
Why Fiction Beats Truth - tlb
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/why-fiction-trumps-truth.html
======
TeMPOraL
Fourth: for almost anything in life, knowing the truth doesn't matter in
practice - instead, people believe things that make for good social objects,
i.e. catalysts of discussions with other people. In cases were being wrong
leads to direct and near-immediate consequences, people tend to learn the
truth quickly.

The problem with that is that today, a lot more things have delayed effects,
or effects that only materialize at scale. For instance, taking whatever
bullshit news sources publish at face value works as long as it only matters
in bar conversations; unfortunately, these things also shape public pressure
on governance - in particular in democracies, where people end up voting on
it.

WRT. article's point 2, politics example: I really wish people would learn
better. Believing a leader - any leader - uncritically is generally unsafe for
your own survival.

~~~
Buttons840
Well said.

So, someone spouts a well researched conspiracy and others engage in a
conversation and the person gets to recite their well prepared talking points.
That feels good to the person, that's positive reinforcement. That's a story
they can take to their online echo chamber for even more positive feedback.

They hold on to the conspiracy as something to talk about, and as something
they can feel superior about.

So should we just avoid debate? That doesn't seem right.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The scenario I had in mind was not debate, just information exchange. Imagine
a person meeting friends in a bar, or at a dinner party. They're likely to
exchange stories they read about in the news. "So this politician said
$outrageous-thing!" (taken outside of context, but who cares), says the
person. "Oh yeah, all X are bad, have you heard of $event-that-never-actually-
happened?", replies the person B. The conversation goes on. Ultimately, little
to no truth was exchanged, but people bonded together. Fiction served its
social function.

IME, this is how most not-directly-impactful knowledge is used by people. I've
been in countless such situations, and it's painful for people with stronger
affinity to truth. Unfortunately, under the guise of "good manners", society
teaches you to shut up.

We shouldn't avoid debate. We just need to ensure that people debating are
there to discover the truth, and not just pick up morsels to share at dinner
parties.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>Imagine a person meeting friends in a bar, or at a dinner party. They're
likely to exchange stories they read about in the news. "So this politician
said $outrageous-thing!" (taken outside of context, but who cares), says the
person. "Oh yeah, all X are bad, have you heard of $event-that-never-actually-
happened?", replies the person B. The conversation goes on. Ultimately, little
to no truth was exchanged, but people bonded together. Fiction served its
social function.

If I hear something that seems right and I start repeating it, I generally try
to go check if I am talking rubbish or not. If I find out that I am, I stop
repeating the thing, or I include the truth next to the story, if the story is
entertaining enough in and of itself. I tried to explain why I do this, while
having a recent discussion with a visitor about the Navy vs Lighthouse story -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_urban_legend)
and was told that what I was doing was anti-social and that I wasn't helping
anyone by being interested in the truth of things that people have said. I
tried to explain that I was doing it to satisfy my own curiosity for the main
part, and this completely floored them. They could not understand the
motivation of being personally interested in the reality of a story, for them
the only value was if they liked the story.

~~~
honzzz
Interesting - I've heard this, but always as a joke. It never occurred to me
that anyone could actually believe it. I am not saying that you did that but I
can imagine how someone explaining to the laughing audience that this event
did not really happen would be kind of anti-social.

~~~
TeMPOraL
There is no good way to explain it to them. You do it at the moment the story
is told, you're seen as a killjoy and a smartass. You wait until after the
meeting to correct the person who told it, and (unless you're really good
friends with them) you'll likely offend them ("why would you correct me on
something so trivial?!"). You could try and wait a couple of days, and then
stage a sudden discovery ("oh, I'll be damned, I just read that $story is not
actually true!"), but the objection of would-be offended person is still
technically valid - why are you expending so much effort on something so
trivial?

So in the end, this stuff gets largely uncorrected.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>You do it at the moment the story is told, you're seen as a killjoy and a
smartass.

I have long found the fact that 'trying to be smart' is an insult in our
society, to be a source of both bewilderment and depression. I remember being
utterly confused when even the teachers would use it at school. I'd ask them
why we were at school, if we were not trying to be smart? Which would then get
me into trouble, presumably for trying to be smart.

After a while I got bitter about this and my response turned into; 'Yes I am.
Tell me, how is trying to be thick working out for you?', which still got me
into trouble, but with more entertaining results.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, it is. Which circles back to my original comment - regular people don't
care about being right except in things directly and immediately impacting
their lives.

Note however that in both cases they (and generally all humans, to some
extent) care about their relative status; in most circumstances (especially
when in a group), correcting someone will be seen as an attempt to diminish
their social status.

It's unfortunate that this is the case, and a lot of people who honestly value
being correct have to struggle with getting the handle on this whole status
mechanism. I'm not even blaming most people that much here; I do my best to
always accept corrections well, and I still at times feel bad or get angry
when someone points out that I'm talking nonsense.

