Why Fiction Beats Truth
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The problem with that is that today, a lot more things have delayed effects, or effects that only materialize at scale. For instance, taking whatever bullshit news sources publish at face value works as long as it only matters in bar conversations; unfortunately, these things also shape public pressure on governance - in particular in democracies, where people end up voting on it.
WRT. article's point 2, politics example: I really wish people would learn better. Believing a leader - any leader - uncritically is generally unsafe for your own survival.
That to some degree, the truth doesn’t matter in practice is a very sobering and very frustrating realization.
So, someone spouts a well researched conspiracy and others engage in a conversation and the person gets to recite their well prepared talking points. That feels good to the person, that's positive reinforcement. That's a story they can take to their online echo chamber for even more positive feedback.
They hold on to the conspiracy as something to talk about, and as something they can feel superior about.
So should we just avoid debate? That doesn't seem right.
IME, this is how most not-directly-impactful knowledge is used by people. I've been in countless such situations, and it's painful for people with stronger affinity to truth. Unfortunately, under the guise of "good manners", society teaches you to shut up.
We shouldn't avoid debate. We just need to ensure that people debating are there to discover the truth, and not just pick up morsels to share at dinner parties.
If I hear something that seems right and I start repeating it, I generally try to go check if I am talking rubbish or not. If I find out that I am, I stop repeating the thing, or I include the truth next to the story, if the story is entertaining enough in and of itself. I tried to explain why I do this, while having a recent discussion with a visitor about the Navy vs Lighthouse story - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur... and was told that what I was doing was anti-social and that I wasn't helping anyone by being interested in the truth of things that people have said. I tried to explain that I was doing it to satisfy my own curiosity for the main part, and this completely floored them. They could not understand the motivation of being personally interested in the reality of a story, for them the only value was if they liked the story.
So in the end, this stuff gets largely uncorrected.
I have long found the fact that 'trying to be smart' is an insult in our society, to be a source of both bewilderment and depression. I remember being utterly confused when even the teachers would use it at school. I'd ask them why we were at school, if we were not trying to be smart? Which would then get me into trouble, presumably for trying to be smart.
After a while I got bitter about this and my response turned into; 'Yes I am. Tell me, how is trying to be thick working out for you?', which still got me into trouble, but with more entertaining results.
Note however that in both cases they (and generally all humans, to some extent) care about their relative status; in most circumstances (especially when in a group), correcting someone will be seen as an attempt to diminish their social status.
It's unfortunate that this is the case, and a lot of people who honestly value being correct have to struggle with getting the handle on this whole status mechanism. I'm not even blaming most people that much here; I do my best to always accept corrections well, and I still at times feel bad or get angry when someone points out that I'm talking nonsense.
In the moment, I can be very combatative and do not tend to fold easy, but if someone demonstrates to me conclusively that I am talking utter bollocks, I appreciate that I have learned something and I try to remember to thank them.
Am from the UK and I have heard that story for years from a variety of people who do seem to completely believe it, as it is usually brought up to give an example that shows Americans being stupid, and the motive of 'aren't we better' would not be there if they thought that the story was false. I didn't know the truth of it but thought it was a funny story, so had gone to look it up a while back.
Is also usually brought up by the same people who will crow about Americans not understanding the concept of irony or sarcarsm, again to demonstrate the supposed superiority of UK culture. I have taken to pointing out that saying that tells me nothing about Americans, but does demonstrate that the person I am talking to presumably never reads any books.
He never said that at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War
"As Secretary of State Powell summarized in his February 5, 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, "the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction."[34] On February 11, 2003, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq has moved to the top of my list. As we previously briefed this Committee, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security, a threat that will certainly increase in the event of future military action against Iraq. Baghdad has the capability and, we presume, the will to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons against US domestic targets in the event of a US invasion."[35][36] On April 10, 2003, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer reiterated that, "But make no mistake—as I said earlier—we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found."[37] Despite the Bush Administration's consistent assertion that Iraqi weapons programs justified an invasion, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz later cast doubt on the Administration's conviction behind this rationale by saying in a May 2003 interview: "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue—weapons of mass destruction—because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."[38]"
"After the invasion, despite an exhaustive search led by the Iraq Survey Group involving a more than 1,400 member team, no evidence of Iraqi weapons programs was found. On the contrary, the investigation concluded that Iraq had destroyed all major stockpiles of weapons of mass destructions and ceased production in 1991 when sanctions were imposed.[39][40][41] The failure to find evidence of Iraqi weapons programs following the invasion led to considerable controversy in the United States and worldwide, including claims by critics of the war that the Bush and Blair Administrations deliberately manipulated and misused intelligence to push for an invasion. "
I wonder what kind of mischief these fellows are up to these days, or have they all retired?
