terrain. It leads us to believe that we know far more than we actually know.
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