Some academic circles can suffer from an acute expert problem producing cosmetic but fake knowledge, particularly in narrative disciplines...
Narrative discipline: discipline that consists in fitting a convincing and well-sounding story to the past (history, statistics, political science). Opposed to experimental discipline ...
Narrative fallacy: our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts.
Retrospective distortion: Examining past events without adjusting for the forward passage of time. It leads to the illusion of posterior predictability.
It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.
Hat tip to John Robb.
