The ludic fallacy, proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan (2007), is "the misuse of games to model real-life situations".
Taleb's argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on platonified forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take various aspects into account:[citation needed] One example given in the book is the following thought experiment.
Two people are involved: A third party asks them to "assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped.
A reasonable person, for example, would not bet on red on a roulette table that has come up black 26 times in a row (especially as the reward for a correct guess is so low when compared with the probable odds that the game is fixed).
"A martial version of the ludic fallacy: organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera.