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.
because of the words "biologically inclined", psychological proof has a pretty big inductive gap to leap to get to establishing a biological inclination.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think that’s a useful standard. Reducing human psychology down to genetics is A bit like trying to reduce weather forecasting down to quantum mechanics.
That’s not a perfect analogy because there are some genes that we know have strong psychological impact, but that doesn’t mean all human behaviour is neatly connected to specific isolatable gene sequences.
Did you read the article? There it is claimed that narrative fallacy is a biological inclination. Why would you not question that claim and ask for some proof?
The narrative fallacy is just a way for people to describe errors caused when conclusions are based inadequate information. It is an ancient and mundane idea with analogs across time and cultures.
The article mentions the biological nature of it, but I interpret that as the biological reality that humans are not omniscient, thus are always susceptible to filling in the gaps between empirical evidence with unsubstantiated prose.
Yes I read it. When it says biology, I don’t think it’s reasonable to substitute in genetics and retain the same sense.
Suppose that the tendency towards the narative fallacy is due to such fundamental architectural structures in our brain that they go back to our early mammal ancestors. If that is true, any genetic change sufficient to modify it materially would have to be so radical that we essentially wouldn’t have mammal brains anymore. We’re way beyond population genetics and incremental natural selection at that point. There’s no genetic study or engineering intervention we could possibly contemplate in our lifetimes that would be relevant.
So when I say genetics isn’t really an issue here it’s not because the behaviour isn’t genetically determined, it’s that it may be so strongly tied to huge, mutually interconnected tracts our our genome that it’s just not a useful level of abstraction for us at the moment.
I think when one looks around, narrative fallacy is ever-present. The evidence is all around us, in virtually every newspaper and book. We seek to make the world cause and effect, to make people "good" or "bad", etc.
One of my personal pet peeves around this fallacy is how often it arises in sports. Before Jordan won 6 championships, he was a "great player who didn't elevate his teammates". After all the winning, he became "the greatest player to ever play". People just want a simple story, because they're busy - it's hard to have a nuanced view of everything you see or hear about.
>I think when one looks around, narrative fallacy is ever-present
Yes I think the same, it's certainly a comforting story to tell oneself about why people reduce the complex world to simple narratives, thus narrative fallacy if it exists falls prey to narrative fallacy.
However I have to assume that I could be wrong and what I perceive as examples of this narrative fallacy and demonstrating its existence do nothing of the sort.
Finally, the evidence all around us that I perceive does not lead to a proof of a biological inclination. It just leads to my consideration that there might be one.
So if Jeff Bezos or Nassim Taleb tells me it's a biological inclination, I would be inclined to find some polite way to tell him to prove it.
Yep. "biological inclination" doesn't have to mean there's some "fallacy gene". It just means that our brains have evolved to extrapolate as much as possible for the least effort (you try running a computer on this wattage..), we want fast decisions & most people don't want to have to maintain dozens of constraints in their head (only recently have we started learning to write down these constraints, which is much easier to keep track of)
Meanwhile ideas have evolutionary pressure too. It's called memes. Memes work best when they require low effort from their carriers. If a meme requires some existing knowledge, & truth often relies on knowledge, that means it can only be transmitted to those with the knowledge, unless it brings that knowledge as baggage
Whether or not humans are biologically inclined to it, it's still a valid question to ask "Are you considering this potential mistake when telling our story and taking precautions to avoid it?"
You make a great point, there's a big temptation to commit narrative fallacy when trying to explain narrative fallacy.
So we should look for empirical evidence.
At the same time brains are complicated, psychology is complicated, genetics is complicated.
We know a lot about all of the above but we don't really understand any of them.
The history of all three sciences is full of narrative fallacies.
Given what we don't know, absolute proof, especially in genetics, isn't currently possible. So we have to settle for the best working explanation based on what we know. I think there is plenty of peer reviewed support for the idea that we are biologically inclined to look for neat explanations so that we can file challenging concepts away as resolved and focus our bandwidth on other things.
the reason that I don't see it as a token exercise is that ascribing things to biological inclination seems to be its own easy to fall into fallacy. So I like to avoid it while still conceding it may very well be the case in particular cases.
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.
But this is not simply the nature of people to search for understanding. It's also down to the willful exploitation of events in bad faith.
Especially in these days--where there's a pitched ideological/political battle raging, coupled with an assault on "knowing"--that seems to be the larger driving force.
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?
Exactly this type of articles raised my suspicion. It says that people have burned various towers in protest of 5G, and that there are crazy conspiracy theories linking 5G and covid, but it gives no evidence that the two are connected. What percentage of those pissed at 5G are believing this conspiracy theory? 10%? 1%? 0.01%?
Occam's Razor tells us that given that there's a bunch of facebook troll nonsense going around about 5G causing covid (which is trivial for you to find yourself, directly), and since that coincides with an upswing in both tower destruction and also threats of violence (often with assertions of causing covid) towards workers, it's probably mostly that.
Why are you interested in minimizing this or finding a media-based conspiracy to overreport?
Occam's Razor may suggest something, but the actual truth of the matter remains unknown.
> Why are you interested in minimizing this or finding a media-based conspiracy to overreport?
An even better question is: why/how has your mind chosen to frame his words in a specific manner that is not actually contained within what he wrote, as well as assume (without evidence) a specific intent/motivation? Was this purely conscious and deliberate, or was it more instinctual?
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.
> A bonkers hoax video about Bill Gates has been making the rounds on social media — and it’s setting the anti-vaxx conspiracy world on fire.
> The video claims to show Gates briefing the CIA in 2005 about a vaccine to immunize religious fanatics. The video, which is obviously faked, is getting gobbled up by online conspiracy theorists who’ve latched onto the Microsoft co-founder as the mastermind behind the coronavirus pandemic.
A lovely narrative, but if one actually bothered to read the article with critical thinking skills engaged (as would be the case if the article was written by conspiracy theorists, rather than written about conspiracy theorists), it would be obvious that the author didn't even make an attempt to provide any evidence that substantiates the claim that this story is "setting the anti-vaxx conspiracy world on fire".
This is very typically the case with articles about conspiracy theorists, which insinuate (usually without saying explicitly) that all(!) conspiracy theorists believe <x>, and the "evidence" for these claims, if any is provided at all, is almost without exception a simplistic narrative, or another article of the exact same form.
An example of just such an article was even provided as evidence to answer a question in this very HN thread! [1]
If one was to actually do the most basic of fact checking on such articles (the vice.com one above for example), they would frequently encounter posts like this one[2] where the author, rather than "gobbling up the obviously faked video", instead clearly points out the obvious propaganda techniques used by the MSM.
You'd think someone would eventually catch on and say something about this obviously recurring technique in news reporting, but such exposes would occur you know where...in a conspiracy theory community, and you know [3] what they say about conspiracy theorists!
The reason people believe these news about conspiracy theorists is because many of them have their relatives/friends/acquaintances who on a regular basis tend to start those crazy topics at the dinner table and who are never argued against because by that time everybody knows that arguing with someone fixed on an idea is absolutely useless.
You can’t be theoretical in conspiracies. You can either prove it (or at least know facts others don’t) or you are crazy.
> The reason people believe these news about conspiracy theorists is because many of them have their relatives/friends/acquaintances who on a regular basis tend to...
A similar heuristic is someone who gets robbed at gunpoint by a black person, and then claims that all black people are violent. It's interesting how society seemed to be able to not only get over that popular form of stereotype (which is indeed not identical, but is also similar), but now largely abhors it, yet the very idea that not all "conspiracy theories/theorists" are identically flawed is considered (with no supporting evidence whatsoever) impossible.
