Comment by Verdex
6 hours ago
My belief is that the function of a story is to provide social cover for our actions. Other people need to evaluate us (both in the moment and after the dust has settled) and while careful data analysis can do the job, who has time for that crap.
As such the story can be completely divorced from reality. The important thing is that the story is a good one. A good story transfers your social cover for yourself to your supervisor. They don't have to understand what you did and explain why it's okay that it failed. They just have to understand the story structure that you gave them. Listen to this great story, it's not my report's fault for this failure, and it's certainly not mine, just bad luck.
Additionally, the good (and sufficiently original) story is a gift because your supervisor can reuse it for new scenarios.
The good salesman gives you the story you need to excuse the purchase that will enable you to succeed. The bad salesman sells you on a story that you need a frivolous purchase.
And this is why job hoping is "bad". Eventually the incompetent employee uses up all of their good stories and management catches onto their act. It's embedded into our language. "Oh we've all heard this story before." The job hopper leaves just as their good stories are exhausted and can start over fresh at the new employer.
All of this in response to
> If we're lucky, people will manage to adapt and update their mental models to be less trustworthy of things that they can't verify
Yes, if we're lucky that is what will happen. But I fear that we're going to have to transition to a very low trust society for that to happen.
Reliance on the story is reliant on the trust that someone has done the real work. Distrust of the story implies a wider scale distrust in others and institutions.
Maybe we can add a tradition of annotating our stories with arguments and proofs. Although I've spent a two decade career desperately trying to give highly technical people arguments and proofs and I've seen stories completely unmoored from reality win out every time.
Optimistically, I'm just really bad at it and it's actually a natural transition. Pessimistically, we're in for a bumpy ride.
I'm not sure I'm quite as pessimistic as you, just because I tend to treat most predictions of how society will adapt to things as a whole as fairly low confidence, but I certainly don't disagree that it at least seems hard to imagine people getting past all this quickly.
The idea of story being how people justify making their decisions is interesting. I'm reminded of a couple of anecdotes my father has repeated a few times over the years about two distinct medical circumstances he's had. When he was first diagnosed with sleep apnea, he apparently was very skeptical that he had any reason to do anything because the sleep doctor told him things like "this will help you be less sleepy during the day" and "you won't start nodding off as you drive" when he didn't feel like either of those experiences happened to him. Eventually a different sleep doctor did convince him it was worthwhile to treat, and he's used a CPAP since then, he still seems not to feel like it would have made sense for him to start when he first got the diagnosis. Through the lens you've given, the original doctor didn't give him a compelling enough story to justify the effort on his part. On the other hand, the first time he talked to a nutritionist about changing his diet, he apparently mentioned something about how he wanted to at least be able to eat ice cream occasionally, even if it was less often, rather than not ever be able to eat it again, and the nutritionist replied "Of course! that would make life not worth living". He ended up being much more open to listening to the advice of the nutritionist than I would have expected, and I think it would be reasonable to argue that was because the nutritionist was able to give him a story that seemed compelling about what his life would be like with the suggested changes.