~~~
inflatableDodo
Some things are both harsh and good, and disillusionment is one of them.

In the moment, I can be very combatative and do not tend to fold easy, but if
someone demonstrates to me conclusively that I am talking utter bollocks, I
appreciate that I have learned something and I try to remember to thank them.

------
wellpast
This truth v. fiction binary is common thinking but far too simplistic.

The idea that there is just a set of facts on one side of the fence and on the
other is all the lies -- and the dumb hoi polloi just tends to always go for
the "bad side"... This is just simplistic, unimaginative, unrealistic
thinking.

Even a cluster of the most brutally "true" of facts can be so readily
misconstrued and misapplied and result and motivate terrible consequences.
Anyone who claims to have the truth _might_ be holding on to a few axioms
resembling facts -- but they will always be applying their own visceral
interpretation of what should be done with those facts.

So when the hoi polloi favors fiction over facts, it's less for any of the
reasons mentioned here which incidentally are all rooted in the (frankly,
dumb) idea that the hoi polloi is dumb. They're not. They look past the
trivial truth of small, static 'facts' and are looking at the bigger picture
which requires metaphor and right-hemispheric perception, etc.

~~~
lostjohnny
It is also simplistic to think that since people can't handle the truth, lies
are better.

narrative per se is not bad, but lies are.

Of course we can resort to Gödel and his incompleteness theorem to reject
axioms validity, but try that argument at the bar, with the first stranger you
meet.

The bigger picture requires profound knowledge of the current laws to imagine
how they could break under a new, different paradigm.

Think about Asimov's work, he was writing fiction, but was writing something
that could happen, not something just because it could bond people together.

TL;DR: saying "we need to switch to renewable sources of energy or we'll all
die" is fiction, we don't know for sure if we'll all die, but it's good to
switch to renewables.

"If you do this or that God will punish you" is a lie that nobody should tell
and nobody should believe in, even when it sounds good (thou shalt not kill),
you shouldn't do it because it's bad, not because God told you.

------
nullc
So what should one do when one finds themselves being turned into roadkill
under the wheels of someone else's socially useful fiction?

I feel like the author of the piece might even advocate going along with-- or
at least not wasting your energies fighting-- many cases of socially useful
fiction. But that hardly works when you happen to be the person or of the
creed one targets.

~~~
tlb
First, realize that simply pointing out to people how they are mistaken won't
change much.

Myths, for some reason, often have loopholes. Achilles is invincible, except
for his heel. Samaritans are bad, except for some good ones. So sometimes you
can position yourself as matching the loophole and get a pass. Sometimes this
is humiliating, though, or funnels groups of people into acting out narrow
stereotypes.

~~~
schmidtleonard
> First, realize that simply pointing out to people how they are mistaken
> won't change much.

That lesson took me embarrassingly long to learn, but it's a good one.

I haven't given much thought to pattern-matching a loophole as a strategy, but
your observation is key: people are willing to make exceptions, you just have
to figure out how to get them to make an exception for _you_.

How to do that? Virtue signal. Watch other people for ideas. You won't have to
watch long, people _love_ to virtue signal and do it all the time. Validate
their VS to score some quick points, swallow the small amount of bile that it
brings to the back of your throat, and then pick something politically
adjacent but not so directly similar as to compete/threaten. Those constraints
are pretty loose, they should leave you with a wide field of possibilities to
choose from. Pick the least unpalatable and you're set.

~~~
onlydeadheroes
Your approach increases the problem's scale. I've found the exact opposite,
that by carefully confiding in friends about my non-conformity often brings
out their relieved agreement and binds us together much strongly. In these
times it is important to start making a mental list of who behaves like a
human and who behaves like cattle.

