6 ms·
If you can’t tell a story about it, it isn’t real
- AlbertCory 3y agoThe article is bemoaning this tendency,not celebrating it.
- Spivak 3y agoThe missing piece is that there is a, to me, well meaning effort to not publish these out-of-narrative stories because their real life effect is pouring gasoline on other hate. With covid there was so much avoiding talking about China being the origin because there was a hoard of people frothing at the mouth waiting to justify their hate. It's the whole reason respectability politics exists. You see it with everything, some people are murderers, rapists, thieves, jaywalkers, but when people of certain demographics are caught the story spreads like wildfire after a drought -- "see see we told you they were horrible people!!"
- scotty79 3y agoI think that's a good sentiment. Reluctance towards creating new narratives because narratives are alwayd lies and can be dangerous. But you can't have entertainment (which includes news) without narratives so you stick to safe-ish ones.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoPosted by the same submitter a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36387187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36387187
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rapatel0 3y agoI don't know what this means or what value this framework provides. Literally any random sequence of events is a story. That doesn't have any bearing on it being true or false. Example: - I was hungry - so I ate a sandwich - Then I took a shit. - Then cows started flying. Completely fabricated and not real. (I had oats today) Also, "Gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 on Earth." Not a story a but definitely true and explainable to the average person.
- barelyauser 3y ago>>Also, "Gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 on Earth." Not a story a but definitely true and explainable to the average person. This can only be explained with the aid of a story. Gravity being this thing that results in this falling to the ground and so on.
- jstarfish 3y agoIt's not about truth, it's just a reflection on packaging and presentation of ideas. You're taking it too literally. The argument boils down to anything you can't explain doesn't exist, which is shortsighted and pseudointellectual. It's an Agile project manager's understanding of Story. A top comment mentions physics, and I would suggest the concept of mental illness and "hurt feelings" also qualifies. We don't understand a fucking thing about psychology (the field is rife with fraud and psychiatrists are no more effective than shamans), though there are clearly problems that exist within people's brains. Schizophrenia is very real to the afflicted, yet they can't coherently explain their experience. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Whether it's True or Real or not isn't really the point.
- rapatel0 3y agoI get the basic premise: the idea is that storytelling is how to explain concepts and ideas. It's just one of those glaringly obvious observations. > The argument boils down to anything you can't explain doesn't exist, which is shortsighted and pseudointellectual. Yeah, 100% agree. I prefer the old Feynman's quote (paraphrasing): If you can't explain it to a 5 year old, then you probably don't understand it. (that doesn't mean it doesn't exist)
- AlbertCory 3y ago> Literally any random sequence of events is a story. That doesn't have any bearing on it being true or false. The author didn't say any set of events is true or false. He's remarking on how people want a story to explain things, which is what Hollywood thrives on. And how things that don't easily lend themselves to a story tend to be ignored.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
- Freedom2 3y agoThis seems like a shallow article. I have an intelligent, switched-on colleague who is also a great friend. If that colleague, who has a hard time expressing themselves due to factors outside of their control, cannot tell a story about something that they have uniquely experienced, it isn't real? Ridiculous.
- CyanBird 3y agoThis article refers to public messaging, not personal one to one discussions by specialized individuals with specialized training
- pjs_ 3y agoTwo things that are real but aggressively story-resistant are quantum mechanics and the self-stability of bicycles. Tens of thousands of pages have been written in an effort to provide an intuitive, natural-language story about what is happening in a double-slit experiment, but every one of them is broken. Of course the math is simple and superposition/entanglement are real, but none of the stories are good. Similarly, when you push a bicycle with no rider, it recovers from a partial fall surprisingly well - but there's not a good story about how. Stories are told regarding various real effects such as gyroscopic forces, the rake of the fork, caster effects, and so on - but it is also possible (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1201959 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1201959) to build a bicycle which inverts each of those effects and is still categorically self-stable - at that point it is hard to tell a good story.
- omginternets 3y agoI'm not sure what you're suggesting -- that seeking narrative explanations is wrong, or that the models we have of bicycle/quantum-mechanics are wrong?
