Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

This week’s New Yorker has an article describing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project. I’ve heard about this project for years, and I’ve never understood what the point is. Collecting all of those pictures and articles and emails about one’s life just creates an overwhelming mass of data that can’t be processed effectively. It’s like the shoeboxes (or now file folders) of photos that we all have that we never look at because they’re not organized and we can’t find the one we want.

The dumbest thing I read in the article was their failed attempt to write software to do “auto-storytelling”.

“What we’re storing, really, is snippets and scenes and episodes,” he says. “A movie tells a story, and we’re not doing that.” What Bell and the others imagine, ultimately, is a function by which a computer assembles a person’s autobiography, which he or she authorizes and passes on.

What they’re talking about is creating the self story. But no computer can do that. They are operating under the misguided belief that facts alone tell the story of one’s life. I mention it in that post, but history is so much more than a recitation of facts. It’s the assembling of facts retroactively into a pattern that allows us to make sense of the facts, to tell the story.

We don’t know what the facts mean to us until we look back later and find out what happened - then we know which facts mattered. Let’s imagine that I’m out at the bar having a drink. I see a cute girl, talk to her for a bit, and get her number (indulge my fantasy here for a second). Is this fact significant in my later life? We can’t tell at this point. Maybe I get dissed after one date. Maybe we go on to have a long-term relationship. The fact of me meeting her in a bar stays the same, but the story changes depending on what happens.

The whole point of telling a story is that it lets us understand the underlying patterns that drive events. Stories are our way of making sense of the world. We feel uncomfortable when events happen that are beyond our understanding. As soon as we can come up with a story that explains what happened (even if it doesn’t fit the facts exactly), we feel better. “He dumped me because he wasn’t ready for a real commitment.” “She dumped me because she thought I didn’t make enough money.” “I got fired because my boss had it in for me.” The story doesn’t even have to make sense to somebody else - the story is the way of coping with the unexpected sequence of events.

Another problem I have with the MyLifeBits project is that it’s inefficient and unhelpful. I don’t want raw mass data dumps of my life. If I were a manager, and I asked my team to get me the sales numbers, I would be furious if they just dumped spreadsheets on me. They need to analyze the data, figure out the trends, and summarize it for me in what is essentially the story of sales.

I’m reading the book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert cites research saying that our brain does that analysis for us. Our brains don’t remember all the details of our lives - it remembers key points, the bits that differed from the routine, the outline of the story. When we are reconstructing what happened, our brain fills in all sorts of details that may not be strictly factual, but that were irrelevant to the story so they weren’t stored. The brain stores the high-level management report, not the original raw data.

There are risks associated with that approach. As a trained scientist, I understand the importance of keeping the raw data around so that I can go back and re-analyze it later. But re-analysis takes time and energy, so it makes sense that the brain evolved to optimize for efficiency. One of Gilbert’s points is that we are deluding ourselves if we think we remember the raw sensory data, and we need to take into account the high-level nature of our memories. But I’ll get to that in a separate book review.

Scientists and engineers love raw data. It has a primal quality to it, a sense of endless possibility - who knows what patterns will emerge? But raw data is incomplete. It doesn’t mean anything. It needs us to make sense of it, to find the patterns, so that we can use those patterns to make future decisions. Without stories to bind it together, raw data is useless.

I’d much rather have this blog than MyLifeBits. This blog is where I take all of that raw data from my life and simmer it down into key points that I want to remember. This is where I record the stories and thoughts and ideas that help me make sense of the world, that I can use to make decisions. It may be a compressed representation (the backup is only 4MB), but it’s far more helpful to me than the reams of data coming out of MyLifeBits.

I was thinking about the P.S. in my learn-and-latch post and trying to figure out the process by which people absorb general patterns into themselves. In fact, what are those general patterns? What forms do they take?

My thesis of the day is that the general patterns I was talking about are stories. I circle back to the topic of stories pretty regularly, as I find that stories are extremely powerful patterns that our brains are structured to absorb. For instance, I regularly tell stories that I don’t know the origin of; I don’t remember where I read or heard the story or even many of the specific details, but the general pattern of the story itself was memorable and sticks with me. I think the reason for that is that our brains are wired to remember patterns, not details, and our predilection for stories reflects that.

So what makes a story a good general pattern? And how do we even evaluate the “good-ness” of a pattern/story? My evaluation metric is going to be whether a story sticks with people and influences their behavior. As usual on this topic, I’m influenced by Orson Scott Card’s story The Originist, which has the wonderful quote, “the vigor of a community depends on the allegiance of its members, and the allegiance can be created and enhanced by the dissemination of epic stories.” Stories create community. Becoming part of the community involves learning the origin myths and the identity stories and incorporating those into your self story. A great story is one which people take to heart, that changes their behavior, that causes them to self-identify as part of a community.