Hard disagree there. In genuine life-or-death scenarios, the two most common reactions are blind panic and denial. If you're unlucky enough to find yourself in a smoke-filled aeroplane cabin on an airport runway, your fellow travellers will probably do one of two things - frantically stampede towards the exits, or calmly gather their belongings from the overhead bins. Increasingly, you'll see people moving towards the flames to film them on their phone.
Even after people have repeatedly experienced a disaster like a flood, hurricane or wildfire, they often deny the possibility of a recurrence.
The idea that there is just a set of facts on one side of the fence and on the other is all the lies -- and the dumb hoi polloi just tends to always go for the "bad side"... This is just simplistic, unimaginative, unrealistic thinking.
Even a cluster of the most brutally "true" of facts can be so readily misconstrued and misapplied and result and motivate terrible consequences. Anyone who claims to have the truth might be holding on to a few axioms resembling facts -- but they will always be applying their own visceral interpretation of what should be done with those facts.
So when the hoi polloi favors fiction over facts, it's less for any of the reasons mentioned here which incidentally are all rooted in the (frankly, dumb) idea that the hoi polloi is dumb. They're not. They look past the trivial truth of small, static 'facts' and are looking at the bigger picture which requires metaphor and right-hemispheric perception, etc.
Nothing beside "axioms" is really true.
narrative per se is not bad, but lies are.
Of course we can resort to Gödel and his incompleteness theorem to reject axioms validity, but try that argument at the bar, with the first stranger you meet.
The bigger picture requires profound knowledge of the current laws to imagine how they could break under a new, different paradigm.
Think about Asimov's work, he was writing fiction, but was writing something that could happen, not something just because it could bond people together.
TL;DR: saying "we need to switch to renewable sources of energy or we'll all die" is fiction, we don't know for sure if we'll all die, but it's good to switch to renewables.
"If you do this or that God will punish you" is a lie that nobody should tell and nobody should believe in, even when it sounds good (thou shalt not kill), you shouldn't do it because it's bad, not because God told you.
Pedantry: "The hoi polloi* is redundant — in Greek, hoi is a definite article equivalent to "the," so "the hoi polloi" is "the the many." [0] But yes, that's how the term has passed into common parlance, just as "ATM machine" is similarly redundant.
I feel like the author of the piece might even advocate going along with-- or at least not wasting your energies fighting-- many cases of socially useful fiction. But that hardly works when you happen to be the person or of the creed one targets.
Myths, for some reason, often have loopholes. Achilles is invincible, except for his heel. Samaritans are bad, except for some good ones. So sometimes you can position yourself as matching the loophole and get a pass. Sometimes this is humiliating, though, or funnels groups of people into acting out narrow stereotypes.
That lesson took me embarrassingly long to learn, but it's a good one.
I haven't given much thought to pattern-matching a loophole as a strategy, but your observation is key: people are willing to make exceptions, you just have to figure out how to get them to make an exception for you.
How to do that? Virtue signal. Watch other people for ideas. You won't have to watch long, people love to virtue signal and do it all the time. Validate their VS to score some quick points, swallow the small amount of bile that it brings to the back of your throat, and then pick something politically adjacent but not so directly similar as to compete/threaten. Those constraints are pretty loose, they should leave you with a wide field of possibilities to choose from. Pick the least unpalatable and you're set.
Leave home.
edit - that was maybe slightly personal as responses go, but I think in a situation where you find yourself to be a pawn in someone else's psycosis, then you should extracate yourself from it and try and help at arms length unless you have a will of iron.
On the other hand, due to various forms of prejudice, certain characteristics (race, gender, accent, and what not) increase your chance of victimization. This while sad, becomes fuel to people who dedicate their lives to fight for injustices.
Most people believe that they, and they alone are the guardians of universal truth. Ries and Trout really hit the nail on the head when they discuss the folly of trying to change a mind.
“You want to change something in a computer? Just type over or delete the existing material. You want to change something in a mind? Forget it.” ―Ries and Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
“The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.” ―Ries and Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
But... I think the.. narrative gets into inevitably sticky territory. It is, after all, a narrative explaining the role of narratives...
Pure truths and falsehoods are generally small. e=mc^2 or F=ma. Cesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. Facts, baiscally.
Einstein heralded the atomic age, when man began to master matter & energy. Newton's mechanics became both a model for scientific exploration and a symbol for the coming rational age. The Roman Republic ended that day, and the Empire began.
These no neither truths or falsehoods. They're narratives, or fictions as YNH sometimes calls them.
