The Narrative Fallacy and What You Can Do About It

A beautiful overview of the Narrative Fallacy in PDF format. 

A representative excerpt:

Such is the power of the Narrative Fallacy — the backward-looking mental tripwire that causes us to attribute a linear and discernable cause-and-effect chain to our knowledge of the past. As Nassim (Taleb) points out, there is a deep biological basis to the problem: we are inundated with so much sensory information that our brains have no other choice; we must put things in order so we can process the world around us. It’s implicit in how we understand the world. When the coffee cup falls, we need to know why it fell. (We knocked it over.) If someone gets the job instead of us, we need to know why they were deemed better. (They had more experience, they were more likeable.) Without a deep search for reasons, we would go around with blinders on, one thing simply happening after another. The world does not make sense without cause and effect.