11 ms·

Why Fiction Beats Truth

108 points by tlb 7y ago

slippinjimmy 7y ago
Truth doesn't have to make sense AND it is often hidden from view.
nullc 7y ago
So what should one do when one finds themselves being turned into roadkill under the wheels of someone else's socially useful fiction? I feel like the author of the piece might even advocate going along with-- or at least not wasting your energies fighting-- many cases of socially useful fiction. But that hardly works when you happen to be the person or of the creed one targets.
- tlb 7y ago
  First, realize that simply pointing out to people how they are mistaken won't change much. Myths, for some reason, often have loopholes. Achilles is invincible, except for his heel. Samaritans are bad, except for some good ones. So sometimes you can position yourself as matching the loophole and get a pass. Sometimes this is humiliating, though, or funnels groups of people into acting out narrow stereotypes.
  - schmidtleonard 7y ago
    > First, realize that simply pointing out to people how they are mistaken won't change much. That lesson took me embarrassingly long to learn, but it's a good one. I haven't given much thought to pattern-matching a loophole as a strategy, but your observation is key: people are willing to make exceptions, you just have to figure out how to get them to make an exception for you. How to do that? Virtue signal. Watch other people for ideas. You won't have to watch long, people love to virtue signal and do it all the time. Validate their VS to score some quick points, swallow the small amount of bile that it brings to the back of your throat, and then pick something politically adjacent but not so directly similar as to compete/threaten. Those constraints are pretty loose, they should leave you with a wide field of possibilities to choose from. Pick the least unpalatable and you're set.
    - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
      Your approach increases the problem's scale. I've found the exact opposite, that by carefully confiding in friends about my non-conformity often brings out their relieved agreement and binds us together much strongly. In these times it is important to start making a mental list of who behaves like a human and who behaves like cattle.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Find people to team up with. Build a squad. Practice self-defense, in whatever medium you find practical. Recruit.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >So what should one do when one finds themselves being turned into roadkill under the wheels of someone else's socially useful fiction? Leave home. edit - that was maybe slightly personal as responses go, but I think in a situation where you find yourself to be a pawn in someone else's psycosis, then you should extracate yourself from it and try and help at arms length unless you have a will of iron.
- analyst74 7y ago
  On an individual level, as long as crossing you has more perceived consequences than benefits, people will generally think twice before turning you into a social roadkill. On the other hand, due to various forms of prejudice, certain characteristics (race, gender, accent, and what not) increase your chance of victimization. This while sad, becomes fuel to people who dedicate their lives to fight for injustices.
- RaceWon 7y ago
  > So what should one do when one finds themselves being turned into roadkill under the wheels of someone else's socially useful fiction? Most people believe that they, and they alone are the guardians of universal truth. Ries and Trout really hit the nail on the head when they discuss the folly of trying to change a mind. “You want to change something in a computer? Just type over or delete the existing material. You want to change something in a mind? Forget it.” ―Ries and Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing “The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.” ―Ries and Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
yeahitslikethat 7y ago
Tldr: 1) you know where lies come from: people you know. Therefore you can trust people who tell the same lies. 2) you can trust people who believe your lies because believing lies is more expensive than going with the truth, because expensive signals are harder to fake. 3) the truth hurts. No one wants to follow someone who hurts them. We prefer to follow people who lie to us so we will feel better.
- kurthr 7y ago
  I'd say there's also an element of enjoying a narrative, whether we call them memes or myths, that is satisfying and fits a story we know. Some time around 2000 I started seeing most news (especially long form) through this lens and I discount/research it a bit more the more it follows a standard narrative. Usually, it's a sign that facts have been cherry picked or out of context to fit, thought that's not always the case. It's rare that there's a story (or scientific research) that doesn't have some warts and things that don't fit, and to me those aspects are part of what give it a ring of authenticity... although they are also falsifiable. Many current memes (and science press releases) are terribly simplistic and made for those who truly don't care about truth, but are looking for that hit of satisfaction of discovering they were always right.
  - hhjjkkll 7y ago
    I find memes to be often low effort half/quarter-truths or no truth at all and their humor lies within the irony that they aren't true at all. What is the impact on society when people in masses are consuming and entertaining themselves with this "content"?
    - mistermann 7y ago
      Depends on which definition of meme you're using: - a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users. - an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation. The former refers to things like the sometimes clever pictures you see on social media, the latter refers to things like what you read in the newspaper (often referred to as facts), but both kinds have widely varying levels of truth.
wayoutthere 7y ago
