When scale confounds our perceptions, stories can clarify them
nautil.us
nautil.us
One of the first examples in the article makes this point, actually, but maybe not on purpose.
> The late physicist Albert Bartlett was concerned that people didn’t fully comprehend the consequences of exponential population growth and the inevitability (and speed) of resource depletion. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race,” he said, “is our inability to understand the exponential function”—that is, change that builds on previous changes.
You know who else noticed that and wove a compelling story about it? Malthus[1].
The point is that stories and analogies on their are not sufficient—but people treat them as if they are. After all, what convinces is, well, how convincing the story is, and that's a quality unto itself. It's orthogonal or, at least, loosely correlated with what we should care about.
But they're oh-so-satisfying! A neat explanation, just counter-intuitive enough to seem like a revelation but reasonable enough to accept, perhaps a bit glib, makes you feel like you really understood something. There's a whole genre of books like this now—think Freakanomics and Malcolm Gladwell. Even if the arguments in a book like that are reasonable (not always the case!), the sheer quality of storytelling dominates and makes them more convincing than they have any right to be. Which in turn makes people more confident in their own understanding than they should be.
Then this is compounded by the second-order effect people look for: social proof. Perhaps better known as "popularity". Not a great system either!
It's funny that the author mentions social media as a way to spread stories because that's where I see a lot of extremely pat stories get shared around—regardless of their merits. Even ignoring my own judgement, enough of them are self-contradictory that they're obviously unreliable. And yet they all get viral and spread around quickly and effectively.
This is not to say that stories are useless, by any means. They're great for building up intuition which is crucial for understanding. But you can't rely solely on stories.
In essence, I guess, I agree with the article that stories are powerful. They really are. But I disagree, vehemently, about what that power entails. In the end, stories are about convincing, not understanding. And using social media to spread stories? Again: powerful. And again more about manipulation than edification. Fundamentally, your stories are no different from propaganda hammering away at a Big Lie. Your lie just happens to be true. (Or so you believe, presumably.)
I'm a bit conflicted with the whole mode of thought presented in this article which also seems to pervade modern politics. (Or perhaps all politics?) It's the idea that the obstacle to overcome is not finding the right conclusions and properly motivating them, but rather—given conclusions that are assumed right—the problem is to convince everybody else. And I agree with a lot of the specific details this mode of thought espouses, but solely as effective tactics for convincing people. It feels incredibly manipulative even if I agree with the ideas people are pushing. (As it happens, I see this mostly with progressive issues. People are very open about relying on social manipulation to push their views since their views are so obviously correct. But that's just the circles I move in; I'm sure it's just as true for people trying to push religion.)
The problem, of course, is that these tactics work regardless of the underlying issue. But people who use them don't see it this way: they see success as justification of their own narratives. Both parts of that, I think, are unhealthy. Pushing our views at any cost means that they are left unchecked, and we can't be right about everything! And then interpreting success—a mix of convincingness and popularity—as a strong signal exacerbates these problems.
A "story" is the way to convey the dynamics of a complex system while conveniently discarding the constituents of that system. If we don't keep the components, how can we prove the story is true? One problem is no one really cares or thinks they know enough to challenge the story. They accept it at face value.
I feel this is a deeper limitation of human thinking. It's very difficult to see something at different levels simultaneously. We can understand behaviour on a high level (e.g. income inequality), and we can understand behaviour on a lower level (e.g. not having enough money to eat), but we can't intuitively understand how low level behaviours effect and affect high level behaviours.
It's not like we're not trying to understand, it's more that we don't even have a basis for understanding. We know how elections work, but it's so easy to intuitively think "my one vote doesn't really count". We're observing high level dynamics while simultaneously contributing to them.
It's weird. Like thinking about one's own consciousness.