Two things that are real but aggressively story-resistant are quantum mechanics and the self-stability of bicycles.
Tens of thousands of pages have been written in an effort to provide an intuitive, natural-language story about what is happening in a double-slit experiment, but every one of them is broken. Of course the math is simple and superposition/entanglement are real, but none of the stories are good.
Similarly, when you push a bicycle with no rider, it recovers from a partial fall surprisingly well - but there's not a good story about how. Stories are told regarding various real effects such as gyroscopic forces, the rake of the fork, caster effects, and so on - but it is also possible (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1201959) to build a bicycle which inverts each of those effects and is still categorically self-stable - at that point it is hard to tell a good story.
there's a quantum interpretation that is fairly easy to explain, it's called Pilot Wave theory. It posits that quantum effects are caused by a something akin to a bouncing ball creating a standing wave. This leads to phenomena associated with both wave and particle. Interestingly the theory fits available experimental data, as far as I am aware.
A possibly related anecdote is one about Richard Feynman. When he tried and failed to write an accessible undergrad lecture about QCD(?), he told his colleagues that meant he/they didn't really understand it themselves.
I would go a bit further than that, and posit that most complex or interesting systems resist the construction of concise, accurate narratives and that one reason we fail in our management of complex economic, political and ecological systems is because the stories we tell ourselves about them are too simple to capture the truth about highly-dimensional systems with lots of feedback.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting -- that seeking narrative explanations is wrong, or that the models we have of bicycle/quantum-mechanics are wrong?
This idea that there's an agenda for every observation seems to have started in the past 10 years. I find it very strange. It really shackles the mind, and conversation.
I notice my mind tends to think this way as well. Thinking about why I will think that usually yields recollections of people making "innocent" observations while they clearly had ulterior motives; such memories are in-person events, not this sort of interaction online. That said, it's easy to (read: difficult not to) apply similar heuristics to online interactions.
Not to excuse it; I agree with your conclusion. Hopefully such an understanding can help people to be patient with the behavior despite the annoyance.
The parent didn't make any suggestion that the models are wrong. "the math is simple" means that not only does the model work, it's also simple to calculate. That leaves the interpretation that seeking good narratives will sometimes be fruitless.
I think that's not quite accurate. I remembere there were some experiments where wheel had a counterspinning weight attached to nullify its momentum and the bicycle still mostly worked as usual.
There's this presumption whenever I read this argument that every person is story dominant.
Sure, many people need captivating stories and poorly comprehend statistics and orders of magnitude. You probably need stories to reach a majority of people. The cinema is more popular than abstract math classrooms.
But some people are different. They don't watch TV, movies, Netflix or read fiction. They live fully productive lives without being constantly enraptured in melodramas.
These people will read a story and think "bullshit bullshit blah blah". Don't forget about those people as well. They're often the ones put in control of the money.
I think this is about different kind of stories. Not "captivating stories" and "melodramas". More like... whatever it is one would produce if asked to ELI5 something.
Like the two cases 'pjs_ mentions[0] - double-slit experiment and the self-stability of bicycles. In both cases, we know it's a real thing, and it's easy to demonstrate it. In the double-slit case, we even have a relatively simple mathematical model describing the phenomenon. But try to explain why either happens to a random person, without ending up at "the math says so" or "look, we've tested it many times; it just works like this", and... well, that's the story many (most?) of us seek to understand something.
If I hadn't gone into biology I have long thought I would have gone into either math or history. Don't presume there's a huge dichotomy between the people in either field.
What human brain is good at: chains of causation with clearly defined relationships. I.e. stories.
What human brain is bad at: fuzzy mess of thousands or billions of interrelated events that all influence each other slightly.
This is the reason we have to use machine learning to find a program that seems to solve OCR or natural language or image recognition instead of just writing these programs ourselves. We cannot comprehend the complexity, we can only recognize if it works roughly how we want it to.
I sort-of agree, but maybe not on the term "human brain".
I think there is definitely something (or several things) in that brain that is extremely good at fuzzy messes of correlations. It's just not the conscious mind that maybe some people think of as their "self".
After all, those difficult image-recognition and language tasks are carried out by the human brain, even if we can't explain how they work in the "explainer" part of our mind.
Tangentially related, I find the split-brain experiments fascinating[1], in how they demonstrate clearly that there can be multiple "consciousnesses" at work, and the one that does the talking is only one of them, and is not necessarily running the show.
Yeah, should have said the conscious, abstract thinking part.
We also have coprocessors for intuitive physics, face detection, inverse kinematics for muscle movement, etc. And even some virtualization so we can simulate other people minds.
The missing piece is that there is a, to me, well meaning effort to not publish these out-of-narrative stories because their real life effect is pouring gasoline on other hate. With covid there was so much avoiding talking about China being the origin because there was a hoard of people frothing at the mouth waiting to justify their hate. It's the whole reason respectability politics exists.
You see it with everything, some people are murderers, rapists, thieves, jaywalkers, but when people of certain demographics are caught the story spreads like wildfire after a drought -- "see see we told you they were horrible people!!"
I think that's a good sentiment. Reluctance towards creating new narratives because narratives are alwayd lies and can be dangerous. But you can't have entertainment (which includes news) without narratives so you stick to safe-ish ones.
It's not about truth, it's just a reflection on packaging and presentation of ideas. You're taking it too literally.
The argument boils down to anything you can't explain doesn't exist, which is shortsighted and pseudointellectual. It's an Agile project manager's understanding of Story. A top comment mentions physics, and I would suggest the concept of mental illness and "hurt feelings" also qualifies.
We don't understand a fucking thing about psychology (the field is rife with fraud and psychiatrists are no more effective than shamans), though there are clearly problems that exist within people's brains. Schizophrenia is very real to the afflicted, yet they can't coherently explain their experience. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Whether it's True or Real or not isn't really the point.
> Literally any random sequence of events is a story. That doesn't have any bearing on it being true or false.
The author didn't say any set of events is true or false. He's remarking on how people want a story to explain things, which is what Hollywood thrives on.
And how things that don't easily lend themselves to a story tend to be ignored.
I started hating narratives. They create their own realities that often don't align with the available data or often don't even intersect with available data. Whole swaths of made up "realities" that are not even wrong.
This seems like a shallow article. I have an intelligent, switched-on colleague who is also a great friend. If that colleague, who has a hard time expressing themselves due to factors outside of their control, cannot tell a story about something that they have uniquely experienced, it isn't real? Ridiculous.
Tens of thousands of pages have been written in an effort to provide an intuitive, natural-language story about what is happening in a double-slit experiment, but every one of them is broken. Of course the math is simple and superposition/entanglement are real, but none of the stories are good.
Similarly, when you push a bicycle with no rider, it recovers from a partial fall surprisingly well - but there's not a good story about how. Stories are told regarding various real effects such as gyroscopic forces, the rake of the fork, caster effects, and so on - but it is also possible (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1201959) to build a bicycle which inverts each of those effects and is still categorically self-stable - at that point it is hard to tell a good story.