I hadn’t thought of it this way; but it does seem like a pragmatic framework for understanding truth at societal scale. Ultimately, the truth is messy and fiction is often easier to understand.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Fourth: for almost anything in life, knowing the truth doesn't matter in practice - instead, people believe things that make for good social objects, i.e. catalysts of discussions with other people. In cases were being wrong leads to direct and near-immediate consequences, people tend to learn the truth quickly. The problem with that is that today, a lot more things have delayed effects, or effects that only materialize at scale. For instance, taking whatever bullshit news sources publish at face value works as long as it only matters in bar conversations; unfortunately, these things also shape public pressure on governance - in particular in democracies, where people end up voting on it. WRT. article's point 2, politics example: I really wish people would learn better. Believing a leader - any leader - uncritically is generally unsafe for your own survival.
- askafriend 7y ago
  Very well articulated. I’d been thinking about something similar and I thank you for putting into concrete words the vague, abstract ideas tossing around in my head. That to some degree, the truth doesn’t matter in practice is a very sobering and very frustrating realization.
- Buttons840 7y ago
  Well said. So, someone spouts a well researched conspiracy and others engage in a conversation and the person gets to recite their well prepared talking points. That feels good to the person, that's positive reinforcement. That's a story they can take to their online echo chamber for even more positive feedback. They hold on to the conspiracy as something to talk about, and as something they can feel superior about. So should we just avoid debate? That doesn't seem right.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The scenario I had in mind was not debate, just information exchange. Imagine a person meeting friends in a bar, or at a dinner party. They're likely to exchange stories they read about in the news. "So this politician said $outrageous-thing!" (taken outside of context, but who cares), says the person. "Oh yeah, all X are bad, have you heard of $event-that-never-actually-happened?", replies the person B. The conversation goes on. Ultimately, little to no truth was exchanged, but people bonded together. Fiction served its social function. IME, this is how most not-directly-impactful knowledge is used by people. I've been in countless such situations, and it's painful for people with stronger affinity to truth. Unfortunately, under the guise of "good manners", society teaches you to shut up. We shouldn't avoid debate. We just need to ensure that people debating are there to discover the truth, and not just pick up morsels to share at dinner parties.
avip 7y ago
2 must have Churchill quotes: Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on (unsourced, but why not attribute it to Churchill anyhow? he deserves it)
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  > why not attribute it to Churchill anyhow? Because it isn't true. Was the irony intentional? Apparently [0] it's from Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull. [0] https://richardlangworth.com/galloping-lie https://richardlangworth.com/galloping-lie , also https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/09/colin-kaepernick/nfls-colin-kaepernick-incorrectly-credits-winston-/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/09...
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  - cfmcdonald 7y ago
    The original original is from Jonathan Swift: "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Indeed, that's why, as Swift insists, we have to "Speak Now" !
- deleted 7y ago
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trabant00 7y ago
Another: two polar opposite political stances can be true at the same time. Immigraton can be and is both good and bad. So are social help programs. Guns. Government intervention. Surveilance. Etc. Your truth is not the only truth. There are an infinite true perspectives on a issue. Another perspective is not false just because it opposes yours and yours is true.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I agree, but it's important to understand this strictly, and not come to the conclusion that all views are equal and equally true. To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're wrong.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    >To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're wrong. This is brilliant. I tend to fall back on category theory and multivalent logic for the same job.
    - emmelaich 7y ago
      Not to pick on you; I like this comment. But it's about the most HN comment I've ever read! Beautiful.
      - inflatableDodo 7y ago
        Thanks and don't worry, it usually takes me a while to even notice when people are picking on me, am notoriously bad at detecting that kind of thing. Obliviousness to social cues does come with some perks. Out of interest, I'd like it if you could explain why you think it is the most HN comment you've ever read. I have some idea, but am not entirely sure.
a9a 7y ago
I’m not sure I agree with the last line that these groups prize unity at the expense of truth. My takeaway from the rest of the article is that trust (performed as social cohesion) is the underlying social value that we are actually talking about in many of these conversations. Both verifiable truth (e.g. scientific predictions that we can trust) and fictions (e.g. elaborate stories that give us a shortcut to trust, as mentioned in the article) play a part in building trust. Successful organizations understand the right mix of truth and fiction to inspire trust—the morals of bible stories are powerful because they are “true” for many people to the extent that seem to reflect many people’s day to day experience. So, rather than unity vs truth, maybe we should think of unity as a function of a variety of strategies, one of which is truth? And successful organizations as ones that find the right balance?
tunesmith 7y ago