------
dalbasal
I'm a big fan of Harari's Sapiens, like a lot of people.

But... I think the.. narrative gets into inevitably sticky territory. It is,
after all, a narrative explaining the role of narratives...

Pure truths and falsehoods are generally small. e=mc^2 or F=ma. Cesar crossed
the Rubicon in 49 BC. Facts, baiscally.

Einstein heralded the atomic age, when man began to master matter & energy.
Newton's mechanics became both a model for scientific exploration and a symbol
for the coming rational age. The Roman Republic ended that day, and the Empire
began.

These no neither truths or falsehoods. They're narratives, or fictions as YNH
sometimes calls them.

The truth of a narrative is much squishier than the truth of a fact. A case in
point is right here: he gives 3 reasons for why fictions succeed politically.
These reasons are narratives themselves. For example: _" How many Israelis
Italians or Indians can stomach the unblemished truth about their nations"_ I
don't think there _is_ an "unblemished truth" about a nation. History is
ultimately the biggest harriest example of narrative making. Without
narratives, there is no meaningful "Italian people," just people and places
and stuff. To make it meaningful, you need a narrative. A story that tels you
what "The Italian People" are.

I think a better understanding of how political narratives work is important
(and interesting). I'm just skeptical that a true-v-not_true classification is
meaningful or useful.

Political pychology should be a field in itsewlf.

It's very hard to project much meaning from facts. Facts don't tell you what
Cesar means for our Republic.

~~~
lostjohnny
> I don't think there is an "unblemished truth" about a nation

As an Italian, born in Italy and still living in Italy in 2019, I think there
is and it is true that if you talk about our recent past very few (20-25%
maybe) can stomach it.

Italian people IS "just people and places and stuff", but you forgot food.

> Facts don't tell you what Cesar means for our Republic.

It means he ended it.

He was a military leader who seized control of and put an end to the Roman
Republic.

This is not narrative, this is a fact.

Narrative is letting Brutus become a traitor, while he conspired to kill a
tyrant, narrative is Shakespeare that named him "the noblest Roman of them
all".

~~~
dalbasal
I'm not disagreeing with the main points. There are things about our countries
that we can't stomach.

My point is that to be meaningful politically, that stuff is likely to be
narrative.. which is not the same as fact. "Cesar ended the republic" is a
narrative sort of a statement not a factual one. Cesar crossed the Rubicon,
named himself distator for life, marched on Rome... those are facts.

By narrative, I don't mean that it's false.

The Republic itself is/was a story, and the story changed and evolved
constantly. Just like democracy, capitalism or whanot it's not a legible
concept. It's more like "X is the better man for the job" than "X weighs more
than Y." Whether the Republic ended or not only has meaning within the context
of the story. There's no external test that declares a republic dead, outside
of the narrative.

I recently read a Chinese history timeline. The jist was "China was an empire
for thousands of years, until mao." Whether or not something is or isn't "The
Chinese empire" is a narrative claim, not a factual one.

The first step towards a truthier world is recognizing the difference between
facts and stories. Truth means something totally different depending on what
you're dealing with. Apart from climate change, I can't think of major
political questions where factual truths and falsehoods play a roles anything
like role naratives play.

------
trabant00
Another: two polar opposite political stances can be true at the same time.
Immigraton can be and is both good and bad. So are social help programs. Guns.
Government intervention. Surveilance. Etc.

Your truth is not the only truth. There are an infinite true perspectives on a
issue. Another perspective is not false just because it opposes yours and
yours is true.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I agree, but it's important to understand this strictly, and not come to the
conclusion that all views are equal and equally true.

To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political
stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are
projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional
space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D
cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're
wrong.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>To more mathematically minded people I'd explain it like this: two political
stances can be correct at the same time, because political stances are
projections of high-dimensional conceptual structures to lower-dimensional
space. Both a circle and a rectangle are correct 2D projections of a 3D
cylinder. But if your 2D projection of a cylinder looks like a hexagon, you're
wrong.

This is brilliant. I tend to fall back on category theory and multivalent
logic for the same job.

~~~
emmelaich
Not to pick on you; I like this comment.

But it's about the most HN comment I've ever read!

Beautiful.

