[HN Gopher] If you can't tell a story about it, it isn't real
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If you can't tell a story about it, it isn't real
Author : azhenley
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-06-21 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (surfingcomplexity.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (surfingcomplexity.blog)
| Spivak wrote:
| The 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!!"
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Posted by the same submitter a couple of days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36387187
| [deleted]
| Freedom2 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| This article refers to public messaging, not personal one to
| one discussions by specialized individuals with specialized
| training
| pjs_ wrote:
| Two 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) 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I don't think he's "suggesting" anything. He's noting that
| two phenomena are resistant to story-telling.
| nomel wrote:
| This 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I notice my mind tends to think this way as well.
| Thinking about _why_ I will think that usually yields
| recollections of people making "innocent" observations
| while they clearly had ulterior motives; such memories
| are in-person events, not this sort of interaction
| online. That said, it's easy to (read: difficult not to)
| apply similar heuristics to online interactions.
|
| Not to excuse it; I agree with your conclusion. Hopefully
| such an understanding can help people to be patient with
| the behavior despite the annoyance.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| The parent didn't make any suggestion that the models are
| wrong. "the math is simple" means that not only does the
| model work, it's also simple to calculate. That leaves the
| interpretation that seeking good narratives will sometimes be
| fruitless.
| johnpublic wrote:
| there's a quantum interpretation that is fairly easy to
| explain, it's called Pilot Wave theory. It posits that quantum
| effects are caused by a something akin to a bouncing ball
| creating a standing wave. This leads to phenomena associated
| with both wave and particle. Interestingly the theory fits
| available experimental data, as far as I am aware.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave_theory
| theonemind wrote:
| As 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| I wonder how much this difference can be observed between
| academics with a Math major and those with a History major.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It probably maps less cleanly than you imagine. People are
| complicated.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I 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
| rapatel0 wrote:
| I 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.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > Also, "Gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 on Earth." Not a story a but
| definitely true and explainable to the average person.
|
| Okay, so explain it, what does it mean?
|
| Don't use a story though.
|
| Pretend I didn't do physics in high school.
| barelyauser wrote:
| >>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 wrote:
| It'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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The article is bemoaning this tendency,not celebrating it.
| ajuc wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| I 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
| ajuc wrote:
| Yeah, 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.
| crummy wrote:
| I like the idea that incident reviews should include a gripping
| retelling of events to ensure we remember the lessons from it.
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