Constructing these sort of stories is really tricky. Without any details, the story doesn’t seem real, because there’s nothing to anchor our perceptions. More details make the story more specific and real. But too many details doesn’t work either; somebody that drones on, unable to resist talking about every last detail, is incredibly boring. A good storyteller leaves out certain details so that people can project themselves into the story, lettiing them fill in the blanks.

Getting the right details is important. A storyteller will tailor the details to the audience, making references to things they would know so as to anchor the story in their reality. I was noticing this last night when out with friends; I was telling a story about my time at TEP, and slipped in an aside to the other TEPs present of who the protagonist was; since they knew who he was, it helped to ground the story, since they knew that this was totally expected behavior on his part. The story was still funny to the non-TEPs, but I think the extra detail I threw in to make the connection for the TEPs helped.

One of the reasons we often struggle with integrating into a new group or community is that they don’t share the same references as us. So the stories require extra explanation for them to make sense. It takes time before we learn the back history and meet the people of the group so that we can appreciate the stories. But once we become fully integrated, we have taken ownership of the community stories as our own stories, and it almost doesn’t matter whether we witnessed the story or not. The same stories get told about the same people, even if the names keep changing.

Another aspect of a good story is that it should create a template for others to follow. The stories that last are the ones that are exemplars of the desired community behavior. We reward such behavior with immortality through stories. In the context of a community like TEP, the stories almost always revolve around otherwise intelligent people who do odd (and often stupid) things. The Hanging Couch, the Musical Stairwell, Water War stories, etc. In other communities, other things are rewarded, whether it’s great hacks (either computer or other) or self-sacrifice or awesome layouts in frisbee or whatever. The stories that define a community are the best guide as to how an ideal member of the community should behave.

It’s interesting to try to take all of these factors and use them in attempting to evaluate the quality of the construction of a story. Is the story well or badly constructed? It depends on what you are trying to achieve in a story. If it’s to entertain folks over dinner, keeping it snappy and concise is the way to go, and you get instant feedback. If you are trying to create an origin myth for one’s community, you have to consider these other factors, the balance between detail and generality, and it takes much longer to evaluate whether you are successful.

It’s very difficult to self-consciously construct such origin myths. It seems too calculated, too artificial (the example of L. Ron Hubbard to the contrary). The stories have to evolve, to be told and re-told, by people who never even met the people originally in the story, eroding the details such as names and dates and specific places until only the essential bones of the story remain. As the community evolves, the stories change to match.

Patterns. Stories. Communities. Welcome to my mind.

Re-reading my searching for continuity post, I find it somewhat amusing how easy it was for me to construct a story that fits my previous patterns of behavior. The story of our self is always miraculously consistent, no matter how our motivations shifted and changed along the way. It reminds me of the comic book fan practice of retconning.

Retcon is an abbreviation for retroactive continuity. It comes up a lot in comic books, where the writers on a given series will change, and then write something that is clearly inconsistent with what was written by an earlier writer. The diehard fans would notice the inconsistency and complain. So Marvel started giving No Prizes to fans who could make up a creative explanation for the apparent inconsistency, retroactively making the gaffe consistent with the known history. Hence, retroactive continuity. It’s basically a geekier way of saying 20/20 hindsight.

What’s interesting to me is that in my previous post, I was retconning my life. There is no real theme in the things I was interested in, no “prime directive” that was motivating me. I was trying to retroactively create a thread that tied all of my different interests together, rather than just admit I am a dabbler. And it basically worked. By only choosing the details that supported the point I was trying to make, and ignoring other inconsistencies, I created a story that unified my life. Sort of.

This is yet another example of how our mind fills in the blanks, which is a topic I’ve been meaning to get back to for months. There are so many degrees of freedom that I could come up with many different stories, all of which fit the stated events of my life. Which is oddly liberating. There is no One True Me. There are a multiplicity of me’s, waiting to be called into being by my actions. The actions I take moving forward define the story I want to tell about myself, and I can find a way to fit all of my previous actions into that story through the power of retconning. Of course, it’s also terrifying, because it means I can be anybody. Who do I want to be?

