Writing and the narrative fallacy (2018)

However, I'd like to push back gently on the idea that we should never use narratives.

It is true that _traditional story structures_ don't necessarily reflect the real structure of historical experience/occurence, but they _can_ fit, too. It really depends on the occurence. And more importantly, stories can be infinitely granular and complex (just read _War and Peace_ or _In Search of Lost Time_, for example), complex and granular enough to capture actual historical experience without distortion.

As for people not describing their lives as a mess, that's because a mess has no structure - whereas a journey or a battle has a structure; life does not necessarily have structure, sure, but those people who choose to describe their lives in structured ways do so because they are _giving_ it structure. If someone's life is structured (by them) as a pursuit of some goal or state, where everything that happens either helps that, hinders that, or acts as a side-quest, then they may well describe it as a journey. A fractally complex journey, but a journey nonetheless.

That means that your listener will imperfectly understand reality. That is inevitable.

that's (again) the fundamental attribution error, another type of bias where we attribute to people outcomes that are more attributable to situations.

besides, most prevalent among the covid narratives is the fear and panic of the unknown--the complexity and randomness (of nature) as you put it--so quite the opposite of what you narrate.

the simple narrative is that covid is caused by a respiratory virus, and while there's lots to learn about viruses overall, we know plenty enough about them not to be in a panic over it, and to develop reasonable policies entirely from the knowledge we have. but that's too simple for our overwhelming fear of the unknown, untamped by reason, and many of us seek other, often more complicated narratives to assuage our anxiety.

The truth being complexity and randomness is just another part of the narrative.

As well as the simplistic counter-narratives deployed to combat those narratives:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295618

This isn't a battle of facts vs facts as most people believe, but rather a battle of memes vs memes, where both sides are typically not telling the whole truth, but usually for different reasons. It's fascinating to observe the battle (and forum commentary on the battle) from an abstract perspective, if you can manage it, but not many people seem to even know such a perspective even exists, and it certainly isn't something we're taught in school or at home, at least "in The West".

When I asked my boss (who is co-founder of the company, so has all the historic context) how the company culture got to be in the good place it is, his immediate, and most confident, answer was "luck."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti

This accounts for our science and philosophy being correct but also indicates that, for instance, if an explanation posits an entirely new non-physical dimension or an entirely new system of physics, without good evidence for it over the others (and this is important: the two explanations we are comparing with Occam's Razor need to be explaining the same data - have the same explanatory power - otherwise there should be an obvious way to falsify/confirm one or the other) then its less likely to be true.

Or, in short: "this explanation requires me to throw out everything else I think I know, whereas this other explanation explains the same data but requires me to discard less, so it is probably a better explanation."

There is plenty of evidence that shows that humans are susceptible to these types of fallacies, whether it's at explaining the world around us or even explaining our own behavior. My favorite study on self-justification is the split-brain experiment. But essentially if we are susceptible to after-the-fact narrative fallacies of our own behavior, we are definitely susceptible to it for the rest of the world, about which we know much less and which is far more complicated.

That’s not a perfect analogy because there are some genes that we know have strong psychological impact, but that doesn’t mean all human behaviour is neatly connected to specific isolatable gene sequences.

One of my personal pet peeves around this fallacy is how often it arises in sports. Before Jordan won 6 championships, he was a "great player who didn't elevate his teammates". After all the winning, he became "the greatest player to ever play". People just want a simple story, because they're busy - it's hard to have a nuanced view of everything you see or hear about.

So we should look for empirical evidence.

At the same time brains are complicated, psychology is complicated, genetics is complicated.

We know a lot about all of the above but we don't really understand any of them.

The history of all three sciences is full of narrative fallacies.

Given what we don't know, absolute proof, especially in genetics, isn't currently possible. So we have to settle for the best working explanation based on what we know. I think there is plenty of peer reviewed support for the idea that we are biologically inclined to look for neat explanations so that we can file challenging concepts away as resolved and focus our bandwidth on other things.

It's very common to label clearly intelligent business-people who have 'mathiness background' and analytical thinking ability as geniuses.