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.
Replies (7)
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.
I've seen a UFO. I don't care if people believe me. I'll only tell the story if I feel like it.
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.
I for one am interested. I'm a scientist, but also have been studying the modern UFO phenomenon and think there's something to it.
UFO's are in the 1% in the phrase "99% of conventional wisdom is correct."
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.
we just need lossless compression and a way to transfer this between brains
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.
