The danger of stories

"They asked various political leaders and generals to evaluate the probability that the USA would withdraw its ambassador from the Soviet Union. They then asked the same people to evaluate the probability that both (a) The USSR would invade Poland AND (b) as a consequence, the USA would withdraw its ambassador from the USSR."

This seems to be worded funny, such that it is easy to misconstrue that as the conditional "If the USSR invades Poland, THEN the USA would withdraw its ambassador". That is, the consequence is not viewed as separate from the condition if the subject considers the consequence as the only possibility of the condition, then the condition portion occurring alone and the condition and the consequence occurring have exactly the same likelyhood in people's minds. After all, the consequence has no reason to occur if the condition isn't met. The USSR invades Poland and it snows in Florida are two events that, if taken together, have a smaller chance of being true than either of them occurring independently.

I prefer to think of this differently:

Stories have power. Stories have the ability to convince and teach. Stories can propogate your way of thinking. Stories can take on the chracteristics of the teller. Stories are more memorable than any powerpoint deck.

Stories will make or break your startup.

Learn to tell the right ones and to tell them well.

Am I the only one who was thinking "Wow, this is stupidly impossible" while reading the story? He was trying to say that our minds make us think its possible, but that point was totally lost on me.

"Of course, that's illogical. My story is only one of many possible scenarios that could lead to Apple buying Microsoft, so it must have a smaller likelihood."

That's dumb. It's entirely possible for there to be a large number of possibilities, yet one to have a higher probability of occurring than all of the rest combined.

Stories capture people's attention like nothing else and keep them reading.

Maybe that's why I ended up wasting so much time on this stupid post.