It is possible to engineer communication to alter the power levels between fiction and truth. Just look at Twitter, which did this in the wrong direction - there is reduced accountability and greater power in quipping something misleading or false, compared to doing so offline. But if instead there was an engineered solution to speed up the feedback loop between theory and reality, or fiction and truth, then there would be more of a cost towards saying outlandish things. "Truth wins in the long run" and "in the long run, we're all dead"... so you have to figure out how to make it more of a medium- or short-run. There's also that other quote, I forget, about "my irrationality exceeds your bankroll", where people can lose their shirt betting on truth if the market stays irrational long enough. That's when you need clearer truth singles sooner, so truth can win more reliably.
airocker 7y ago
Would this explain President Trump's tactics too?
- vneumanarc 7y ago
  Yes. It also would explain everyone who hates him and the media that lies about him. Everyone chooses their fiction over truth. Trump, journalists, you, me, everyone.
- myko 7y ago
  Hard to say that Trump actually thinks through his actions. It seems more likely he's having Alzheimer's related fits and is just a habitual liar.
wellpast 7y ago
This truth v. fiction binary is common thinking but far too simplistic. The idea that there is just a set of facts on one side of the fence and on the other is all the lies -- and the dumb hoi polloi just tends to always go for the "bad side"... This is just simplistic, unimaginative, unrealistic thinking. Even a cluster of the most brutally "true" of facts can be so readily misconstrued and misapplied and result and motivate terrible consequences. Anyone who claims to have the truth might be holding on to a few axioms resembling facts -- but they will always be applying their own visceral interpretation of what should be done with those facts. So when the hoi polloi favors fiction over facts, it's less for any of the reasons mentioned here which incidentally are all rooted in the (frankly, dumb) idea that the hoi polloi is dumb. They're not. They look past the trivial truth of small, static 'facts' and are looking at the bigger picture which requires metaphor and right-hemispheric perception, etc.
- pojzon 7y ago
  Like you mention, reality is rather painted in shades of gray. Nothing beside "axioms" is really true.
- lostjohnny 7y ago
  It is also simplistic to think that since people can't handle the truth, lies are better. narrative per se is not bad, but lies are. Of course we can resort to Gödel and his incompleteness theorem to reject axioms validity, but try that argument at the bar, with the first stranger you meet. The bigger picture requires profound knowledge of the current laws to imagine how they could break under a new, different paradigm. Think about Asimov's work, he was writing fiction, but was writing something that could happen, not something just because it could bond people together. TL;DR: saying "we need to switch to renewable sources of energy or we'll all die" is fiction, we don't know for sure if we'll all die, but it's good to switch to renewables. "If you do this or that God will punish you" is a lie that nobody should tell and nobody should believe in, even when it sounds good (thou shalt not kill), you shouldn't do it because it's bad, not because God told you.
- dctoedt 7y ago
  > the hoi polloi Pedantry: "The hoi polloi* is redundant — in Greek, hoi is a definite article equivalent to "the," so "the hoi polloi" is "the the many." [0] But yes, that's how the term has passed into common parlance, just as "ATM machine" is similarly redundant. [0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hoi_polloi https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hoi_polloi
Nasrudith 7y ago
There is one context when truth beats fiction - cold hard reality which cannot be fooled. Unfortunately often takes the form of ruin from war, fammine, pestilence, or economics. Imperial Japan is a good example of a "delusional empire" - they insisted upon Banzai Charges and Kamakazi squandering their experience. Or Lysenkoism and the Great Leap Forward.
tus87 7y ago
Bit like claiming the false rape accusation rate is only 2% and the women generally don't lie about rape. A nice little bit of fiction the extremist left like the NYT much prefer over the truth. Or the general false narratives of feminism that the left has been pumping for decades...false narratives and propaganda are the heart of left wing politics, only the right tells the truth. That's why the left wants to shut conservatives down...they are offended by the truth.
mncharity 7y ago
Someone described[1] preferring the 'capitalist enemy' FT, to the NYT, because "the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is - a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests." (And "the Times [is] bloated with opinion pieces and op-eds".) So here we have a op ed, exploring why people believe fictions, which somehow fails to emphasize that it's economically profitable to lie to people. Even with its focus on leadership, that's odd. As for cost, the NYT rarely manages to mention "regulatory capture"[2], consistently described TPP as a free trade treaty, but not Canadian resentment of being arm-twisted by Hollywood via USMCA to extend copyright term, nor China's of US pharma currently attempting similar. The NYT had an ad slogan, "The Truth you deserve". Which seemed to me perhaps poor advertising, as I frequently thought "No, we deserve better." Or... perhaps they were right. [1] https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-the-new-york-times.php https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-t... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22regulatory%20capture%22&sort=newest https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22regulatory%20capture...
- ggggtez 7y ago
  > fails to emphasize it's economically profitable I don't know how you could read it and walk away with that impression. It's very clear that they are saying social cohesion allows the organization of millions of people into productive societies as we know them. There are things to disagree with, but that sticking point doesn't make sense.
  - mncharity 7y ago
    Sorry I was unclear: "it's economically profitable to lie to people" ... for the agent promulgating the lie. Which incentivizes the creation of widely-believed fictions, despite societal cost. Climate change is dishonest scientists; sugar is healthy wonder-food; opioids are low-risk; vaccination causes autism.
j7ake 7y ago