> You can’t be theoretical in conspiracies. You can either prove it (or at least know facts others don’t) or you are crazy.
Is this a theory/opinion, or a fact? If it's a fact, can you provide some supporting evidence &/or reasoning?
I mean, I can certainly agree that this very much seems to be all that most people are currently capable of, but to say that humans are not capable of it at all, but they are capable of conceptualizing theories in virtually all other fields, seems rather odd.
Can you think of any reasons why people's conceptualization of conspiracy theories/theorists is so unlike virtually every other idea? Why is it that otherwise logical people are unable to exercise logic when the topic arises, but instead revert to almost purely heuristic reasoning, often accompanied by an inability to realize that is what they're doing? Surely there must be some underlying cause behind this mysterious anomaly, no?
> 'they all boil down to "it's the fault of {fill in the blank evil rich person or organization}"'
that's (again) the fundamental attribution error, another type of bias where we attribute to people outcomes that are more attributable to situations.
besides, most prevalent among the covid narratives is the fear and panic of the unknown--the complexity and randomness (of nature) as you put it--so quite the opposite of what you narrate.
the simple narrative is that covid is caused by a respiratory virus, and while there's lots to learn about viruses overall, we know plenty enough about them not to be in a panic over it, and to develop reasonable policies entirely from the knowledge we have. but that's too simple for our overwhelming fear of the unknown, untamped by reason, and many of us seek other, often more complicated narratives to assuage our anxiety.
The meanings behind those stories go deeper than blame and have their own elegant source. There is a simple but powerful alegbra to the romance in stories.
The truth being complexity and randomness is just another part of the narrative.
This isn't a battle of facts vs facts as most people believe, but rather a battle of memes vs memes, where both sides are typically not telling the whole truth, but usually for different reasons. It's fascinating to observe the battle (and forum commentary on the battle) from an abstract perspective, if you can manage it, but not many people seem to even know such a perspective even exists, and it certainly isn't something we're taught in school or at home, at least "in The West".
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.
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.
Haha U.G.! Amazing. The things you come across on HN. I was introduced to his book and videos of him by a christian friend at whose house he often stayed. (She also got me into Nisargadatta!) She said he'd eat nothing but cream. He helped end my religious period, and meant a lot to me at the time. The guru to end all gurus! He made a lot of sense, especially for people caught up in the spiritual world, "seekers". I just looked and wikipedia says he died in 2007, also that he ate a lot of salt and cream.
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...
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.
Bezos is probably highly intelligent but not 'hyperintelligent'. He wanted to become theoretical physicist but realized that he was not up to it. He graduated with degree in electrical engineering and computer science.
It's very common to label clearly intelligent business-people who have 'mathiness background' and analytical thinking ability as geniuses.
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."
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.
I used to think the same thing, but as I grew older, I realized that that concept doesn’t apply to all people. Sometimes what comes off as hyper intelligent is really just smart people putting the time in to prepare for specific occasions. It is unlikely that Bezos met with the author without having done a lot of preparation and research into factors that he felt were important. Narrative being one of them; he is a very public figure after all.
Of course I could be wrong, but I like to think of it this way - Do not reduce to genius what is often the result of hard work and preparation.
Childhood trauma has been a better measurement for understanding people who claim or chase ‘huge success‘ in my experience - and this includes myself. From what I see, the image of ‘success’ that is expected or hoped for by many today has little to do with joy and pleasure, and more to do dominating others. From what I’ve experienced I’ve seen that if one has unresolved childhood trauma‘s and PTSD, one is more likely to act out of revenge, or to enjoy violence (Marshall Rosenberg writes about this: he believes that when our needs are unmet - we can sometimes start to ‘enjoy‘ violence more).
I’ve now been facing my childhood trauma and addressing it, as well as growing a more compassionate self, and reflecting on this is interesting, because a part of me of course still yearns for an extravagant hero journey, yet I’m not finding myself wishing or hoping for this big idea of success, I think because my relationships have become a lot better and a lot easier, and my experience of life lighter and more playful. Also I have individuen and I am more authentic now. Less perfectionistic and more forgiving. It’s a relief.