- AlbertCory 3y agoI don't think he's "suggesting" anything. He's noting that two phenomena are resistant to story-telling.
- omginternets 3y agoWhich would seem to argue in favor of what I understood to be the article's point, which is why I'm curious to know what he's pointing at.
- nomel 3y agoThis idea that there's an agenda for every observation seems to have started in the past 10 years. I find it very strange. It really shackles the mind, and conversation.
- crummy 3y agoI like the idea that incident reviews should include a gripping retelling of events to ensure we remember the lessons from it.
- ajuc 3y agoWhat human brain is good at: chains of causation with clearly defined relationships. I.e. stories. What human brain is bad at: fuzzy mess of thousands or billions of interrelated events that all influence each other slightly. This is the reason we have to use machine learning to find a program that seems to solve OCR or natural language or image recognition instead of just writing these programs ourselves. We cannot comprehend the complexity, we can only recognize if it works roughly how we want it to.
- interroboink 3y agoI sort-of agree, but maybe not on the term "human brain". I think there is definitely something (or several things) in that brain that is extremely good at fuzzy messes of correlations. It's just not the conscious mind that maybe some people think of as their "self". After all, those difficult image-recognition and language tasks are carried out by the human brain, even if we can't explain how they work in the "explainer" part of our mind. Tangentially related, I find the split-brain experiments fascinating[1], in how they demonstrate clearly that there can be multiple "consciousnesses" at work, and the one that does the talking is only one of them, and is not necessarily running the show. [1] example, with interviews with a patient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv4K5aStdU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv4K5aStdU
- ajuc 3y agoYeah, should have said the conscious, abstract thinking part. We also have coprocessors for intuitive physics, face detection, inverse kinematics for muscle movement, etc. And even some virtualization so we can simulate other people minds.
- kristopolous 3y agoNot everyone is story oriented or needs them. There's this presumption whenever I read this argument that every person is story dominant. Sure, many people need captivating stories and poorly comprehend statistics and orders of magnitude. You probably need stories to reach a majority of people. The cinema is more popular than abstract math classrooms. But some people are different. They don't watch TV, movies, Netflix or read fiction. They live fully productive lives without being constantly enraptured in melodramas. These people will read a story and think "bullshit bullshit blah blah". Don't forget about those people as well. They're often the ones put in control of the money.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI wonder how much this difference can be observed between academics with a Math major and those with a History major.
- kristopolous 3y agoIt probably maps less cleanly than you imagine. People are complicated.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoIf I hadn't gone into biology I have long thought I would have gone into either math or history. Don't presume there's a huge dichotomy between the people in either field.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI think this is about different kind of stories. Not "captivating stories" and "melodramas". More like... whatever it is one would produce if asked to ELI5 something. Like the two cases 'pjs_ mentions[0] - double-slit experiment and the self-stability of bicycles. In both cases, we know it's a real thing, and it's easy to demonstrate it. In the double-slit case, we even have a relatively simple mathematical model describing the phenomenon. But try to explain why either happens to a random person, without ending up at "the math says so" or "look, we've tested it many times; it just works like this", and... well, that's the story many (most?) of us seek to understand something. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422981
- theonemind 3y agoAs someone into Buddhism, I'm more in the "if you can tell a story about it, it isn't real" camp. The 180 degree polarity just struck me as amusing.
- sheepscreek 3y agoChatGPT is an excellent story teller. Give it the dry facts, and ask it to weave them into a story for a 10 year old.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI also use it to make inflammatory clickbait titles and captions so my posts engage better Surprisingly helpful mental offload, its better than I would have been
- scotty79 3y agoI started hating narratives. They create their own realities that often don't align with the available data or often don't even intersect with available data. Whole swaths of made up "realities" that are not even wrong.
- scotty79 3y ago> In The 1918 Flu Faded in Our Collective Memory: We Might ‘Forget’ the Coronavirus, Too. I feel like we (including myself) have already forgotten.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWorkers at Area 51 would definitely disagree with the premise.