The truth of a narrative is much squishier than the truth of a fact. A case in point is right here: he gives 3 reasons for why fictions succeed politically. These reasons are narratives themselves. For example: "How many Israelis Italians or Indians can stomach the unblemished truth about their nations" I don't think there is an "unblemished truth" about a nation. History is ultimately the biggest harriest example of narrative making. Without narratives, there is no meaningful "Italian people," just people and places and stuff. To make it meaningful, you need a narrative. A story that tels you what "The Italian People" are.
I think a better understanding of how political narratives work is important (and interesting). I'm just skeptical that a true-v-not_true classification is meaningful or useful.
Political pychology should be a field in itsewlf.
It's very hard to project much meaning from facts. Facts don't tell you what Cesar means for our Republic.
As an Italian, born in Italy and still living in Italy in 2019, I think there is and it is true that if you talk about our recent past very few (20-25% maybe) can stomach it.
Italian people IS "just people and places and stuff", but you forgot food.
> Facts don't tell you what Cesar means for our Republic.
It means he ended it.
He was a military leader who seized control of and put an end to the Roman Republic.
This is not narrative, this is a fact.
Narrative is letting Brutus become a traitor, while he conspired to kill a tyrant, narrative is Shakespeare that named him "the noblest Roman of them all".
My point is that to be meaningful politically, that stuff is likely to be narrative.. which is not the same as fact. "Cesar ended the republic" is a narrative sort of a statement not a factual one. Cesar crossed the Rubicon, named himself distator for life, marched on Rome... those are facts.
By narrative, I don't mean that it's false.
The Republic itself is/was a story, and the story changed and evolved constantly. Just like democracy, capitalism or whanot it's not a legible concept. It's more like "X is the better man for the job" than "X weighs more than Y." Whether the Republic ended or not only has meaning within the context of the story. There's no external test that declares a republic dead, outside of the narrative.
I recently read a Chinese history timeline. The jist was "China was an empire for thousands of years, until mao." Whether or not something is or isn't "The Chinese empire" is a narrative claim, not a factual one.
The first step towards a truthier world is recognizing the difference between facts and stories. Truth means something totally different depending on what you're dealing with. Apart from climate change, I can't think of major political questions where factual truths and falsehoods play a roles anything like role naratives play.
..Difference between purity and precision, I suppose.
Your truth is not the only truth. There are an infinite true perspectives on a issue. Another perspective is not false just because it opposes yours and yours is true.
To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're wrong.
This is brilliant. I tend to fall back on category theory and multivalent logic for the same job.
But it's about the most HN comment I've ever read!
Beautiful.
Out of interest, I'd like it if you could explain why you think it is the most HN comment you've ever read. I have some idea, but am not entirely sure.
Did you come up with this way of looking at it, or is this from some sort of a dedicated "field of study"? This seems to me an extremely good description of what's going on in society lately, from fake news to disagreement on a wide variety of issues, and perfectly explains why opposing sides both think they are right - because often they are both right, they've just chosen different perspectives (subsets of dimensions) for their lower-dimensional conceptual understanding of the larger high-dimensional problem. Throw in the low precision, low dimension capabilities of language and communication, a lack of intellectual humility, and you've got the perfect recipe for a complete gong show even if everyone is trying to be honest.
(Note, do not confuse this example with the infamous "9 / 6" meme, with two people standing over a number painted on the ground and claiming they're right. One of them is wrong, because there's no information loss giving degrees of freedom here; the digit was drawn with a particular orientation in mind, and one party is ignoring it.)
The intended implication of my example is that if political (or other) opinions are necessarily projections of the full issue, you probably need to hold more than one at the same time. Consider technical drawings, e.g. CAD drawings of parts. In order to completely describe a physical part, you almost always have to have multiple projections on a single picture. I believe the same applies to understanding the real world - which is why I like to listen to "the other side", and generally hate the concept of taking a side.
I have the very same feeling, this concept seems near perfectly correct, which is why I'm trying to find some formal discussion of it, something with more meat on the bone.
I think that arguing that a political stance is "correct" or "wrong" isn't the best frame of reasoning here, because it implies that there might be some sort of formal reasoning process you could use to reach a common conclusion. Whereas humans do now work like that and politics does not work like that.
There's no absolute morality, and there's no universal set of moral axioms you can get everyone to agree on. What actually happens is arguing from specific->general in one direction and general->specific in the other, depending how close emotionally people are to the actual situation or how much they're using it to express their identity.
Examples of "specific->general" are any situation where a person gets a law named after them. Examples of "general->specific" is any time people start talking about the constitution.