I think I no longer aim for the same type of success as before.
> 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...). 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.
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.
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.
I'm someone who for years tried to strive for honesty over narrative coherence. The reality is that when you do that people get bored and don't remember a thing. In order to actually convey any information, you need to have a point and some structure that people can understand.
That means that your listener will imperfectly understand reality. That is inevitable.
Anything that forces you to tell stories; creative writing, making videos, theatre, improv perhaps. I think it’s the _telling_ that matters, more than the story. - and I think practice will be much more effective than theory for that.
Build up that sense for what works and what doesn’t by trying and seeing (ideally in a supportive environment - a certain sort of friendship is great for this actually, no need for an improv class)
I'm the sort of person that needs theory to be effective at practice. Without theory, I don't know what to pay attention to. If I just practice without theory, I don't see myself succeed.
"Made to Stick" I found to be a good book on storytelling. It doesn't position it as "storytelling" per se but more generally about how to communicate ideas in a way that captivate audiences, however large or small.
Reminds me of a rule in "Factfulness": Never trust a number in isolation. Numbers are used to create narratives, and a single number or statistic can easily create a misleading picture.
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.
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.
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."
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. (:
Occams Razor is not about the likelihood of a theory being true. It says that out of two theories which both explain observations you should chose the simpler.
It is not a statement about the world, it is a principle of economy of thought.
According to the logical positivist, two theories which explain the same outcome are equally true. Believing that one theory could be "more true" despite both predicting the same outcome is basically religion, since you are believing in some metaphysical "objective truth" beyond observation.
For the proper use of Occam’s Razor, is this accurate? "If you have two competing hypotheses that both have similar predictive power, it's better to test the one that relies on the simplest to test assumptions".
Edit: thinking about this more, possibly? Although, to me, Occam’s Razor seems like a strategy for making the best use of one’s time, not as a direct method of finding truth.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadon edit: I mean biologically inclined implies some genomic proof. Not just psychological studies.
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.
That’s not a perfect analogy because there are some genes that we know have strong psychological impact, but that doesn’t mean all human behaviour is neatly connected to specific isolatable gene sequences.
The article mentions the biological nature of it, but I interpret that as the biological reality that humans are not omniscient, thus are always susceptible to filling in the gaps between empirical evidence with unsubstantiated prose.
Suppose that the tendency towards the narative fallacy is due to such fundamental architectural structures in our brain that they go back to our early mammal ancestors. If that is true, any genetic change sufficient to modify it materially would have to be so radical that we essentially wouldn’t have mammal brains anymore. We’re way beyond population genetics and incremental natural selection at that point. There’s no genetic study or engineering intervention we could possibly contemplate in our lifetimes that would be relevant.
So when I say genetics isn’t really an issue here it’s not because the behaviour isn’t genetically determined, it’s that it may be so strongly tied to huge, mutually interconnected tracts our our genome that it’s just not a useful level of abstraction for us at the moment.
One of my personal pet peeves around this fallacy is how often it arises in sports. Before Jordan won 6 championships, he was a "great player who didn't elevate his teammates". After all the winning, he became "the greatest player to ever play". People just want a simple story, because they're busy - it's hard to have a nuanced view of everything you see or hear about.
Yes I think the same, it's certainly a comforting story to tell oneself about why people reduce the complex world to simple narratives, thus narrative fallacy if it exists falls prey to narrative fallacy.
However I have to assume that I could be wrong and what I perceive as examples of this narrative fallacy and demonstrating its existence do nothing of the sort.
Finally, the evidence all around us that I perceive does not lead to a proof of a biological inclination. It just leads to my consideration that there might be one.
