My monthly column at Techtarget: Project managers cannot rely on generalizations:

Photography by Notariety.

"The second reason was given to me by Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It is the human need to categorize everything. We just have to put the world around is in neat boxes. Taleb coins the term "Platonicity" for this phenomenon — "the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures." We put a label on an event and use that knowledge to reason about the future. We use this mechanism on everything, including people."