Best Story Wins

It sounds like every mathematician and physicist does this:

"Jacques Hadamard, the famous French mathematician, in the late stages of his life, decided to poll his 99 buddies, who made up together the 100 great mathematicians and physicists on the earth, and he asked them, "How do you do your thing?" ... Only a few, out of the hundred, claimed to use mathematical symbology at all. Quite a surprise. All of them said they did it mostly in imagery or figurative terms. An amazing 30% or so, including Einstein, were down here in the mudpies [doing]. Einstein's deposition said, "I have sensations of a kinesthetic or muscular type." Einstein could feel the abstract spaces he was dealing with, in the muscles of his arms and his fingers...

The sad part of [the doing -> images -> symbols] diagram is that every child in the United States is taught math and physics through this [symbolic] channel. The channel that almost no adult creative mathematician or physicist uses to do it... They use this channel to communicate, but not to do their thing." – Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols

http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987

It's absolutely true that the best story wins, but it's not because we are "bored" or "impatient".

It is because we need stories. That is how we operate and it always has been the case. Religions are mostly a collection of compelling stories. Politics. Business. Love. Science.

Being human is consuming and producing stories.

Comparing "The origin of species" with "Sapiens" probably means the author only read the later. Darwin's writing is not just good storytelling because of the quality of the prose. It's convincing because it conveys how he thought about the implications of evolution more deeply than anyone before him. Nobody had spent more time on finches and barnacles than Darwin! Reading "The origin of species" requires a patient and thoughtful audience.

Best story still wins, but the definition of what this is has changed over time, just like how engineering best practices are putting less and less trust in the developer to implement his own solution -- a huge growth in audience almost always means a lower level of effort you can expect from the average audience member.

- Francis Darwin

https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007...

Mackay AL, Ebison M. A Harvest of a Quiet Eye. A Selection of Scientific Quotations. London: The Institute of Physics, 1977: 43.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion

The author's expressing the fact that it is easier to compel by pathos, rather than logos. Yes indeed.

The people who shake their head at the likes of Sapiens and Harari do so because anytime the masses confuse mediocrity for brilliance, it splits culture into what the masses consume and what educated people consume. The widening of this gap does not bode well for either party long term.

"Let us look at two examples, beginning with Hilbert. When we think of Hilbert, we think of a few of his great theorems, like his basis theorem. But Hilbert's name is more often remembered for his work in number theory, his Zahlbericht, his book Foundations of Geometry and for his text on integral equations. The term "Hilbertspace" was introduced by Stone and von Neumann in recognition of Hilbert's textbook on integral equations, in which the word "spectrum" was first defined at least twenty years before the discovery of quantum mechanics. Hilbert's textbook on integral equations is in large part expository, leaning on the work of Hellinger and several other mathematicians whose names are now forgotten.

Similarly, Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry, the book that made Hilbert's name a household word among mathematicians, contains little original work, and reaps the harvest of the work of several geometers, such as Kohn, Schur (not the Schur you have heard of), Wiener (another Wiener), Pasch, Pieri and several other Italians.

Again, Hilbert's Zahlbericht, a fundamental contribution that revolutionized the field of number theory, was originally a survey that Hilbert was commissioned to write for publication in the Bulletin ofthe German Mathematical Society.

William Feller is another example. Feller is remembered as the author of the most successful treatise on probability ever written. Few probabilists of our day are able to cite more than a couple of Feller's research papers; most mathematicians are not even aware that Feller had a previous life in convex geometry.

Allow me to digress with a personal reminiscence. I sometimes publish in a branch of philosophy called phenomenology. After publishing my first paper in this subject, I felt deeply hurt when, at a meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, I was rudely told in no uncertain terms that everything I wrote in my paper was well known. This scenario occurred more than once, and I was eventually forced to reconsider my publishing standards in phenomenology.

It so happens that the fundamental treatises of phenomenology are written in thick, heavy philosophical German. Tradition demands that no examples ever be given of what one is talking about. One day I decided, not without serious misgivings, to publish a paper that was essentially an updating of some paragraphs from a book by Edmund Husserl, with a few examples added. While I was waiting for the worst at the next meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, a prominent phenomenologist rushed towards me with a smile on his face. He was full of praise for my paper, and he strongly encouraged me to further develop the novel and original ideas presented in it."

https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l...

As "history is written by the victors" the headline may have the conclusion reversed, and there's more than a little survivorship bias here, when all of the references are bestsellers...

In reality, emotions rule us and that's why a good story wins. It speaks to the inner cortex, the one in the driver's seat.

We are a post truth society. (It's actually a post internet society which now has the truth available but people don't use it, which is strangely more annoying)