If you can’t tell a story about it, it isn’t real
surfingcomplexity.blog
surfingcomplexity.blog
Tens of thousands of pages have been written in an effort to provide an intuitive, natural-language story about what is happening in a double-slit experiment, but every one of them is broken. Of course the math is simple and superposition/entanglement are real, but none of the stories are good.
Similarly, when you push a bicycle with no rider, it recovers from a partial fall surprisingly well - but there's not a good story about how. Stories are told regarding various real effects such as gyroscopic forces, the rake of the fork, caster effects, and so on - but it is also possible (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1201959) to build a bicycle which inverts each of those effects and is still categorically self-stable - at that point it is hard to tell a good story.
Not to excuse it; I agree with your conclusion. Hopefully such an understanding can help people to be patient with the behavior despite the annoyance.
There's this presumption whenever I read this argument that every person is story dominant.
Sure, many people need captivating stories and poorly comprehend statistics and orders of magnitude. You probably need stories to reach a majority of people. The cinema is more popular than abstract math classrooms.
But some people are different. They don't watch TV, movies, Netflix or read fiction. They live fully productive lives without being constantly enraptured in melodramas.
These people will read a story and think "bullshit bullshit blah blah". Don't forget about those people as well. They're often the ones put in control of the money.
Like the two cases 'pjs_ mentions[0] - double-slit experiment and the self-stability of bicycles. In both cases, we know it's a real thing, and it's easy to demonstrate it. In the double-slit case, we even have a relatively simple mathematical model describing the phenomenon. But try to explain why either happens to a random person, without ending up at "the math says so" or "look, we've tested it many times; it just works like this", and... well, that's the story many (most?) of us seek to understand something.
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What human brain is bad at: fuzzy mess of thousands or billions of interrelated events that all influence each other slightly.
This is the reason we have to use machine learning to find a program that seems to solve OCR or natural language or image recognition instead of just writing these programs ourselves. We cannot comprehend the complexity, we can only recognize if it works roughly how we want it to.
I think there is definitely something (or several things) in that brain that is extremely good at fuzzy messes of correlations. It's just not the conscious mind that maybe some people think of as their "self".
After all, those difficult image-recognition and language tasks are carried out by the human brain, even if we can't explain how they work in the "explainer" part of our mind.
Tangentially related, I find the split-brain experiments fascinating[1], in how they demonstrate clearly that there can be multiple "consciousnesses" at work, and the one that does the talking is only one of them, and is not necessarily running the show.
[1] example, with interviews with a patient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv4K5aStdU
We also have coprocessors for intuitive physics, face detection, inverse kinematics for muscle movement, etc. And even some virtualization so we can simulate other people minds.
You see it with everything, some people are murderers, rapists, thieves, jaywalkers, but when people of certain demographics are caught the story spreads like wildfire after a drought -- "see see we told you they were horrible people!!"
Literally any random sequence of events is a story. That doesn't have any bearing on it being true or false.
Example:
- I was hungry
- so I ate a sandwich
- Then I took a shit.
- Then cows started flying.
Completely fabricated and not real. (I had oats today)
Also, "Gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 on Earth." Not a story a but definitely true and explainable to the average person.
This can only be explained with the aid of a story. Gravity being this thing that results in this falling to the ground and so on.
The argument boils down to anything you can't explain doesn't exist, which is shortsighted and pseudointellectual. It's an Agile project manager's understanding of Story. A top comment mentions physics, and I would suggest the concept of mental illness and "hurt feelings" also qualifies.
We don't understand a fucking thing about psychology (the field is rife with fraud and psychiatrists are no more effective than shamans), though there are clearly problems that exist within people's brains. Schizophrenia is very real to the afflicted, yet they can't coherently explain their experience. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Whether it's True or Real or not isn't really the point.
> The argument boils down to anything you can't explain doesn't exist, which is shortsighted and pseudointellectual.
Yeah, 100% agree. I prefer the old Feynman's quote (paraphrasing): If you can't explain it to a 5 year old, then you probably don't understand it.
(that doesn't mean it doesn't exist)
The author didn't say any set of events is true or false. He's remarking on how people want a story to explain things, which is what Hollywood thrives on.
And how things that don't easily lend themselves to a story tend to be ignored.
Okay, so explain it, what does it mean?
Don't use a story though.
Pretend I didn't do physics in high school.
(not a story)
No. There needs to be a narrative framework. Or, at the very least, an apparent chain of causality. That's how we make sense of the world.
I'd say that there's a huge story hidden in this simple statement.
Of attraction, universality, measurements, relativity, degrees of truth.
Also it's not technically true because gravitational acceleration varies with height and geology.
I feel like we (including myself) have already forgotten.
Surprisingly helpful mental offload, its better than I would have been