What do you mean by truth? We act on heuristics that are sufficiently good approximations to be useful. For example, we act as if the world is flat when we run or drive. We act as if the world is spherical when we fly across continents. However, both are only approximations to the reality (Earth is an ellipsoid). We use them because they are useful. It is reasonable to have multiple views of the world that changes with scale.
antmanler 7y ago
What if a fiction is someone try to tell the truth that will happen in the future, but in a acceptable and literature way?
HNLurker2 7y ago
Bypass? Ahh is by Yuval that guy who wrote homo deus so he probably repeats his ideas and this is promo for his book
- devoply 7y ago
  I can't say I like everything he says, but he's got a lot of good stuff to say.
  - HNLurker2 7y ago
    For a while I used to bypass NYtimes by having them redirect from Facebook (they fixed it):https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/why-fiction-trumps-truth.html https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019...
_pmf_ 7y ago
Can the NYT apply their insights to how they deal with the "fine people hoax"?
12thwonder 7y ago
Isn’t this article a fiction itself? in a sense that it is not proven to be true or impossible to prove? It’s interesting because it looks like people are buying this story thus proving his point, fiction (this article) beats truth.
disappearance 7y ago
It seems to me profession/ occupation might play a role here too. Doctors & software developers I know favour truth based discussions. Friends/ associates in sales are far more likely to enthusiastically regurgitate something emotive (untrue/ misrepresented) from a tabloid paper (as prime conversation). So, shower thought: is the value we place on truth in social situations affected by the frequency truth's value is demonstrated to us in our daily professional lives?
dalbasal 7y ago
I'm a big fan of Harari's Sapiens, like a lot of people. But... I think the.. narrative gets into inevitably sticky territory. It is, after all, a narrative explaining the role of narratives... Pure truths and falsehoods are generally small. e=mc^2 or F=ma. Cesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. Facts, baiscally. Einstein heralded the atomic age, when man began to master matter & energy. Newton's mechanics became both a model for scientific exploration and a symbol for the coming rational age. The Roman Republic ended that day, and the Empire began. These no neither truths or falsehoods. They're narratives, or fictions as YNH sometimes calls them. The truth of a narrative is much squishier than the truth of a fact. A case in point is right here: he gives 3 reasons for why fictions succeed politically. These reasons are narratives themselves. For example: "How many Israelis Italians or Indians can stomach the unblemished truth about their nations" I don't think there is an "unblemished truth" about a nation. History is ultimately the biggest harriest example of narrative making. Without narratives, there is no meaningful "Italian people," just people and places and stuff. To make it meaningful, you need a narrative. A story that tels you what "The Italian People" are. I think a better understanding of how political narratives work is important (and interesting). I'm just skeptical that a true-v-not_true classification is meaningful or useful. Political pychology should be a field in itsewlf. It's very hard to project much meaning from facts. Facts don't tell you what Cesar means for our Republic.
- lostjohnny 7y ago
  > I don't think there is an "unblemished truth" about a nation As an Italian, born in Italy and still living in Italy in 2019, I think there is and it is true that if you talk about our recent past very few (20-25% maybe) can stomach it. Italian people IS "just people and places and stuff", but you forgot food. > Facts don't tell you what Cesar means for our Republic. It means he ended it. He was a military leader who seized control of and put an end to the Roman Republic. This is not narrative, this is a fact. Narrative is letting Brutus become a traitor, while he conspired to kill a tyrant, narrative is Shakespeare that named him "the noblest Roman of them all".
  - dalbasal 7y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with the main points. There are things about our countries that we can't stomach. My point is that to be meaningful politically, that stuff is likely to be narrative.. which is not the same as fact. "Cesar ended the republic" is a narrative sort of a statement not a factual one. Cesar crossed the Rubicon, named himself distator for life, marched on Rome... those are facts. By narrative, I don't mean that it's false. The Republic itself is/was a story, and the story changed and evolved constantly. Just like democracy, capitalism or whanot it's not a legible concept. It's more like "X is the better man for the job" than "X weighs more than Y." Whether the Republic ended or not only has meaning within the context of the story. There's no external test that declares a republic dead, outside of the narrative. I recently read a Chinese history timeline. The jist was "China was an empire for thousands of years, until mao." Whether or not something is or isn't "The Chinese empire" is a narrative claim, not a factual one. The first step towards a truthier world is recognizing the difference between facts and stories. Truth means something totally different depending on what you're dealing with. Apart from climate change, I can't think of major political questions where factual truths and falsehoods play a roles anything like role naratives play.
gandalfian 7y ago
"Real life is like bad television" (paraphrased woody Allen)
dmontero 7y ago
Our mind likes plausible stories. It helps to make sense of the past and to have the -incorrect- perception that one can predict the future. That's why fictions are so powerful. We easily get caught by them. If people beliefs were purely rational, they would be able to weight the facts against the fictions. However, our subjective confidence in a story (fact or fiction) depends on many factors: - We tend to believe stories that appear to be based on cause-effect and that express continuity. - We tend to believe in things that people that we trust and love believe in.

