Quotes About Narrative

A person's disposition should serve as a narrative of their lives not the pigmentation of their skin.

You're the best bad decision I ever made, and you are, by far, my favorite story to tell.

If the stones that we walked on could talk, they would surely tell our story." - Magnetic Reverie

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

You need a story to displace a story.

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative. Ideas come and go, stories stay.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly

We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.

It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.

The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.

The "persecution" of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

Author discussed what he calls the narrative fallacy. This refers to our limited ability to look at a sequence of facts without weaving an explanation into them.

Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest—and the more volatility and dispersion, the rosier the best story will be (and the darker the worst story). Someone

Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right—the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flâneur.

The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?†

The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models—those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.

It took me an entire lifetime to find out what my generator is. It is: We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.

You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.

narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and