What knowledge do you assume you, or others know? What assumptions do you have that may be holding you back? Dr Ann Clarke explains how the assumption of knowledge is the death of curiosity. Test and destroy it.
Narrative Fallacy: Biological Tricks Played on Your Mind and How to Hack Them for Better Cognitive Performance
The narrative fallacy is a concept I learnt from Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan.
When there is too much information we like to summarise, simplify and tell stories.
It’s how Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory and founder of Memrise, can learn the order of a shuffled deck of cards in just minutes, or recount the order of over 2,000 ones and zeros in under a half hour.
Using your imagination to create and tell stories is the perfect data compression tool.
However, it comes at a cost.
The human (and robot) nature to compress data means that we automatically look at sequences and weave an explanation into them, an arrow of relationship.
“Where this propensity can go wrong”, Taleb writes, “is when it increases our impression of understanding.”
For example:
- The mirror broke and then misfortune came.
- Interest rates went down and then house prices went up.
- I did press-ups and then I got a girlfriend.
The Narrative Fallacy
Creating arrows of relationship lead to false understanding.
You do a certain activity and gain a result. So you do the same activity expecting the same result. Riddled with error, this leads to some extreme prediction problems.
Lawrence Neal, author and podcaster of Corporate Warrior asked me in an interview, “Tom, how do you choose your projects?”
He was referring to the vast array of things I’ve done: worked in a corporate communications agency, opened a design agency, become a suit tailor, written and published a book, as well as many smaller projects: Capoeira, Krav Maga, Google Chrome extensions, “Britain’s sexiest man” and more.
Had he asked me a month before I read The Black Swan, I would have told him what I had told everyone else: a story which made them all link together. Factors, reason and logic. “I did this because…”, “I wanted this so I decided to…”, and “I’m someone who…”
I fell for the narrative fallacy. I lied to myself. I was a Narrative Fraud.
Reasons for The Narrative Fallacy
1: Information overload
The main reason for the narrative fallacy is to compress data. It would be impossible for us to remember everything and everyone. We do not have the cognitive capacity to do that. The same is true of computers. Therefore, we learn to recognise patterns: I can’t remember every detail of my brother’s face, but I remember the pattern. I can’t remember exactly how society works, but I remember the pattern.
When we remember patterns (for example, a Mind Map) it’s easier to learn. Yet in doing so we leave out The Black Swan and think chaos is more ordered than it really is.
If the pattern has a sequence; if it’s repeated or needs to be stored in a certain order, then we squeeze it into our memory along with rules. The degree of randomness is called Kolmogorov complexity – see below.
2: Physiology: Dopamine
The chemical dopamine regulates moods and “supplies an internal reward system in the brain”. A side effect is that a higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection.
I say ‘vulnerability’ because while in some cases it may be beneficial, for example in Brain Training Games, in many it is not. You start to see patterns where there are none: “astrology, superstitions, economics, and tarrot-card reading”.
Dopamine is not the reason for the narrative fallacy, but a correlation between the physical and the neural.
3: Kolmogorov Complexity
Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov was a 20th-century Russian mathematician. A probability genius. He understood that the combination of data, rules and logic can produce an output far greater than the sum of its parts: DNA, for instance.
When we remember something, we tend to combine the memory with context too: where we learnt it, when we learnt it, from whom we learnt it. We provide narrative. This helps in the retrieval of knowledge.
The Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is the length of the shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces the object as output.
Replace computer program with neural pathway and it’s the same thing: How complex data is can be measured by how short the neural pathway is to retrieve it. As our brains are in the business of making everything as simple as possible, it tries to find patterns and creates some rules around it.
“And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.”
Why is the narrative fallacy bad?
When you look back on your own life and construct a story around its events, the conclusion is that you were always in the driving seat. Everything was under your control. You chose to do it. If luck runs your way and these events lead to success, then as Ryan Holiday warns in Ego Is The Enemy, you might come crashing down without understanding why.
Chance and randomness leads to serendipity for which another word is opportunity. If, however, you’re ignorant of that fact because you’ve become a narrative fraud, you’ll be blind to it.
In truth:
- I read Anthropology at UCL because a friend said it sounded like something I’d like.
- I got a job at a health practice because I saw it on Gumtree.
- At that health practice I met someone who worked at the UK’s leading corporation communications agency.
- I applied for a job there and got it.
- It was tough, with long hours and low pay. I didn’t enjoy it and so looked for something else.
- I happened to meet the founder of a suit tailoring firm; a topic I also happened to be reading about. The combination of events and feelings led to me applying for a job.
- Deepak Tailor, founder of LatestFreeStuff, happened to come to one of my networking events one evening. We stayed in touch for years and a thousand chance events later we’re starting a business together.
- Chance, chance, chance, chance, chance.
I would love to say it was all part of a master plan. That there was a direction or an arrow of relationship.
For years, that is what I did say. It’s especially hard not to at dinner parties. Yet people who do this run the risk of creating an identity for themselves that may not be one of which they are in control. If you’ve become successful by chance, but believe your own false narrative, then when luck runs away you feel failure.
It’s for this reason South Korea and Japan have extortionately high suicide rates: young men take bad luck personally – they feel it is a lack of skill, knowledge or wisdom.
How to de-contruct your narrative fallacy
- First, tell yourself the story you tell everyone else. Who you are, what you do, why you do it. Write it down if you have to: Your story. How did you get there? What made you do it? Why does it interest you?
- Then go back to the beginning. How did you really do it? How did you even hear about it? Where were you when you found it? For what reason were you actually looking for it? Who told you about it? Was it by chance?
- Continue to the next stage of your story. Who are the people that pointed you in the direction? What books, films, articles gave you ah ha moments? When did you roll the dice and take a gamble? At which part were you in the right place at the right time?
- Think hard: if one event did not happen, which would it be that would have meant none of the rest did either? Find your keystone moment.
Wider Consequences of the Narrative Fallacy
So far, the narrative fallacy seems pretty harmless. Yet what happens when people who believe their own false narrative then teach them to their own children?
What happens when economists and so-called ‘experts’ create a causation narrative about events which led to a certain result (boom / bust) use it as the basis of Government policy?
What happens when a scientist says saturated fats (not sugar) are bad for you and cause the entire Western world to accept it as fact, change behaviour, and then reinforce it in future generations?
Our own narratives overlap with those of others. If they’re false, which most are, it becomes ever more difficult and complex to overcome.
De-Learn, Re-examine, and Be Open to Chance
If we can’t trust friends, relatives, Doctors and popular publications, who can we trust? As Doug McGuff wrote in Body By Science, it’s tempting to reply, “to science”.
However, “in this role, one has to be careful to look closely at the studies, as not all the studies represent an honest attempt to find the truth.”
Simply looking at introductions and conclusions is not enough. You must look at the evidence and methodology too. Life hacking is a process of de-learning and re-examination.
De-construct your narrative fallacy and you’ll see how much of a role chance played. This is not a bad thing. On the contrary it is good. Be open to chance and look out for positive black swans: moments of opportunity that may have profound beneficial consequence.
Photo by Internet Archive Book Images
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Good article, might be worth explaining in the comments section what positive and negative Black Swans are, just incase some people haven’t come across Taleb.