I think you've made a good point here. The article talks about emergent phenomenon, and how difficult it is to describe high level dynamics when one is simply l

I think you've made a good point here. The article talks about emergent phenomenon, and how difficult it is to describe high level dynamics when one is simply looking at the components. A "story" is the way to convey the dynamics of a complex system while conveniently discarding the constituents of that system. If we don't keep the components, how can we prove the story is true? One problem is no one really cares or thinks they know enough to challenge the story. They accept it at face value. I feel this is a deeper limitation of human thinking. It's very difficult to see something at different levels simultaneously. We can understand behaviour on a high level (e.g. income inequality), and we can understand behaviour on a lower level (e.g. not having enough money to eat), but we can't intuitively understand how low level behaviours effect and affect high level behaviours. It's not like we're not trying to understand, it's more that we don't even have a basis for understanding. We know how elections work, but it's so easy to intuitively think "my one vote doesn't really count". We're observing high level dynamics while simultaneously contributing to them. It's weird. Like thinking about one's own consciousness.