108 points by tlb 7y ago

Truth doesn't have to make sense AND it is often hidden from view.

So what should one do when one finds themselves being turned into roadkill under the wheels of someone else's socially useful fiction? I feel like the author of the piece might even advocate going along with-- or at least not wasting your energies fighting-- many cases of socially useful fiction. But that hardly works when you happen to be the person or of the creed one targets.

tlb 7y ago
First, realize that simply pointing out to people how they are mistaken won't change much. Myths, for some reason, often have loopholes. Achilles is invincible, except for his heel. Samaritans are bad, except for some good ones. So sometimes you can position yourself as matching the loophole and get a pass. Sometimes this is humiliating, though, or funnels groups of people into acting out narrow stereotypes.
- schmidtleonard 7y ago
  > First, realize that simply pointing out to people how they are mistaken won't change much. That lesson took me embarrassingly long to learn, but it's a good one. I haven't given much thought to pattern-matching a loophole as a strategy, but your observation is key: people are willing to make exceptions, you just have to figure out how to get them to make an exception for you. How to do that? Virtue signal. Watch other people for ideas. You won't have to watch long, people love to virtue signal and do it all the time. Validate their VS to score some quick points, swallow the small amount of bile that it brings to the back of your throat, and then pick something politically adjacent but not so directly similar as to compete/threaten. Those constraints are pretty loose, they should leave you with a wide field of possibilities to choose from. Pick the least unpalatable and you're set.
  - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
    Your approach increases the problem's scale. I've found the exact opposite, that by carefully confiding in friends about my non-conformity often brings out their relieved agreement and binds us together much strongly. In these times it is important to start making a mental list of who behaves like a human and who behaves like cattle.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Find people to team up with. Build a squad. Practice self-defense, in whatever medium you find practical. Recruit.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
>So what should one do when one finds themselves being turned into roadkill under the wheels of someone else's socially useful fiction? Leave home. edit - that was maybe slightly personal as responses go, but I think in a situation where you find yourself to be a pawn in someone else's psycosis, then you should extracate yourself from it and try and help at arms length unless you have a will of iron.
analyst74 7y ago
On an individual level, as long as crossing you has more perceived consequences than benefits, people will generally think twice before turning you into a social roadkill. On the other hand, due to various forms of prejudice, certain characteristics (race, gender, accent, and what not) increase your chance of victimization. This while sad, becomes fuel to people who dedicate their lives to fight for injustices.
RaceWon 7y ago
> So what should one do when one finds themselves being turned into roadkill under the wheels of someone else's socially useful fiction? Most people believe that they, and they alone are the guardians of universal truth. Ries and Trout really hit the nail on the head when they discuss the folly of trying to change a mind. “You want to change something in a computer? Just type over or delete the existing material. You want to change something in a mind? Forget it.” ―Ries and Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing “The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.” ―Ries and Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

yeahitslikethat 7y ago

Tldr: 1) you know where lies come from: people you know. Therefore you can trust people who tell the same lies. 2) you can trust people who believe your lies because believing lies is more expensive than going with the truth, because expensive signals are harder to fake. 3) the truth hurts. No one wants to follow someone who hurts them. We prefer to follow people who lie to us so we will feel better.

kurthr 7y ago
I'd say there's also an element of enjoying a narrative, whether we call them memes or myths, that is satisfying and fits a story we know. Some time around 2000 I started seeing most news (especially long form) through this lens and I discount/research it a bit more the more it follows a standard narrative. Usually, it's a sign that facts have been cherry picked or out of context to fit, thought that's not always the case. It's rare that there's a story (or scientific research) that doesn't have some warts and things that don't fit, and to me those aspects are part of what give it a ring of authenticity... although they are also falsifiable. Many current memes (and science press releases) are terribly simplistic and made for those who truly don't care about truth, but are looking for that hit of satisfaction of discovering they were always right.
- hhjjkkll 7y ago
  I find memes to be often low effort half/quarter-truths or no truth at all and their humor lies within the irony that they aren't true at all. What is the impact on society when people in masses are consuming and entertaining themselves with this "content"?
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Depends on which definition of meme you're using: - a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users. - an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation. The former refers to things like the sometimes clever pictures you see on social media, the latter refers to things like what you read in the newspaper (often referred to as facts), but both kinds have widely varying levels of truth.