One of the issues brought up in response to my last post was that we, as humans, are really poor at statistically evaluating risk. We’re really good at remembering spectacular stories, or relevant anecdotes, but we’re really bad at taking numbers in the abstract and turning them into guides to behavior. And this isn’t just true in the evaluation of risk. In some sense, we use stories to define who we are. I was thinking about this and realized that the usage of stories ties together a whole bunch of scattered interests that I have (and was the subject of one of the first rants I wrote).

Anybody who has a stake in persuading us to do something understands the power of stories. Advertising is the obvious example. What are commercials other than miniature stories, designed to elicit the appropriate consumer behavior from the audience? Or, as Neal Postman described it, the “Parable of the Ring around the Collar”. Jesus used parables as well. He understood that moral laws such as the Golden Rule would be too abstract for most people, so he used parables to bring it down to specifics of how he expected people to behave in difficult situations.

Politics is another obvious application of stories as persuasion tactics. In 1988, the story of Willie Horton became a millstone around the neck of Dukakis, and eventually helped drag him to defeat. I don’t know if Horton was an exception to the rule, or a commonplace occurrence, but it was irrelevant. All it took was one case, because it created the story. Similarly, the cognitive framing that Lakoff refers to is an attempt to use language to evoke a story in our brain. “Tax relief” evokes the story of the cruel government oppressor, stealing our money away.

Stories are how we structure our memories. If you ask me about what I was doing on June 25, 1994, I’d say, “Um, what?” But, when you prompt me that that was the day that my friends Brian and Jen got married, I’d be able to tell you all sorts of details about that day. Our memories are not filed like a computer’s, with dates and times. Our memories are filed like del.icio.us, with tags on various memories that are associatively linked in a spaghetti-like fashion. (No, I’m not a cognitive scientist, and I don’t even play one on TV, but it makes sense to me). In fact, I might even argue that communication in all of its forms is motivated by the desire for us to tell stories to each other, to say something.

I suspect that our brains are still fairly unevolved from the hunter-gatherer state in a lot of ways - Dunbar’s number is a good example. And there’s really no need for a hunter-gatherer to have to process data in a numerical fashion or in an abstract sense. Simple stories in the form of myths are sufficient. And I can’t blame people that are paid for it to take advantage of that by framing things in the form of simple stories. But I wish that we could use that power for higher purposes.

Stories are one of the most powerful ways for us to get outside of our immediate experience and feel what it’s like to be somebody in another place or another culture. It can break down the barriers between us - the story of “America” and what it means to be in the land of opportunity and freedom is one of the few things that ties together this sprawling country of ours, from the liberals of the West Coast to the conservative Midwest, from the newest immigrant to the WASP who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.

Wouldn’t it be great if we started developing similar myths that made us aware that we are members of a global community rather than separated by our outdated nation-states? It would seem to be obvious in light of the many global problems facing us, from terrorism to global warming to ever-more-interconnected economies. But because the last several centuries have been devoted to developing the story of the nation-state (if my feeble historical knowledge is any guide, the first nation state in the modern sense was Bismarck’s Germany in the 1800s), we are trapped in that story line, that frame, and haven’t figured out how to move on from there.

The other thing that is really necessary is the awareness of strangers as more than an abstract concept. Because most of us do not deal with people unlike ourselves in our daily life, it is easy to demonize them as The Other, rather than realizing that they are probably people who are mostly like ourselves, just struggling to get by in this world. One of the things I liked about the Extreme Democracy salon was Tom Atlee’s presentation on deliberative communal decision making, how even people who thought they believed very different things were able to find commonalities when they talked about the issues in their lives. It kind of relates to an old post of mine about examining our assumptions. And it leads me to think that if we could use stories to help increase our connections, rather than using it to foment separatism (e.g. against Muslims, or “welfare mothers”, or proponents of gay marriage, or Indian companies outsourcing jobs), wouldn’t the world be a better place? I know I’m being idealistic again, since it’s in people’s self interest to try to make their slice of the pie bigger at the expense of others (Thanks Mancur Olson). But stories would be one way to try to make people aware that our self interests are now so intertwined that what is good for one is often good for all. Anyway.

There’s a lot of fertile ground for thought here. Actually, while I was thinking about this entry, and realizing that it ties several broad areas of my interest together, I started randomly speculating that if I were ever to write a book, this would be a good topic. Use the examples I gave above as a kick start to explore several chapters’ worth of case studies of how we use stories to remember our past, to persuade each other, and to organize our lives. Then go interview some cognitive scientists to get the basis for that. Plus some historians for their perspective (oral history, bards and storytellers, etc.). It could be pretty cool. And the title would be “The Animal Who Tells Stories”; hence the title of this post. Anyway. I’m sure there’s a bunch of similar books out there already (if you know of any, please let me know). And I doubt I’ll ever get motivated enough to pull it together.

