In Taleb’s Incerto books he makes the point in several places that our tendency to embed everything in narratives is a trap in our thinking.
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, in their marvelous discussions of science and philosophy in alternate chapters of Terry Pratchett’s Science of Discworld series suggest that humans, whose species is sometimes called Pan sapiens (intelligent ape), really ought to be called Pan narrans (story-telling ape), because we humans embed everything in narratives.
Taleb makes the same point several times in his Incerto books. We humans do use narratives to embed our understandings about the world around us. We put everything into narratives, even scientific theories, and then because the narratives “make sense” to us (after all, we constructed the narrative in the first place to tie things together in what appears to us to be a logical way), we believe them. Even if in fact there was no narrative to what we observed, but just random behavior, or coincidence. This is, for example, the genesis of many conspiracy theories.
One of Taleb’s examples is the ubiquitous commentator explanation for any movement in the stock market. “The market rose 0.01% today on higher trade figures”, or “The market fell 10 points today on worries about inflation”, when in fact these are no more that random movements in the averages that need no explanation at all.
(Aside: Many years ago I was in the long and slow registration line for a computer conference. In front me were two young Asian lads who worked for a hedge fund. Talking to them I discovered that their hedge fund used a sophisticated and complex AI to make stock picks. No one understood quite how the AI made its decisions - increasingly a problem these days with AI systems - so their job was to find a convincing explanation for each pick that they could tell their investors.)
Of course since the world is so immensely complex, our simple narratives are often wrong, or at best incomplete, however much we may believe them. But once we have our observations structured into a coherent narrative, it gets very hard to account for observations that don’t fit our narrative; we tend to ignore them or explain them away rather than adjust the narrative. That is the trap. It takes a special and rare discipline to just observe events unjudgementally without succumbing to the temptation to embed them in a narrative, to “explain” them.
This is evident in the media, who cast everything into a narrative, as interesting and attention-grabbing a narrative as they can manage, because that gets as many readers as possible. And once the media sets the narrative, most of the public adopts that narrative and then argues about it. Media narratives have to be simple, because most readers don’t have the attention span or interest to follow a complex narrative. Since real-life events are never simple, real-life people have complex agendas and motives, and real-life events almost always have many and complex causes, that means the media narrative is almost certainly incomplete, if not completely wrong. But it becomes what the public believes.
And as I mentioned in my Incerto 2 posting several weeks ago, history is subject to this “narrative trap” as well. Historical events are the result of million or billions of major and minor precursor causes, ranging from major parliamentary decisions to the state of Napoleon’s hemorrhoids or whether Charles I had a fight with his wife before meeting with his advisors. Historians, being human, cast history as a relatively simple coherent and understandable narrative, picking out from the billions of real casual chains, many unknown, a few they select (probably based on their own cultural and educational biases) to “explain” the course of history. It makes a more readable and satisfying history, but it is at best highly incomplete, and perhaps wrong altogether, convincing as it may seem.
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