wayoutthere 7y ago

I hadn’t thought of it this way; but it does seem like a pragmatic framework for understanding truth at societal scale. Ultimately, the truth is messy and fiction is often easier to understand.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Fourth: for almost anything in life, knowing the truth doesn't matter in practice - instead, people believe things that make for good social objects, i.e. catalysts of discussions with other people. In cases were being wrong leads to direct and near-immediate consequences, people tend to learn the truth quickly. The problem with that is that today, a lot more things have delayed effects, or effects that only materialize at scale. For instance, taking whatever bullshit news sources publish at face value works as long as it only matters in bar conversations; unfortunately, these things also shape public pressure on governance - in particular in democracies, where people end up voting on it. WRT. article's point 2, politics example: I really wish people would learn better. Believing a leader - any leader - uncritically is generally unsafe for your own survival.

askafriend 7y ago
Very well articulated. I’d been thinking about something similar and I thank you for putting into concrete words the vague, abstract ideas tossing around in my head. That to some degree, the truth doesn’t matter in practice is a very sobering and very frustrating realization.
Buttons840 7y ago
Well said. So, someone spouts a well researched conspiracy and others engage in a conversation and the person gets to recite their well prepared talking points. That feels good to the person, that's positive reinforcement. That's a story they can take to their online echo chamber for even more positive feedback. They hold on to the conspiracy as something to talk about, and as something they can feel superior about. So should we just avoid debate? That doesn't seem right.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The scenario I had in mind was not debate, just information exchange. Imagine a person meeting friends in a bar, or at a dinner party. They're likely to exchange stories they read about in the news. "So this politician said $outrageous-thing!" (taken outside of context, but who cares), says the person. "Oh yeah, all X are bad, have you heard of $event-that-never-actually-happened?", replies the person B. The conversation goes on. Ultimately, little to no truth was exchanged, but people bonded together. Fiction served its social function. IME, this is how most not-directly-impactful knowledge is used by people. I've been in countless such situations, and it's painful for people with stronger affinity to truth. Unfortunately, under the guise of "good manners", society teaches you to shut up. We shouldn't avoid debate. We just need to ensure that people debating are there to discover the truth, and not just pick up morsels to share at dinner parties.

avip 7y ago

2 must have Churchill quotes: Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on (unsourced, but why not attribute it to Churchill anyhow? he deserves it)

MaxBarraclough 7y ago
> why not attribute it to Churchill anyhow? Because it isn't true. Was the irony intentional? Apparently [0] it's from Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull. [0] https://richardlangworth.com/galloping-lie https://richardlangworth.com/galloping-lie , also https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/09/colin-kaepernick/nfls-colin-kaepernick-incorrectly-credits-winston-/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/09...
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- cfmcdonald 7y ago
  The original original is from Jonathan Swift: "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Indeed, that's why, as Swift insists, we have to "Speak Now" !
deleted 7y ago
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trabant00 7y ago

Another: two polar opposite political stances can be true at the same time. Immigraton can be and is both good and bad. So are social help programs. Guns. Government intervention. Surveilance. Etc. Your truth is not the only truth. There are an infinite true perspectives on a issue. Another perspective is not false just because it opposes yours and yours is true.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I agree, but it's important to understand this strictly, and not come to the conclusion that all views are equal and equally true. To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're wrong.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're wrong. This is brilliant. I tend to fall back on category theory and multivalent logic for the same job.
  - emmelaich 7y ago
    Not to pick on you; I like this comment. But it's about the most HN comment I've ever read! Beautiful.
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      Thanks and don't worry, it usually takes me a while to even notice when people are picking on me, am notoriously bad at detecting that kind of thing. Obliviousness to social cues does come with some perks. Out of interest, I'd like it if you could explain why you think it is the most HN comment you've ever read. I have some idea, but am not entirely sure.

a9a 7y ago

I’m not sure I agree with the last line that these groups prize unity at the expense of truth. My takeaway from the rest of the article is that trust (performed as social cohesion) is the underlying social value that we are actually talking about in many of these conversations. Both verifiable truth (e.g. scientific predictions that we can trust) and fictions (e.g. elaborate stories that give us a shortcut to trust, as mentioned in the article) play a part in building trust. Successful organizations understand the right mix of truth and fiction to inspire trust—the morals of bible stories are powerful because they are “true” for many people to the extent that seem to reflect many people’s day to day experience. So, rather than unity vs truth, maybe we should think of unity as a function of a variety of strategies, one of which is truth? And successful organizations as ones that find the right balance?

tunesmith 7y ago

It is possible to engineer communication to alter the power levels between fiction and truth. Just look at Twitter, which did this in the wrong direction - there is reduced accountability and greater power in quipping something misleading or false, compared to doing so offline. But if instead there was an engineered solution to speed up the feedback loop between theory and reality, or fiction and truth, then there would be more of a cost towards saying outlandish things. "Truth wins in the long run" and "in the long run, we're all dead"... so you have to figure out how to make it more of a medium- or short-run. There's also that other quote, I forget, about "my irrationality exceeds your bankroll", where people can lose their shirt betting on truth if the market stays irrational long enough. That's when you need clearer truth singles sooner, so truth can win more reliably.