I’ve spent some time over the past couple days thinking about why Infinite Jest annoyed me so much. I went and read several gushing reviews of the book, as well as interviews with Wallace where he explains what he was trying to do. Part of what Wallace was apparently trying to convey was that life is messy and complicated and it doesn’t come to a neat conclusion. He wasn’t trying to write a typical narrative novel; in fact, he’s explicitly rejecting the conventions associated with the form. I think that’s a copout, though. If you’re writing a novel, you’re making an implicit agreement with the reader that you will follow the conventions, or at least have a good reason to not follow them. To have the reader work for 900 pages and then say “Ha! Just kidding!” is an elementary school amusement, of the order of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.

While I was talking to my friend Wilfred about it, he pointed out that there are no finite points in postmodern relativism. Like the game of Eschaton, the map is not the territory. But, again, if that’s the point of Infinite Jest, I cry copout. I don’t need a novel to tell me that. I can look at the world and know that it’s infinite and unable to be described completely in writing. But does that mean we should despair and not even make an attempt to write? Of course not!

Why do we write? We know that we can not capture all of life, so what’s the point? Here’s my answer. We may not be able to create a complete map, but we can create a useful one. All of writing is an attempt to create a useful abstraction of the world. It is distilling it down to interesting or useful tidbits that can be captured. It’s making a map of life that others can hopefully use to assist them in finding their way, by benefitting from our experience.

Why do I write this blog? It’s because I like trying to create such abstractions. To try to distill my experience and thoughts into little nuggets that I can refer back to later. I know that most of my writing contains gross simplifications and generalizations. But that does not necessarily invalidate its viewpoint, so long as it is understood that my views are on a specific subject at a specific time, and not a general description of life. Yes, my map is not the territory. But it can still be a useful guide in navigating this complex world.

Why do people write nonfiction works? They are often sifting through their experience and sharing the portions that they think are relevant. Just because Kunstler is tremendously biased against cars doesn’t mean we should ignore everything he says if we like cars. He may not capture all the subtleties of the debate in developing a community, but he provides a viewpoint, one that we can weigh and judge in light of our own experience. And if it makes sense to us, we integrate it into our own guides to the world, our own maps.

I love that feeling when I read something, and a little light goes on, and my view of the world is shifted in response to this new viewpoint. Reading that first interview with Lakoff was like that - it just opened up a new way of looking at politics and the world that made so much sense. There are often a few nuggets in any book I read that I want to hold on to. I started writing book reviews for myself just for that reason - to grab the bits that jumped out at me, that made me open my eyes and look at something in a new way.

I think the same motivation holds true for fiction works as well. Authors are trying to communicate something, get an idea across to their readers. Wallace had several points that he was trying to make with Infinite Jest. I don’t think he was entirely successful, but that may be just because I’m still annoyed. A romance novelist is reinforcing a fantasy view of the world where love at first sight exists, and everybody lives happily ever after. A science fiction writer may be speculating on what the effects of technology will be in the future. There is a reason they’re writing, and it’s to get some idea out of their brain and into the reader’s.

And it’s hard. Communication is one of the trickiest things we do as human beings. Given the incredibly low bandwidth we have to communicate with in speech and writing, it’s amazing that we can convey what we are feeling and thinking to each other. I’m influenced here by the book The User Illusion and Norretranders’s description of exformation, which is the enormous amount of context that we each use to interpret the words on a screen in front of us, or a conversation with a friend. It’s similar to the idea of reality coefficients, where it’s really hard to communicate with somebody who’s using a different context or a different set of assumptions.

Which brings us back to postmodernism, oddly enough. One of the great insights of postmodernism was that the meaning of a work was not solely in the work itself. It was also in the context that a reader brought to the work. Using that in the example of Infinite Jest, Wallace intentionally evoked the context of a narrative novel, but then intentionally rejected the conventions associated with it. He broke the implicit contract he had with his readers. Given his affection for postmodernism, perhaps he was trying to point out this importance of context explicitly by showing how much we depend on it. Perhaps.

P.S. This post was written while wearing a bandanna, one of David Foster Wallace’s trademarks. Thought you’d like to know.
P.P.S. Any postmodern theory referenced in this post is unlikely to be accurate, since I am a total poser when it comes to postmodern theory.

