Forwarded: Best Story Wins
Stories catch people’s imaginations. Especially, the ones that give the perception of understanding.
We like to simplify complex topics - reduce the dimensions of the underlying information. As Maestro Nassim Taleb writes in Black Swan, “it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.”1
Explanations bind facts together, as a cue for memory, among other things. The ability to weave existing information into an easily digestible story is a valuable skill in this modern world. The act of distilling a sequence of events into an explanation can provide a sense of understanding in this world full of unknowns. This becomes dangerous when such explanations increase our impression of knowledge, severely distorting our mental representation of the world.
As kids, we come across so many fables introducing us to ethics. The story of “The Tortoise and The Hare”2 is just more captivating than reading the pithy proverb - “Slow and steady wins the race”. In addition to fables, there are a lot of popular adult books that weave philosophies of life into their plot and character arcs - to name a few personal favorites - Siddhartha, The Little Prince, and The Alchemist.
Stories can be helpful as a gateway to difficult, and hard-to-grasp topics. For example, I grew so curious about our unending universe after watching Cosmos3, our magical planet after watching Planet Earth4, and anthropology after Sapiens5. Even though a lot of the facts presented in them could be wrong or outdated, they still serve as my North star about the respective topic - I can easily find the specifics if I’m interested in digging deeper.
Maybe that is the point!
Stories may not add inherent value to our existing collective knowledge but they can be powerful enablers. Some stories can pique our curiosity about things that we don’t usually think about or take for granted.