Each of those is a lossy transformation. Specific->general loses information about the particular situation. General->specific is what we use most of the time - the basis of legal systems - and has the less obvious failure mode that it can produce bad results that have no obvious immediate blame. But neither is more "correct" in a formal sense than the other.
I disagree with that. In so far a political stance refers primarily to objective reality (e.g. "should we introduce a carbon tax, and if yes, in what form?"), you should be able to reach common conclusion in a group of honest people. That people often don't doesn't mean it can't be done - it's a result of political discussions involving plenty of dishonest or disinformed people.
> There's no absolute morality, and there's no universal set of moral axioms you can get everyone to agree on.
Yes and no. There isn't an explicit, absolute morality, but that doesn't mean morality is a free variable. It doesn't exist in a vacuum, in exist in human brains - which are all the same hardware and mostly-same firmware. If you look at all the societies and cultures, there's plenty of values that are essentially universal. That's not an accident.
> arguing from specific->general in one direction and general->specific
I agree that people generally argue like this, and it's a bit orthogonal (if closer to the focus of daily experience) to what I wrote about. But humans are capable of doing these steps multiple times - e.g. simultaneously compare specifics of a situation against a specialization of a generic rule, and generalize the situation to compare against a set of general values. In so far as we're talking about objective reality, correct generalizations and specializations will converge on a self-consistent picture. And whatever subjectivity is caused by a difference in values has its limits - it's not a license to throw reason away and say that the whole space of all possible opinions is equally valid.
> Each of those is a lossy transformation. (...) But neither is more "correct" in a formal sense than the other.
I am arguing that - that two different lossy transformations can be equally "correct". My projection example is a lossy transformation after all. But this doesn't mean any two objects from the codomain of a lossy transformation are equally correct! Just like a hexagon is not a valid projection of a cylinder, or a pony isn't a valid JPEG compression of a human portrait, some generalizations are wrong, and some specializations are wrong.
Really? Even assuming that everyone agrees on the model of policy responses - introducing tax X has result Y - people will still have strong opinions about the distributive effects of those and even the relative importance of the environmental effects. People don't usually come out and say "I'm not willing to spend a dollar to prevent Miami and Bangladesh being submerged", because that sounds bad, but they come very close to it.
> some generalizations are wrong, and some specializations are wrong.
On this we agree - some models are just delusional "motivated reasoning"; Sandy Hook "truthers" etc.
This is a purely objective question, and can be discussed between honest parties until a common conclusion is reached.
> people will still have strong opinions about the distributive effects of those and even the relative importance of the environmental effects.
This is a mix of potentially subjective values and objective statements about how those values are affected by proposed solution; I argue that even if a common conclusion cannot be reached, we can usually come pretty close to it.
> People don't usually come out and say "I'm not willing to spend a dollar to prevent Miami and Bangladesh being submerged", because that sounds bad, but they come very close to it.
People don't usually think in these categories; between lack of information, misinformation, opportunity costs (no one has time to be up to date on everything, or even to think through everything) and psychological discounting ("I worry about securing food for my children tomorrow, not about some uncertain future 50 years from now"), you end up with people who believe in things that are wrong even when taking their own subjective values into account.
I feel the problem we have isn't with subjectiveness - most political issues are objective enough in principle. We have a computational problem - we can't get enough people to think and talk through issues deeply enough. Instead, people fall back to computationally efficient heuristics - ideologies and soundbites. Pattern matching everything into beliefs like "capitalism is bad", or "government regulation is bad" is a faulty generalization, but it saves on thinking.
It may be that at the scale of our current problems, this computational barrier is in practice insurmountable. If so, we're fucked, and I'm not sure what to do. But it's probably why there's so much pushback against democracy from the "intellectual elites" - because they realize that this problem only scales with the number of people you need to involve to make a decision.
(N.b. trust is another computation-saving hack humanity has used since forever, and what enables us to have societies as large as today. The trust that other people don't try to hurt me, that they have my interests in mind. It's damn effective, and that's why I'm particularly hateful towards individual, company and government activities that erode this trust.)
I prefer Roisin Murphy's 'You can't hide from the truth, because the truth is all there really is.' What you are describing seems more like relative accuracy of broadly stated opinions.
edit - Roisin Murphy, 'The Truth' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMUngA6EQ5Y
Of course, and some thing are good for ones (immigration does not hurt middle class but bestowing a cheap labor upon them) and bad for others (immigration is damping the prices of labor of the working class).
But there are some universal falsehoods tho, like when the good intentions are leading to results quite different from the expected.
I don't think this is a helpful way of saying this. There is, in fact, only one truth in terms of what the facts are. All of us have different models in our head of what the world is like; these models are incomplete and often wrong. But the weakness of our models of the world won't stop reality from coming and biting us when we make bad decisions.