I was talking to a friend last night who passed along an interesting observation to me: that people actively seek out evidence to support their worldviews. I’ve always believed that our perceptions color our view of the world in a passive way; that we see what we expect to see. Where one person sees the wonders of science and evolution, another sees evidence of the Grand Design of the Creator. But I hadn’t ever really considered it something that people did actively. It’s interesting because it begs the question of how one can adjust one’s worldview to change one’s life in a desired fashion. What does it even mean to try to support one’s worldview?

In a totally separate conversation over AIM today, a friend and I were talking about the new Mel Gibson Passion movie, and he commented: “i’m really perplexed as to why people adamantly believe this is historically accurate”. My off-the-cuff response was: “these are people who’ve never taken a real liberal arts class in their life, so they don’t understand how history is constructed. history isn’t a recitation of facts, it’s a viewpoint - a construction of a narrative.” I thought it was a pretty clever thing to say at the time, but that’s it.

I later realized that these two separate quotes are conceptually linked. And the link is the idea of a self story, a narrative that we tell about ourselves. This idea of the self story is a large part of Orson Scott Card’s work, and I have been attracted to it for many years. Card’s view is that all of us have a vision of ourselves, one that we strive to support. We pick and choose pieces of our life to support that vision. An inescapable continuation of this idea is that nobody is evil in their own minds; they have constructed a self story where their actions make sense, no matter how inexplicable they are to the rest of the world (I allude to this in my rant about extremism). I’ve played with this idea in other forms before, but I want to return to it again in this forum and explore it a bit more.

Let’s start with the history quote. There’s a common saying that “History is written by the winners.” This acknowledges that there is no such thing as an objective history. A recitation of facts is not history, despite the lesson plans of our middle school teachers. A historian generally has a theory in mind, a narrative that they are trying to support, and they go looking for evidence for that theory. This was something I didn’t quite understand about history when I mused about this before, although I did apply the idea to literary criticism. But another quote about history also illustrates the point I’m trying to make: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana was not saying that we would literally relive the past, of course. He was pointing out that by learning from the stories that passed before, we can learn how to live better in the future.

It all comes back to stories. This is Card’s view of the world - he believes that what separates us as humans from animals is our ability to tell stories, and our ability to incorporate stories and myths into ourselves and make them part of our self story. Put that way, it sounds a bit detached, but let’s use the example of myths of America. One such myth is that promulgated by the NRA, that being an American is about being able to bear arms against our oppressors. Another is the nineteenth century doctrine of Manifest Destiny. People believe in these myths, take them to heart, and use them to define what it means to be an American. This is why one of the most powerful epithets that can be used in a debate is to be un-American, with the added confusion that the term means many different things, depending on which set of myths about America one subscribes to.

Getting back to the original discussion, what does it mean to actively seek out evidence to support one’s worldview? It means living our life in such a way as to support our self story, our ongoing narrative of who we are. If we think of ourselves as socially awkward, we will throw ourselves at difficult social situations, fail and then justify the failure by saying that it’s just who we are. If we think of ourselves as having bad luck, we will find a way to interpret events in such a way as to support that. My friend even posited cases like having a belief that all cars fall apart, and then driving one’s car into the ground to prove it. The point I’m trying to make is that we live our lives in accordance with our self-constructed narrative.

How do you change that narrative? If it’s self-constructed, why is it so hard to change one’s outlook? Why shouldn’t I be able to say “Poof! I’m more sociable!” I think that this can be attributed to lack of knowledge, habit and fear. Lack of knowledge, in that it’s hard to realize that one can take better control of one’s life. Card’s work also expresses this idea; in Speaker for the Dead, a character says “We [humans] question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.” If you have always assumed that you are a certain way, you never think to question it. Habit, because once you get used to doing things a certain way, it’s hard to change. You settle into a routine. And fear. Fear is the toughest one. What we’re talking about here is altering the self story. This strikes at the very core of who we are. We are our self story. So changing that means changing who we are at a fundamental level. This is justifiably scary - who are we if we’re not ourselves?

So it’s hard. I think there’s hope of doing it. But reconstructing one’s narrative in such a way as to make the change one wants without affecting how it integrates into the rest of one’s worldview is tricky to say the least. But taking control of one’s life can be empowering. Many works of fiction that I like explore this idea, with a notable one being V for Vendetta. Lois McMaster Bujold has a great quote along these lines from Countess Vorkosigan - something like (terribly paraphrased because I can’t find the quote right now) “If one accepts the consequences of one’s actions, then the corollary is if one desires some consequences, one better start taking action in such a way as to make those consequences happen.”

Anyway. This has degenerated into even less coherence than usual. I’ll pick up another time with a narrative-centric viewpoint of the world, applying the idea of narrative construction to everything from marketing to ourselves to government.