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I believe that we process facts in a narrative. If you look at a bare fact, your mind automatically creates a narrative. Murder rate 1% 22 Angstrom Purple Bu
by csours 2y ago
I believe that we process facts in a narrative. If you look at a bare fact, your mind automatically creates a narrative.
Murder rate 1%
22 Angstrom
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That narrative takes place in a framing story.
'Science', among other things, is a very detailed framing story that modern society uses to evaluate facts.
An individual's framing story includes all of their history and biases and motivated reasoning and incentives and all the rest of the fallacies.
So yes, bad science is fiction, but even good science is narrative. If this feels wrong, go re-read a paper. Look at a figure or a sentence in the abstract. Your mind constructs a narrative.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoAndrew addressed this in the comments: Regarding storytelling: Thomas Basbøll and I have argued that stories are important not just for communicating science to others but also in doing good science. My perspective here is: 1. Fictional stories are an informal sort of predictive model checking, in which the process of working out a story is a way of understanding the implications of a scenario. 2. Nonfiction stories are a sort of prior predictive check, where the unexpected twist that makes the story so satisfying represents a revelation of some aspect of reality that confounds our expectations, that is, does not fit with our implicit or explicit model of the world. That second point is a bit murky but this is a comment on a blog :) Here is the much more detailed paper he co-wrote with Basbøll: http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/storytelling.pdf http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/storytel...