So if Jeff Bezos or Nassim Taleb tells me it's a biological inclination, I would be inclined to find some polite way to tell him to prove it.
Meanwhile ideas have evolutionary pressure too. It's called memes. Memes work best when they require low effort from their carriers. If a meme requires some existing knowledge, & truth often relies on knowledge, that means it can only be transmitted to those with the knowledge, unless it brings that knowledge as baggage
So we should look for empirical evidence.
At the same time brains are complicated, psychology is complicated, genetics is complicated.
We know a lot about all of the above but we don't really understand any of them.
The history of all three sciences is full of narrative fallacies.
Given what we don't know, absolute proof, especially in genetics, isn't currently possible. So we have to settle for the best working explanation based on what we know. I think there is plenty of peer reviewed support for the idea that we are biologically inclined to look for neat explanations so that we can file challenging concepts away as resolved and focus our bandwidth on other things.
But still enough in the air to refrain from claiming biological inclination.
Asking for proof is useful, but it's a token exercise if you don't have an alternative explanation.
Especially in these days--where there's a pitched ideological/political battle raging, coupled with an assault on "knowing"--that seems to be the larger driving force.
Why are you interested in minimizing this or finding a media-based conspiracy to overreport?
Occam's Razor may suggest something, but the actual truth of the matter remains unknown.
> Why are you interested in minimizing this or finding a media-based conspiracy to overreport?
An even better question is: why/how has your mind chosen to frame his words in a specific manner that is not actually contained within what he wrote, as well as assume (without evidence) a specific intent/motivation? Was this purely conscious and deliberate, or was it more instinctual?
https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/11/five-telecom-towers-torched-po...
I'm generally interested in the subculture
> used to refer to a situation in which there is a choice between two different plans of action, but both together are not possible
The actual state of affairs is that both are occurring.
One example is this recently popular story on Reddit:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4aydjg/somehow-this-wild-...
> A bonkers hoax video about Bill Gates has been making the rounds on social media — and it’s setting the anti-vaxx conspiracy world on fire.
> The video claims to show Gates briefing the CIA in 2005 about a vaccine to immunize religious fanatics. The video, which is obviously faked, is getting gobbled up by online conspiracy theorists who’ve latched onto the Microsoft co-founder as the mastermind behind the coronavirus pandemic.
A lovely narrative, but if one actually bothered to read the article with critical thinking skills engaged (as would be the case if the article was written by conspiracy theorists, rather than written about conspiracy theorists), it would be obvious that the author didn't even make an attempt to provide any evidence that substantiates the claim that this story is "setting the anti-vaxx conspiracy world on fire".
This is very typically the case with articles about conspiracy theorists, which insinuate (usually without saying explicitly) that all(!) conspiracy theorists believe <x>, and the "evidence" for these claims, if any is provided at all, is almost without exception a simplistic narrative, or another article of the exact same form.
An example of just such an article was even provided as evidence to answer a question in this very HN thread! [1]
If one was to actually do the most basic of fact checking on such articles (the vice.com one above for example), they would frequently encounter posts like this one[2] where the author, rather than "gobbling up the obviously faked video", instead clearly points out the obvious propaganda techniques used by the MSM.
You'd think someone would eventually catch on and say something about this obviously recurring technique in news reporting, but such exposes would occur you know where...in a conspiracy theory community, and you know [3] what they say about conspiracy theorists!
[1] https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/11/five-telecom-towers-torched-po...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/gpj202/bill_gat...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_conditioning
You can’t be theoretical in conspiracies. You can either prove it (or at least know facts others don’t) or you are crazy.
A similar heuristic is someone who gets robbed at gunpoint by a black person, and then claims that all black people are violent. It's interesting how society seemed to be able to not only get over that popular form of stereotype (which is indeed not identical, but is also similar), but now largely abhors it, yet the very idea that not all "conspiracy theories/theorists" are identically flawed is considered (with no supporting evidence whatsoever) impossible.