~~~
inflatableDodo
Thanks and don't worry, it usually takes me a while to even notice when people
are picking on me, am notoriously bad at detecting that kind of thing.
Obliviousness to social cues does come with some perks.

Out of interest, I'd like it if you could explain why you think it is the most
HN comment you've ever read. I have some idea, but am not entirely sure.

------
a9a
I’m not sure I agree with the last line that these groups prize unity at the
_expense_ of truth. My takeaway from the rest of the article is that trust
(performed as social cohesion) is the underlying social value that we are
actually talking about in many of these conversations. Both verifiable truth
(e.g. scientific predictions that we can trust) and fictions (e.g. elaborate
stories that give us a shortcut to trust, as mentioned in the article) play a
part in building trust. Successful organizations understand the right mix of
truth and fiction to inspire trust—the morals of bible stories are powerful
because they are “true” for many people to the extent that seem to reflect
many people’s day to day experience. So, rather than unity vs truth, maybe we
should think of unity as a function of a variety of strategies, one of which
is truth? And successful organizations as ones that find the right balance?

------
avip
2 must have Churchill quotes:

 _Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing ever happened_

 _A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its
pants on_ (unsourced, but why not attribute it to Churchill anyhow? he
deserves it)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> why not attribute it to Churchill anyhow?

Because it isn't true. Was the irony intentional?

Apparently [0] it's from Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull.

[0] [https://richardlangworth.com/galloping-
lie](https://richardlangworth.com/galloping-lie) , also
[https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/09...](https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/09/colin-
kaepernick/nfls-colin-kaepernick-incorrectly-credits-winston-/)

~~~
cfmcdonald
The original original is from Jonathan Swift: "Falsehood flies, and truth
comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too
late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath
thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company
parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after
the patient is dead."

~~~
BlueTemplar
Indeed, that's why, as Swift insists, we have to "Speak Now" !

------
tunesmith
It is possible to engineer communication to alter the power levels between
fiction and truth. Just look at Twitter, which did this in the wrong direction
- there is reduced accountability and greater power in quipping something
misleading or false, compared to doing so offline.

But if instead there was an engineered solution to speed up the feedback loop
between theory and reality, or fiction and truth, then there would be more of
a cost towards saying outlandish things.

"Truth wins in the long run" and "in the long run, we're all dead"... so you
have to figure out how to make it more of a medium- or short-run. There's also
that other quote, I forget, about "my irrationality exceeds your bankroll",
where people can lose their shirt betting on truth if the market stays
irrational long enough. That's when you need clearer truth singles sooner, so
truth can win more reliably.

------
disappearance
It seems to me profession/ occupation might play a role here too.

Doctors & software developers I know favour truth based discussions.

Friends/ associates in sales are far more likely to enthusiastically
regurgitate something emotive (untrue/ misrepresented) from a tabloid paper
(as prime conversation).

So, shower thought: is the value we place on truth in social situations
affected by the frequency truth's value is demonstrated to us in our daily
professional lives?

------
Nasrudith
There is one context when truth beats fiction - cold hard reality which cannot
be fooled. Unfortunately often takes the form of ruin from war, fammine,
pestilence, or economics. Imperial Japan is a good example of a "delusional
empire" \- they insisted upon Banzai Charges and Kamakazi squandering their
experience. Or Lysenkoism and the Great Leap Forward.

------
dmontero
Our mind likes plausible stories. It helps to make sense of the past and to
have the -incorrect- perception that one can predict the future.

That's why fictions are so powerful. We easily get caught by them.

If people beliefs were purely rational, they would be able to weight the facts
against the fictions. However, our subjective confidence in a story (fact or
fiction) depends on many factors: \- We tend to believe stories that appear to
be based on cause-effect and that express continuity. \- We tend to believe in
things that people that we trust and love believe in.

------
wayoutthere
I hadn’t thought of it this way; but it does seem like a pragmatic framework
for understanding truth at societal scale. Ultimately, the truth is messy and
fiction is often easier to understand.

------
mncharity
Someone described[1] preferring the 'capitalist enemy' FT, to the NYT, because
"the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is - a
global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political
interests." (And "the Times [is] bloated with opinion pieces and op-eds".)

