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I think its unappreciated just how dangerous stories are. it can lead people to believe many untrue things, which causes many societal issues. Maybe we are biased from our days where if you didn't listen to your ancestors by the fire, then you would be eaten by wolves. I think we're over-tuned and assign a higher truth value to stories we are told. The only way to fight this is to gain a rationalist mindset to fight back against our inherent biases (aka brain malfunctions), but rationalists seems to be on a decline these days. Asking for evidence is *not cool*, what is cool is believing every and anything people tell you 🙄 Make skepticism cool again. #lesswrong

Replies (50)

It depends on who you are talking to. Stories from my side of an argument, totally benign. Stories from the out group should be banned from the public arena because it will change our kids. But a tool is a tool and what is more interesting is why stories are dangerous. The answer is algorithmic compression. When you employ skepticism in the abstract you can divine atomic truths. But it is impossible to maintain all the atomic truths we have discovered in an immediately useful way. We have to go back over our note carefully. This isn't helpful when you need an immediate response. Stories use known patterns from the real world to compress information in a way that can both be easily transferred between minds as well as unpacked at a later time. Over long periods of time stories that coevolve with a culture end up compressing a lot of useful information. No different from DNA. True and useful as not identical but neither are they completely independent parameters. They are have a positive correlation however tenuous. The best combat to bad stories is to carefully use your discovered bits of atomic wisdom to create better stories. If they are useful they will propagate. Unfortunately, like in the case of UFO hunters the usefulness of the story is simply as a shibboleth for marginal people to belong to a group.
↩ replying to npub1w4jk...30zp
I use this when teaching my kids math in preschool years. If I asked them what 2+3 is I get wild guesses. But we have a fence in our backyard that the kids aren't allowed behind. We also have geese flying about here in MN. So if I tell the kids that a little boy wandered behind the fence and found his way home blocked by 2 geese and then 3 more join them then demand they answer how many there are to get past, they nerely always answer correctly. With my oldest I had him doing fairly decent multiplication and division involving triple digit numbers in his head by first grade.
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↩ replying to npub1w4jk...30zp
In effect, memes are also a form of story. Are they true or false? Fact or fiction? They are both. Neither. Some third thing. Truthy. They communicate a highly condensed set of information in symbolic form. Allegories, parables, fables, epics, any sort of narrative, is the word version of an image. They're meant to communicate something more complex, in the most succint and relatable way. They're metainformation, rather than facts.
↩ replying to Comte de Sats Germain
I make no truth claims about UFO sightings. Simply because I don't have a particular experience, doesn't mean other people haven't. But since UFO sightings are not a common experience they have limited utility as cultural stories. How does the story change how I should behave? On an individual level they are interesting because it carries information about the teller. Kind of like me telling someone about the time I hiked to the bottom of the grand canyon. It has no cultural significance but it does have interpersonal significance. Though I will admit seeing a UFO is a much more interesting story.
↩ replying to jb55
The simple requirement that information must transfer between brains precludes lossless compression. It is not hard, it is impossible. This is fine. The impossibility stems from the fact that every brain is different. If you took the pattern of neurons firing in my head when I think of the definition of "perturbation" and mapped it to your head you might catch a whiff of gargonzola cheese. Ok maybe not quite that since there are meaningful divisions in the brain, but it wouldn't come out anything like it went in. This is a feature. Miscommunication forces each node to process incoming information and check it for compatibility with priors. (The fact that we do a bad job of it set aside for the moment) Lossless transfer would be 100% uncritical because there is nothing to indicate whether you are the source or the recipient of the information. This is how computer viruses work. They can tailor the payload to a known hardware/software stack. If the transmission happens losslessly then the target will run it uncritically. Lossy compression means that bad ideas can become better ideas as they encounter heads with different perspectives and experiences. It is with enough eyes all bugs are shallow. Identical sets of eyes are useless.
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Something I have come to appreciate though is how stories can relay a set of heuristic moral principles that can be generally good to follow. Some people aren’t inclined to put the work in to dig all the way down to try and seek the moral first principles like yourself. Just my 2 Sats.
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↩ replying to R
That way lies madness. "Everything is a lie"? So what, nothing's real unless you see it yourself? The moon might be made of cheese, and Australia doesn't exist unless you've visited. But of course, you don't "actually" think that... Because if you seriously believed that you couldn't operate in the world, you'd be a raving lunatic pooping pants on the street. So it's all just a front.
↩ replying to Globe99
The context was stories. Once something has been proven true it is no longer just a story. Billions of things have already been proven true including that the moon is not made out of cheese. You can build on established truth rather than believe whatever new narrative some “authority” is pushing. Haven’t pooped my pants for more than 50yrs. Might start again in the next 30yrs, who knows.
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One of @rabble 's recent podcast guests was making an interesting point that some of the original objections to the printing press, aside from the loss of control of the Papacy as the sole source of Truth, was that trust moved from social networks to intellectual authorities. E.g. "I've been buying cheese from Jörg at the market for 10 years, I trust him more than some pamphlet saying the Plague is coming." The advent of social media, for better or worse, has sort of reversed this dynamic.
the bible call for us to believe what God said without any proof just because he said it. the bible calls it faith Then he said, "I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew 18:3
It’s not necessary to convince people to be skeptical or rational, it’s enough to show the results of living that way. Trying to persuade others is always misguided; they’ll understand only when they experience the pain themselves.
You are touching on a wider/more meta problem. I think it is the whole conditioning of forcing acceptance of BS narratives and how it perverts the mindset/mental framework of people against their own natural rationality. Once their broken or brainwashed enough, the mind somehow shifts into hold onto this fear based narrative defensiveness.