https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/06/15/if-you-cant-tell-a-story-about-it-it-isnt-real/ Skip to content [c690634d34] Surfing Complexity Lorin Hochstein's ramblings about software, complex systems, and incidents. If you can't tell a story about it, it isn't real Lorin Hochstein incidents, systems June 15, 2023 2 Minutes We use stories to make sense of the world. What that means is that when events occur that don't fit neatly into a narrative, we can't make sense of them. As a consequence, these sorts of events are less salient, which means they're less real. In The Invisible Victims of American Anti-Semitism, Yair Rosenberg wrote in the Atlantic about the kinds of attacks that target Jews which don't get much attention in the larger media. His claim is that this happens when these attacks don't fit into existing narratives about anti-Semitism (emphasis mine): What you'll also notice is that all of the very real instances of anti-Semitism discussed above don't fall into either of these baskets. Well-off neighborhoods passing bespoke ordinances to keep out Jews is neither white supremacy nor anti-Israel advocacy gone awry. Nor can Jews being shot and beaten up in the streets of their Brooklyn or Los Angeles neighborhoods by largely nonwhite assailants be blamed on the usual partisan bogeymen. That's why you might not have heard about these anti-Semitic acts. It's not that politicians or journalists haven't addressed them; in some cases, they have. It's that these anti-Jewish incidents don't fit into the usual stories we tell about anti-Semitism, so they don't register, and are quickly forgotten if they are acknowledged at all. In The 1918 Flu Faded in Our Collective Memory: We Might 'Forget' the Coronavirus, Too, Scott Hershberger speculated in Scientific American along similar lines about why historians paid little attention the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though it killed more people than World War I (emphasis mine): For the countries engaged in World War I, the global conflict provided a clear narrative arc, replete with heroes and villains, victories and defeats. From this standpoint, an invisible enemy such as the 1918 flu made little narrative sense. It had no clear origin, killed otherwise healthy people in multiple waves and slinked away without being understood. Scientists at the time did not even know that a virus, not a bacterium, caused the flu. "The doctors had shame," Beiner says. "It was a huge failure of modern medicine." Without a narrative schema to anchor it, the pandemic all but vanished from public discourse soon after it ended. I'm a big believer in the role of interactions, partial information, uncertainty, workarounds, tradeoffs, and goal conflicts as contributors to systems failures. I think the way to convince other people to treat these entities as first-class is to weave them into the stories we tell about how incidents happen. If we want people to see these things as real, we have to integrate them into narrative descriptions of incidents. Because, If we can't tell a story about something, it's as if it didn't happen. Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * Like this: Like Loading... [f2641f12e8] Published by Lorin Hochstein View all posts by Lorin Hochstein Published June 15, 2023 Post navigation Previous Post When there's no plan for this scenario, you've got to improvise Next Post Resilience requires helping each other out Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here... [ ] Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: * * * Gravatar Email (required) (Address never made public) [ ] Name (required) [ ] Website [ ] WordPress.com Logo You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change ) Facebook photo You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change ) Cancel Connecting to %s [ ] Notify me of new comments via email. [ ] Notify me of new posts via email. [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] Search for: [ ] [Search] Elsewhere on the Internet * Website: lorinhochstein.org * Mastodon: @norootcause@hachyderm.io * Twitter: @norootcause Recent Posts * Resilience requires helping each other out * If you can't tell a story about it, it isn't real * When there's no plan for this scenario, you've got to improvise * Treating uncertainty as a first-class concern * My SREcon 23 talk is up Archives * June 2023 * April 2023 * March 2023 * February 2023 * January 2023 * December 2022 * November 2022 * October 2022 * September 2022 * August 2022 * July 2022 * June 2022 * May 2022 * April 2022 * January 2022 * December 2021 * November 2021 * October 2021 * September 2021 * August 2021 * July 2021 * June 2021 * May 2021 * April 2021 * February 2021 * January 2021 * December 2020 * September 2020 * August 2020 * July 2020 * June 2020 * May 2020 * April 2020 * March 2020 * February 2020 * January 2020 * November 2019 * October 2019 * September 2019 * August 2019 * July 2019 * June 2019 * May 2019 * March 2019 * January 2019 * December 2018 * October 2017 * June 2017 * May 2017 * February 2017 * January 2017 * July 2016 * June 2016 * October 2015 * August 2015 * June 2015 * April 2015 * February 2015 * November 2014 * October 2014 * September 2014 * August 2014 * July 2014 * June 2014 * May 2014 * April 2014 * March 2014 * November 2013 * September 2013 * August 2013 * June 2013 * May 2013 * March 2013 * February 2013 * December 2012 * November 2012 * October 2012 * August 2012 * July 2012 * April 2012 * March 2012 * February 2012 * January 2012 * December 2011 Categories * books * cognitive-systems-engineering * education * engineering * incidents * journalism * netflix * openstack * research * resilience * software * systems * Uncategorized * work Meta * Register * Log in * Entries feed * Comments feed * WordPress.com Blog at WordPress.com. * Follow Following + [surfer] Surfing Complexity Join 138 other followers [ ] Sign me up + Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now. * + [surfer] Surfing Complexity + Customize + Follow Following + Sign up + Log in + Copy shortlink + Report this content + View post in Reader + Manage subscriptions + Collapse this bar %d bloggers like this: [b]