airocker 7y ago

Would this explain President Trump's tactics too?

vneumanarc 7y ago
Yes. It also would explain everyone who hates him and the media that lies about him. Everyone chooses their fiction over truth. Trump, journalists, you, me, everyone.
myko 7y ago
Hard to say that Trump actually thinks through his actions. It seems more likely he's having Alzheimer's related fits and is just a habitual liar.

wellpast 7y ago

This truth v. fiction binary is common thinking but far too simplistic. The idea that there is just a set of facts on one side of the fence and on the other is all the lies -- and the dumb hoi polloi just tends to always go for the "bad side"... This is just simplistic, unimaginative, unrealistic thinking. Even a cluster of the most brutally "true" of facts can be so readily misconstrued and misapplied and result and motivate terrible consequences. Anyone who claims to have the truth might be holding on to a few axioms resembling facts -- but they will always be applying their own visceral interpretation of what should be done with those facts. So when the hoi polloi favors fiction over facts, it's less for any of the reasons mentioned here which incidentally are all rooted in the (frankly, dumb) idea that the hoi polloi is dumb. They're not. They look past the trivial truth of small, static 'facts' and are looking at the bigger picture which requires metaphor and right-hemispheric perception, etc.

pojzon 7y ago
Like you mention, reality is rather painted in shades of gray. Nothing beside "axioms" is really true.
lostjohnny 7y ago
It is also simplistic to think that since people can't handle the truth, lies are better. narrative per se is not bad, but lies are. Of course we can resort to Gödel and his incompleteness theorem to reject axioms validity, but try that argument at the bar, with the first stranger you meet. The bigger picture requires profound knowledge of the current laws to imagine how they could break under a new, different paradigm. Think about Asimov's work, he was writing fiction, but was writing something that could happen, not something just because it could bond people together. TL;DR: saying "we need to switch to renewable sources of energy or we'll all die" is fiction, we don't know for sure if we'll all die, but it's good to switch to renewables. "If you do this or that God will punish you" is a lie that nobody should tell and nobody should believe in, even when it sounds good (thou shalt not kill), you shouldn't do it because it's bad, not because God told you.
dctoedt 7y ago
> the hoi polloi Pedantry: "The hoi polloi* is redundant — in Greek, hoi is a definite article equivalent to "the," so "the hoi polloi" is "the the many." [0] But yes, that's how the term has passed into common parlance, just as "ATM machine" is similarly redundant. [0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hoi_polloi https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hoi_polloi

Nasrudith 7y ago

There is one context when truth beats fiction - cold hard reality which cannot be fooled. Unfortunately often takes the form of ruin from war, fammine, pestilence, or economics. Imperial Japan is a good example of a "delusional empire" - they insisted upon Banzai Charges and Kamakazi squandering their experience. Or Lysenkoism and the Great Leap Forward.

tus87 7y ago

Bit like claiming the false rape accusation rate is only 2% and the women generally don't lie about rape. A nice little bit of fiction the extremist left like the NYT much prefer over the truth. Or the general false narratives of feminism that the left has been pumping for decades...false narratives and propaganda are the heart of left wing politics, only the right tells the truth. That's why the left wants to shut conservatives down...they are offended by the truth.

mncharity 7y ago

Someone described[1] preferring the 'capitalist enemy' FT, to the NYT, because "the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is - a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests." (And "the Times [is] bloated with opinion pieces and op-eds".) So here we have a op ed, exploring why people believe fictions, which somehow fails to emphasize that it's economically profitable to lie to people. Even with its focus on leadership, that's odd. As for cost, the NYT rarely manages to mention "regulatory capture"[2], consistently described TPP as a free trade treaty, but not Canadian resentment of being arm-twisted by Hollywood via USMCA to extend copyright term, nor China's of US pharma currently attempting similar. The NYT had an ad slogan, "The Truth you deserve". Which seemed to me perhaps poor advertising, as I frequently thought "No, we deserve better." Or... perhaps they were right. [1] https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-the-new-york-times.php https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-t... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22regulatory%20capture%22&sort=newest https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22regulatory%20capture...

ggggtez 7y ago
> fails to emphasize it's economically profitable I don't know how you could read it and walk away with that impression. It's very clear that they are saying social cohesion allows the organization of millions of people into productive societies as we know them. There are things to disagree with, but that sticking point doesn't make sense.
- mncharity 7y ago
  Sorry I was unclear: "it's economically profitable to lie to people" ... for the agent promulgating the lie. Which incentivizes the creation of widely-believed fictions, despite societal cost. Climate change is dishonest scientists; sugar is healthy wonder-food; opioids are low-risk; vaccination causes autism.

j7ake 7y ago

What do you mean by truth? We act on heuristics that are sufficiently good approximations to be useful. For example, we act as if the world is flat when we run or drive. We act as if the world is spherical when we fly across continents. However, both are only approximations to the reality (Earth is an ellipsoid). We use them because they are useful. It is reasonable to have multiple views of the world that changes with scale.

antmanler 7y ago

What if a fiction is someone try to tell the truth that will happen in the future, but in a acceptable and literature way?

