Quotes About Narrative

narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations

Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test.

La narratividad nace de una necesidad biológica innata conforme a la cual tendemos a reducir la dimensionalidad;

The first of the problems of human nature that we examine in this section, the one just illustrated above, is what I call the narrative fallacy.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them.

Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet.

Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.

but that is not where the significance of the story lies.

Besides narrative and causality, journalists and public intellectuals of the sound-bite variety do not make the world simpler. Instead, they almost invariably make it look far more complicated than it is.

Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas;

history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers)

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

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called "observational," ones in which the researcher finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data, can therefore fall into the trap of an invented narrative.

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

Someone with optionality—the right to pick and choose his story—is only reporting on what suits his purpose.

you need a story to replace a story

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.

In the end we are being driven by history, all the while thinking that we are doing the driving.

Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

I have two goals. First, that readers be interested, drawn by a historical account, amused by its comic aspects, saddened by the tragic elements, captured by the possibilities of the past; and second, that readers be aware that there could be another way of looking at things besides the one I offer. I'm not giving a lesson or a sermon, I'm offering a dialogue, as I said before.

What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.

To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it.