Platonicity and The Platonic Fold

"What I call Platonicity,  after the ideas (and personality) of the philosopher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined "forms", whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what "makes sense"0, even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures .........

"Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.

"The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced".

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

THE BLACK SWAN

Prologue

PLATO and the Nerd

PP XXV