HNLurker2 7y ago

Bypass? Ahh is by Yuval that guy who wrote homo deus so he probably repeats his ideas and this is promo for his book

devoply 7y ago
I can't say I like everything he says, but he's got a lot of good stuff to say.
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  For a while I used to bypass NYtimes by having them redirect from Facebook (they fixed it):https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/why-fiction-trumps-truth.html https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019...

_pmf_ 7y ago

Can the NYT apply their insights to how they deal with the "fine people hoax"?

12thwonder 7y ago

Isn’t this article a fiction itself? in a sense that it is not proven to be true or impossible to prove? It’s interesting because it looks like people are buying this story thus proving his point, fiction (this article) beats truth.

disappearance 7y ago

It seems to me profession/ occupation might play a role here too. Doctors & software developers I know favour truth based discussions. Friends/ associates in sales are far more likely to enthusiastically regurgitate something emotive (untrue/ misrepresented) from a tabloid paper (as prime conversation). So, shower thought: is the value we place on truth in social situations affected by the frequency truth's value is demonstrated to us in our daily professional lives?

dalbasal 7y ago

I'm a big fan of Harari's Sapiens, like a lot of people. But... I think the.. narrative gets into inevitably sticky territory. It is, after all, a narrative explaining the role of narratives... Pure truths and falsehoods are generally small. e=mc^2 or F=ma. Cesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. Facts, baiscally. Einstein heralded the atomic age, when man began to master matter & energy. Newton's mechanics became both a model for scientific exploration and a symbol for the coming rational age. The Roman Republic ended that day, and the Empire began. These no neither truths or falsehoods. They're narratives, or fictions as YNH sometimes calls them. The truth of a narrative is much squishier than the truth of a fact. A case in point is right here: he gives 3 reasons for why fictions succeed politically. These reasons are narratives themselves. For example: "How many Israelis Italians or Indians can stomach the unblemished truth about their nations" I don't think there is an "unblemished truth" about a nation. History is ultimately the biggest harriest example of narrative making. Without narratives, there is no meaningful "Italian people," just people and places and stuff. To make it meaningful, you need a narrative. A story that tels you what "The Italian People" are. I think a better understanding of how political narratives work is important (and interesting). I'm just skeptical that a true-v-not_true classification is meaningful or useful. Political pychology should be a field in itsewlf. It's very hard to project much meaning from facts. Facts don't tell you what Cesar means for our Republic.

lostjohnny 7y ago
> I don't think there is an "unblemished truth" about a nation As an Italian, born in Italy and still living in Italy in 2019, I think there is and it is true that if you talk about our recent past very few (20-25% maybe) can stomach it. Italian people IS "just people and places and stuff", but you forgot food. > Facts don't tell you what Cesar means for our Republic. It means he ended it. He was a military leader who seized control of and put an end to the Roman Republic. This is not narrative, this is a fact. Narrative is letting Brutus become a traitor, while he conspired to kill a tyrant, narrative is Shakespeare that named him "the noblest Roman of them all".
- dalbasal 7y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with the main points. There are things about our countries that we can't stomach. My point is that to be meaningful politically, that stuff is likely to be narrative.. which is not the same as fact. "Cesar ended the republic" is a narrative sort of a statement not a factual one. Cesar crossed the Rubicon, named himself distator for life, marched on Rome... those are facts. By narrative, I don't mean that it's false. The Republic itself is/was a story, and the story changed and evolved constantly. Just like democracy, capitalism or whanot it's not a legible concept. It's more like "X is the better man for the job" than "X weighs more than Y." Whether the Republic ended or not only has meaning within the context of the story. There's no external test that declares a republic dead, outside of the narrative. I recently read a Chinese history timeline. The jist was "China was an empire for thousands of years, until mao." Whether or not something is or isn't "The Chinese empire" is a narrative claim, not a factual one. The first step towards a truthier world is recognizing the difference between facts and stories. Truth means something totally different depending on what you're dealing with. Apart from climate change, I can't think of major political questions where factual truths and falsehoods play a roles anything like role naratives play.

gandalfian 7y ago

"Real life is like bad television" (paraphrased woody Allen)

dmontero 7y ago

Our mind likes plausible stories. It helps to make sense of the past and to have the -incorrect- perception that one can predict the future. That's why fictions are so powerful. We easily get caught by them. If people beliefs were purely rational, they would be able to weight the facts against the fictions. However, our subjective confidence in a story (fact or fiction) depends on many factors: - We tend to believe stories that appear to be based on cause-effect and that express continuity. - We tend to believe in things that people that we trust and love believe in.