Comments on: Tell Me a Story, but Tell Me the Truth

By: Anne Truitt Zelenka » Journalism and Objectivity

Anne Truitt Zelenka » Journalism and Objectivity — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:17:36 +0000

[…] with in trying to figure out my own approach to blogging and to journalism. I addressed it in Tell Me a Story, but Tell Me the Truth. I wondered about it in On Covering Web 2.0 for […]

By: thomas otter

thomas otter — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:04:02 +0000

Anne,
I don’t think Taleb is against storytelling, otherwise his books wouldn’t be so richly narrative. What he is against is the use of simplified models to predict the future. Basically looking into the past to predict the future is overrated.

He is pretty close to Karl Popper.
“There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.”

Taleb says the same thing, just in a more accessible way.

His motto is

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know.…” (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).

My thoughts on Taleb here. http://theotherthomasotter.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/fooled-by-randomness-black-swans-donkeys-and-turkeys/

I’m especially fond of the term Hindsight bias.

By: Anne Truitt Zelenka » Making Meaning with Marketing: Lois Kelly’s Beyond Buzz

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:08:41 +0000

[…] meaningful conversation isn’t easy. You need to tell stories but tell the truth at the same time. Stories encode meaning by highlighting the important and valuable details, by stringing together […]

By: Anne Z

Anne Z — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:31:19 +0000

Deb: I definitely do better with stories too, I think it’s a bias most of us have (maybe not Taleb!) Thanks for the suggestion of Creative Nonfiction. I haven’t seen it but will check it out.

Joshua: I think of Gladwell and Surowiecki too in this context.

By: Joshua Porter

Joshua Porter — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:49:17 +0000

Great piece, Anne!

I was thinking about different writers as I read your piece. I think it would be interesting to create a matrix or some graphic that shows where non-fiction writers are in relation to each other.

I remember comparing Malcolm Gladwell with James Surowiecki (both writers for the New Yorker) when Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds came out. Gladwell is a tremendous story teller, but I just don’t believe all his assertions. Surowiecki, on the other hand, doesn’t quite have the narrative genius of Gladwell, but I trust his writing more. In the end, I would rely on Surowiecki’s arguments, but I often tell others of Gladwell more because of the power of his stories.

By: --Deb

--Deb — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:34:16 +0000

My favorite kind of non-fiction is the kind that tells a story. For whatever reason, my brain just latches onto points in stories with perfect clarity, but struggles with the drier stuff. I have noticed, too, that so many books on writing–not so much the style guides, as the “inspiration,” how-to kinds–focus more on fiction than non-fiction. I’m not entirely sure why, but they do. Maybe because writing a great novel is one of those “should-be” goals for a writer? As if, no matter how successfully they write in history or business or journalism, the “writer” vibe still requires fiction to truly count as a writer.

Oh, and have you seen the magazine, “Creative Nonfiction?” It’s all about writing and showcasing good nonfiction.

By: Stephanie Booth

Stephanie Booth — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:01:55 +0000

Contrast:

“If narrativity causes us to see past events as more predictable, more expected, and less random than they actually were, then we should be able to make it work for us as therapy against some of the stings of randomness.

[…]

Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You feel less guilty for not having avoided certain events; you feel less responsible for it. Things appear as if they were bound to happen.

If you work in a randomness-laden profession, as we see, you are likely to suffer burnout effects from that constant second-guessing of your past actions in terms of what played out subsequently. Keeping a diary is the least you can do in these circumstances.” (p. 73)

So, obviously, not evil in all circumstances

By: Stephanie Booth

Stephanie Booth — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:56:59 +0000

I think that the reason he argues so strongly against it is that his focus is “prediction of what is going to happen”. In that respect, the fact that humans naturally are drawn to narration doesn’t help (if one accepts his thesis that Black Swans are important, of course).

By: Anne Z

Anne Z — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:45:18 +0000

Stephanie: I think Taleb’s clearly arguing against the narrative fallacy in the book, see p63: “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. (It is actually a fraud, but, to be more polite, I will call it a fallacy.) The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event.”

By: Anne Z

Anne Z — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:40:19 +0000

Thanks for the clarification, Stephanie. I read the book a while ago and don’t remember Taleb’s exact position on the narrative fallacy. Will check myself too.