> You can’t be theoretical in conspiracies. You can either prove it (or at least know facts others don’t) or you are crazy.
Is this a theory/opinion, or a fact? If it's a fact, can you provide some supporting evidence &/or reasoning?
I mean, I can certainly agree that this very much seems to be all that most people are currently capable of, but to say that humans are not capable of it at all, but they are capable of conceptualizing theories in virtually all other fields, seems rather odd.
Can you think of any reasons why people's conceptualization of conspiracy theories/theorists is so unlike virtually every other idea? Why is it that otherwise logical people are unable to exercise logic when the topic arises, but instead revert to almost purely heuristic reasoning, often accompanied by an inability to realize that is what they're doing? Surely there must be some underlying cause behind this mysterious anomaly, no?
that's (again) the fundamental attribution error, another type of bias where we attribute to people outcomes that are more attributable to situations.
besides, most prevalent among the covid narratives is the fear and panic of the unknown--the complexity and randomness (of nature) as you put it--so quite the opposite of what you narrate.
the simple narrative is that covid is caused by a respiratory virus, and while there's lots to learn about viruses overall, we know plenty enough about them not to be in a panic over it, and to develop reasonable policies entirely from the knowledge we have. but that's too simple for our overwhelming fear of the unknown, untamped by reason, and many of us seek other, often more complicated narratives to assuage our anxiety.
The truth being complexity and randomness is just another part of the narrative.
As well as the simplistic counter-narratives deployed to combat those narratives:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295618
This isn't a battle of facts vs facts as most people believe, but rather a battle of memes vs memes, where both sides are typically not telling the whole truth, but usually for different reasons. It's fascinating to observe the battle (and forum commentary on the battle) from an abstract perspective, if you can manage it, but not many people seem to even know such a perspective even exists, and it certainly isn't something we're taught in school or at home, at least "in The West".
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti
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...
It's very common to label clearly intelligent business-people who have 'mathiness background' and analytical thinking ability as geniuses.
- 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.
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."
“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...
Of course I could be wrong, but I like to think of it this way - Do not reduce to genius what is often the result of hard work and preparation.
Childhood trauma has been a better measurement for understanding people who claim or chase ‘huge success‘ in my experience - and this includes myself. From what I see, the image of ‘success’ that is expected or hoped for by many today has little to do with joy and pleasure, and more to do dominating others. From what I’ve experienced I’ve seen that if one has unresolved childhood trauma‘s and PTSD, one is more likely to act out of revenge, or to enjoy violence (Marshall Rosenberg writes about this: he believes that when our needs are unmet - we can sometimes start to ‘enjoy‘ violence more).
I’ve now been facing my childhood trauma and addressing it, as well as growing a more compassionate self, and reflecting on this is interesting, because a part of me of course still yearns for an extravagant hero journey, yet I’m not finding myself wishing or hoping for this big idea of success, I think because my relationships have become a lot better and a lot easier, and my experience of life lighter and more playful. Also I have individuen and I am more authentic now. Less perfectionistic and more forgiving. It’s a relief.
I think I no longer aim for the same type of success as before.
> 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...). 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.
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.
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.
Also yes, I thought ISoLT and W&P contrasted nicely.
That means that your listener will imperfectly understand reality. That is inevitable.
Build up that sense for what works and what doesn’t by trying and seeing (ideally in a supportive environment - a certain sort of friendship is great for this actually, no need for an improv class)
For more on why, see: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
https://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/14...
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.
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."
It is not a statement about the world, it is a principle of economy of thought.
According to the logical positivist, two theories which explain the same outcome are equally true. Believing that one theory could be "more true" despite both predicting the same outcome is basically religion, since you are believing in some metaphysical "objective truth" beyond observation.
Edit: thinking about this more, possibly? Although, to me, Occam’s Razor seems like a strategy for making the best use of one’s time, not as a direct method of finding truth.
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.
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.