
Writing and the narrative fallacy (2018) - hhs
https://jacklimpert.com/2018/04/jeff-bezos-talks-about-writing-and-the-narrative-fallacy/
======
stared
I like "Be suspicious of simple stories" TED Talk by Tyler Cowen
([https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_simpl...](https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_simple_stories)):

> Then asked to describe their lives, what is interesting is how few people
> said "mess". It's probably the best answer, I don't mean that in a bad way.
> "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of
> drawing upon multiple strengths. But what people wanted to say was, "My life
> is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said,
> "My life is a battle." Again, that is a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is
> a novel." 5% said, "My life is a play."

In a similar vein, I recommend "The danger of a single story" by Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie
([https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_dange...](https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story)).
For example, if we hear that "Sam is poor" we create a whole image based on
one trait (which does even need to be a defining trait!) and lose the
complexity of a human being and their life. (Side note: if we only know that
"Max supports Trump", and the whole person becomes _only_ a Trump supporter;
it is very different from knowing Max in detail, when it is only one of
his/her traits.)

Yes, for most people stories are the easiest way to learn something. However,
but their own nature they are intentionally oversimplified. So they are also
the easiest way to fool others, intentionally or not.

~~~
logicprog
What you say here is certainly true. Many stories are oversimplified, and
stories are a good way to fool ourselves.

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.

~~~
jadbox
> just read _War and Peace_ or _In Search of Lost Time_, for example

These are excellent well-contrasting examples, well put.

> A fractally complex journey, but a journey nonetheless.

Do you write frequently? This is one of my favorite comments on HN in terms of
style and etiquette.

~~~
logicprog
Thank you for your kind words, you really made my day! I do in fact write
quite often: usually around ten thousand words a week, although most of it
isn't exactly amazing.

Also yes, I thought ISoLT and W&P contrasted nicely.

------
hairofadog
The mirror of this premise is also interesting; think, for example, of all the
extremely complicated narratives woven to explain COVID-19 (5G, Bill Gates,
etc.) On the other hand, maybe those narratives could also be considered a
kind of simplification, which is to say they all boil down to "it's the fault
of {fill in the blank evil rich person or organization}" as opposed to what's
more likely to be the truth, which is that nature and the physical world are
full of complexity and randomness.

~~~
new2628
Honest question: does anyone really think that 5G is related to Covid, or is
this a story planted in the media to also make legitimate criticism of 5G look
like fringe lunacy?

~~~
ketamine__
It's a very active conspiracy. I have seen anti-5G stickers around town.

[https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/11/five-telecom-towers-torched-
po...](https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/11/five-telecom-towers-torched-
possible-5g-conspiracy-arson-protest)

~~~
new2628
Again, it could be that being anti-5G is a reasonable stance, even if it is
silly to claim that it is related to Covid. The linked article does exactly
what I was suspecting: it conflates legitimate criticism with crazy criticism,
trying to discredit both. Suppose someone started a bonfire in front of your
house, and as you protest against it, they would spread the message that you
claim that bonfires cause covid.

------
friendlybus
Taleb repeatedly strikes me as over rated. The difference between narrative
and time is as old as the gods and can easily be argued both ways.

People who adhere to time and conplexity don't get a free pass on the
fundamentals. The project will spring leaks if you get the story wrong.
Information will slip out, people will get the wrong idea and go in opposite
directions.

You can blame those errors on randomness, but really you just let the basic
elements fail by skipping good reasoning.

Taleb's point about unconnected thoughts making an oversimplified story really
misses the complexity in story and the massive filtering efforts that go into
making good stories. He's pandering at best with these ideas.

------
smitty1e
So a successful company acts closer to a top-notch jazz band that

\- improvises its way through a continuous set

\- never stops

\- swaps out players intermittently

\- improvises off of each other based upon events

rather than being an orchestra operating off of some refined composition
handed down from Apollo on mount Olympus.

~~~
kqr
The fact that we are not as much in control as we think can be both liberating
and frustrating.

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."

~~~
smitty1e
As an editorial preference, I favor Destiny over "luck".

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which
permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work
of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and
almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny
minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a
society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck".”
[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/697618-throughout-
history-p...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/697618-throughout-history-
poverty-is-the-normal-condition-of-man-advances)

------
febed
I'm reminded of what U.G. Krishnamurti said - "cause and effect is the
shibboleth of confused minds"

~~~
neonate
Narrative doesn't necessarily imply cause and effect though. I think there may
be two different fallacies here.

~~~
exolymph
It kinda does though. Narrative is a sequence of linked events, and an
implicit assertion that _these_ are the events that are salient.

~~~
neonate
I agree that it's about selecting which events are salient and which to leave
out. And yes, putting them into sequence. But does that always imply
causality? I'm not sure. Maybe it does. If you say "Anne divorced John and
then he died", the mind fills in an implied cause. If you say "John got cancer
and then he died", it fills in a different cause. The key point to me seems to
be selection bias, though: what you chose to include vs. leave out in the two
stories.

------
taejavu
The narrative fallacy is a great counterpoint to the popular invocation of
Occam’s Razor. The next time I hear someone choose to believe something
because it’s the simpler story, I’ll be bringing this up.

~~~
logicprog
I always thought the proper application of Occam's Razor wasn't "the simpler
the proposed explanation is, the truer it is likely to be," since this has
shown to be false in literally every scientific and philosophical
investigation that we've ever done that has arrived at anything close to
verifiable truth, but was more "the fewer assumptions an explanation has, or
the fewer things in our already functional understanding of the world an
explanation requires us to throw out, the truer it is likely to be."