So here we have a op ed, exploring why people believe fictions, which somehow
fails to emphasize that it's economically profitable to lie to people. Even
with its focus on leadership, that's odd.

As for cost, the NYT rarely manages to mention "regulatory capture"[2],
consistently described TPP as a free trade treaty, but not Canadian resentment
of being arm-twisted by Hollywood via USMCA to extend copyright term, nor
China's of US pharma currently attempting similar.

The NYT had an ad slogan, "The Truth you deserve". Which seemed to me perhaps
poor advertising, as I frequently thought "No, we deserve better." Or...
perhaps they were right.

[1] [https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-
stand-t...](https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-the-
new-york-times.php) [2]
[https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22regulatory%20capture...](https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22regulatory%20capture%22&sort=newest)

~~~
ggggtez
> fails to emphasize it's economically profitable

I don't know how you could read it and walk away with that impression. It's
very clear that they are saying social cohesion allows the organization of
millions of people into productive societies as we know them. There are things
to disagree with, but that sticking point doesn't make sense.

~~~
mncharity
Sorry I was unclear: "it's economically profitable to lie to people" ... for
the agent promulgating the lie. Which incentivizes the creation of widely-
believed fictions, despite societal cost. Climate change is dishonest
scientists; sugar is healthy wonder-food; opioids are low-risk; vaccination
causes autism.

------
12thwonder
Isn’t this article a fiction itself? in a sense that it is not proven to be
true or impossible to prove?

It’s interesting because it looks like people are buying this story thus
proving his point, fiction (this article) beats truth.

------
antmanler
What if a fiction is someone try to tell the truth that will happen in the
future, but in a acceptable and literature way?

------
j7ake
What do you mean by truth? We act on heuristics that are sufficiently good
approximations to be useful.

For example, we act as if the world is flat when we run or drive. We act as if
the world is spherical when we fly across continents.

However, both are only approximations to the reality (Earth is an ellipsoid).
We use them because they are useful. It is reasonable to have multiple views
of the world that changes with scale.

------
yeahitslikethat
Tldr:

1) you know where lies come from: people you know. Therefore you can trust
people who tell the same lies.

2) you can trust people who believe your lies because believing lies is more
expensive than going with the truth, because expensive signals are harder to
fake.

3) the truth hurts. No one wants to follow someone who hurts them. We prefer
to follow people who lie to us so we will feel better.

~~~
kurthr
I'd say there's also an element of enjoying a narrative, whether we call them
memes or myths, that is satisfying and fits a story we know.

Some time around 2000 I started seeing most news (especially long form)
through this lens and I discount/research it a bit more the more it follows a
standard narrative. Usually, it's a sign that facts have been cherry picked or
out of context to fit, thought that's not always the case. It's rare that
there's a story (or scientific research) that doesn't have some warts and
things that don't fit, and to me those aspects are part of what give it a ring
of authenticity... although they are also falsifiable.

Many current memes (and science press releases) are terribly simplistic and
made for those who truly don't care about truth, but are looking for that hit
of satisfaction of discovering they were always right.

~~~
hhjjkkll
I find memes to be often low effort half/quarter-truths or no truth at all and
their humor lies within the irony that they _aren 't_ true at all. What is the
impact on society when people in masses are consuming and entertaining
themselves with this "content"?

~~~
mistermann
Depends on which definition of meme you're using:

\- a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with
slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.

\- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be
passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially
imitation.

The former refers to things like the sometimes clever pictures you see on
social media, the latter refers to things like what you read in the newspaper
(often referred to as facts), but both kinds have widely varying levels of
truth.

------
gandalfian
"Real life is like bad television" (paraphrased woody Allen)

------
HNLurker2
Bypass? Ahh is by Yuval that guy who wrote homo deus so he probably repeats
his ideas and this is promo for his book

~~~
devoply
I can't say I like everything he says, but he's got a lot of good stuff to
say.

~~~
HNLurker2
For a while I used to bypass NYtimes by having them redirect from Facebook
(they fixed
it):[https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019...](https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/why-
fiction-trumps-truth.html)

------
_pmf_
Can the NYT apply their insights to how they deal with the "fine people hoax"?

------
airocker
Would this explain President Trump's tactics too?

