Andrew addressed this in the comments: Regarding storytelling: Thomas Basbøll and I have argued that stories are important not just for communicating science

Andrew 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...