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."

~~~
taejavu
I’m not talking about the proper application, I mean only the popular usage.

~~~
logicprog
I understood that - I was just speculating on what the correct usage of it is,
as opposed to the popular usage. I'm not actually sure what the proper
application is and what its relationship to the popular usage was. Thought I
could add to the discussion with that. (:

~~~
taejavu
Ah, it appears to me that you indeed have a good understanding of those things
and how they relate.

------
trash_cat
It's not a fallacy per sé, because people have limited capacity to process
information. This is nessecary to make sense of the world, and narratives as a
whole. The fallacy would be to over simplify where there is no need for it. It
is more of a question to what extent one must be detailed enough to convey a
narrative meaningfully with its nuances.

------
seanwilson
Is there a fallacy name for the concept of "yes, that's a plausible story but
it's just a story and you have no evidence" ?

For example, it's insanely easy to come up with lots of nice sounding stories
about how something might have evolved in humans but you still need evidence
to know which stories are true.

~~~
pmichaud
That is called a "just so story": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-
so_story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story)

~~~
seanwilson
Thanks! Also
[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ad_hoc](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ad_hoc)

Aside: I wish fallacies had more intuitive names that tied in to common
knowledge. It would help their use spread if they were easier to explain, to
remember and didn't have names that could be seen as pretentious e.g. the
Latin ones.

"Straw man" is particularly bad for example - it sounds ridiculous and
pretentious explaining where the name comes from to someone who doesn't know
what logical fallacies are. "Misrepresentation" or something like that might
be better.

I'd love it if we got to the stage where journalists were pointing out logical
fallacies by name in interviews for example.

------
Fricken
"Narrative is the worst model for understanding the world, except for all the
others." Is the response I would have had for Jeff in response to his
question, but I wouldn't have thought of it until after the interview.

------
CptFribble
The funny thing about this anecdote is that Taleb's premise is itself a
narrative fallacy - specifically, he uses story to imply that all (or most)
first approximations are oversimplified and therefore wrong, or at least
incomplete.

Taleb's description of the human susceptibility to story is itself told
through story. How much of what we know about this idea is itself an
oversimplification? How deep does the rabbit hole go?

This is the major challenge of the 21st century, in my opinion - the old
information authorities (newspapers, big 3 TV news) haven't just been broken,
but completely shattered. We've reverted to our tribal roots - trusting the
word of respected members of our tribe - but now that our tribes can extend
across the globe and encompass millions, it's like we're all standing in one
giant town square shouting at each other about how to deal with things like
COVID-19.

I agree that susceptibility to story is a real thing; ad agencies and
scriptwriters have been trading on this phenomenon for a century. The problem
is that we aren't even trying to train ourselves out of it. Without a
practiced ability to recognize when we're being led through a nice-sounding
story, anyone who can weave a good tale will capture huge numbers of people
through the internet for their own purposes. For examples, see flat-earthers,
anti-vaxxers, and the various political disinformation campaigns.

I don't know what the solution is. But I worry a lot about the ability of
powerful interests to capture more power when the general populace is in
chaos. Early 21st century USA is in a state of intense intellectual chaos, and
the increasing pace of capital accumulation at the top of our society is an
ill omen.

------
bryanrasmussen
I guess I'd handle it by asking what proof there was that humans are
biologically inclined to commit this fallacy.

on edit: I mean biologically inclined implies some genomic proof. Not just
psychological studies.

~~~
Ozzie_osman
Why does this need to be genomic? Why is psychological proof not enough?

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.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
because of the words "biologically inclined", psychological proof has a pretty
big inductive gap to leap to get to establishing a biological inclination.

~~~
jessriedel
Aspects of human beings that are widely present in people all over the world,
and are therefore likely resistant to effective removal using known practical
tools, is generally considered reasonable (but not incontrovertible) evidence
for biological inclination. It is not necessary to have linked this to a
particular gene, and doesn't cease to be "biological" if it involves gene-
environment interactions. It was correct to say that most plants were
biologically inclined to use the sun's energy before photosynthesis and DNA
were understood.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
sure, a big enough psychological study without any obvious flaws might
sufficiently bridge the inductive gap for me. But I'm unaware of any, and I
doubt to see one because it would be real difficult to get right. That said I
haven't really looked for one, for the reasons given.

~~~
jessriedel
There's lots of biological knowledge we have that existed before formal
studies. What I said about photosynthesis applies to claims by non-scientists
observing plants informally.

------
john4532452
The narrative fallacy is that human form simpler narratives because the
reality is very complicated to comprehend. May be it is true, but how to
prove. It is possible to prove narrative is simple, but to measure the
incomprehensible reality.

------
scandox
I repeatedly see this trope about Bezos' hyper intelligence. I mean he appears
to be intelligent but how did his reputation for being the smartest of
billionaires arise? What proof is there of it? He generally comes across as a
well read, educated person who also happens to be very rich.

Pointing to Amazon and his success is no answer. People don't go around
calling Carlos Slim hyperintelligent. Or Michael Bloomberg. Even Buffett gets
the "wise" tag. But Bezos is always referenced as if he could readily out
smart his smartest employees in their field if only he could be bothered...

~~~
amscanne
That’s the narrative: Bezos is a genius, Slim is a cut-throat business person,
Buffet is a stock sage, etc. It’s easier than the reality that they are all
random, complex combinations of smart, lucky, persistent, charismatic, etc.

------
jgrant27
Bezos has plenty of his own narrative fallacies going.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVfJVj5z8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVfJVj5z8s)

