Small Stories, part 1
Just finished reading “What we believe, but cannot prove” a collection of essays by prominent thinkers about theories or hypothesis that they consider true but have no factual evidence to support. It’s an uneven book. Some of the authors are apparently trying to prove how clever they are by playing word games with the question itself (What is something that you believe but cannot prove?). Others write about things which are so scientifically specific as to be rather meaningless to those of us without advanced astrophysics training. There are some that are quite excellent. And some which are odd.
One of the odd ones is from Jean Paul Schmetz who believes but cannot prove that most of the things that students are taught in Economics 101 are false. I find this interesting because I thought that everyone already knew this. The idea that what is taught in Economics 101 has any bearing on how economics really works or that the people teaching it actually believe what they are teaching is one that does not hold a lot of credence. There was an excellent article that I found a while ago (which I think I have currently lost) which talked about just this situation: where students progressing through economics curriculum learn that everything they had initially studied really doesn’t work.
Of course, its not like the professors are maliciously lying to these students. It is more that they are telling them “small stories.” It’s a concept that I ran across in an Elizabeth Bear novel I just finished (Worldwired, great book). Small stories are the stories we tell to children to explain things in simple, often “not-quite-true” fashion. A small story is telling a child that gravity is the force that keeps us from floating away off the Earth. Which is true in a fashion, but it really does not accurately describe what gravity is. But it does give a child a reference point for understanding and reassures them that they’re not going to float away. Of course, it gets more complicated when you have to explain things like balloons and airplanes, escape velocity, and the concept of gravity wells in the space-time fabric. So small stories never tell the whole story or even the right story, but they allow someone to grasp a concept enough to move forward.
In Worldwired, the concept is expanded from stories for children to the idea of stories that are told between adults who work in highly complicated fields who otherwise couldn’t talk to each other. How does a xenobiologist talk to a space pilot? How does a xenobiologist talk to an astrophysicist? As knowledge becomes more specialized, communication has to become more general. Stories needs to be smaller and smaller in order to be easily accessible. How does a scientist with thirty years of experience in a field, whose entire course of reasoning is based upon a foundation of basic knowledge, explain derived inferences to someone who does not even understand the basic foundation. That’s what small stories are about.