It is true, that sometimes when people disagree on a political idea, that what's happened is that one person believes A (which is true) and hasn't considered B; and another person believes B (which is true) and hasn't considered A. In that case, the best thing is for both people to learn both A and B (see a "perspective [which] is not false just because it opposes yours"), and revise their plan accordingly.
But in the case of polarized opinions, what normally happens is that at least one side believes X, which isn't true, (or is a gross exaggeration). In that case, while it may help to understand where the other person is coming from, it remains the fact that the right thing is for that person to stop believing that X is true.
So take immigration. Some people claim immigrants "take jobs away" from the native population; others claim that they 1) take jobs that the natives don't want, and 2) create as many jobs as they take by being customers as well as workers. All of these individually can be true; but at the end of the day, there will be a "number of jobs" and "number of unemployed" which is a fact, and will or will not be higher. That's the number that actually counts, not these hand-wavy predictions.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on (unsourced, but why not attribute it to Churchill anyhow? he deserves it)
Because it isn't true. Was the irony intentional?
Apparently [0] it's from Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull.
[0] https://richardlangworth.com/galloping-lie , also https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/09...
Did Aristotle really do this? I've never looked it up, but it does match his reliance on reasoned arguments to arrive at objective truths. :-P
But if instead there was an engineered solution to speed up the feedback loop between theory and reality, or fiction and truth, then there would be more of a cost towards saying outlandish things.
"Truth wins in the long run" and "in the long run, we're all dead"... so you have to figure out how to make it more of a medium- or short-run. There's also that other quote, I forget, about "my irrationality exceeds your bankroll", where people can lose their shirt betting on truth if the market stays irrational long enough. That's when you need clearer truth singles sooner, so truth can win more reliably.
Doctors & software developers I know favour truth based discussions.
Friends/ associates in sales are far more likely to enthusiastically regurgitate something emotive (untrue/ misrepresented) from a tabloid paper (as prime conversation).
So, shower thought: is the value we place on truth in social situations affected by the frequency truth's value is demonstrated to us in our daily professional lives?
That's why fictions are so powerful. We easily get caught by them.
If people beliefs were purely rational, they would be able to weight the facts against the fictions. However, our subjective confidence in a story (fact or fiction) depends on many factors: - We tend to believe stories that appear to be based on cause-effect and that express continuity. - We tend to believe in things that people that we trust and love believe in.
So here we have a op ed, exploring why people believe fictions, which somehow fails to emphasize that it's economically profitable to lie to people. Even with its focus on leadership, that's odd.
As for cost, the NYT rarely manages to mention "regulatory capture"[2], consistently described TPP as a free trade treaty, but not Canadian resentment of being arm-twisted by Hollywood via USMCA to extend copyright term, nor China's of US pharma currently attempting similar.
The NYT had an ad slogan, "The Truth you deserve". Which seemed to me perhaps poor advertising, as I frequently thought "No, we deserve better." Or... perhaps they were right.
[1] https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-t... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22regulatory%20capture...
I don't know how you could read it and walk away with that impression. It's very clear that they are saying social cohesion allows the organization of millions of people into productive societies as we know them. There are things to disagree with, but that sticking point doesn't make sense.
It’s interesting because it looks like people are buying this story thus proving his point, fiction (this article) beats truth.
For example, we act as if the world is flat when we run or drive. We act as if the world is spherical when we fly across continents.
However, both are only approximations to the reality (Earth is an ellipsoid). We use them because they are useful. It is reasonable to have multiple views of the world that changes with scale.
1) you know where lies come from: people you know. Therefore you can trust people who tell the same lies.
2) you can trust people who believe your lies because believing lies is more expensive than going with the truth, because expensive signals are harder to fake.
3) the truth hurts. No one wants to follow someone who hurts them. We prefer to follow people who lie to us so we will feel better.
Some time around 2000 I started seeing most news (especially long form) through this lens and I discount/research it a bit more the more it follows a standard narrative. Usually, it's a sign that facts have been cherry picked or out of context to fit, thought that's not always the case. It's rare that there's a story (or scientific research) that doesn't have some warts and things that don't fit, and to me those aspects are part of what give it a ring of authenticity... although they are also falsifiable.
Many current memes (and science press releases) are terribly simplistic and made for those who truly don't care about truth, but are looking for that hit of satisfaction of discovering they were always right.
- a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.
- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
The former refers to things like the sometimes clever pictures you see on social media, the latter refers to things like what you read in the newspaper (often referred to as facts), but both kinds have widely varying levels of truth.