HMM. THE UTILITY OF STORYTELLING.
It’s more that they’re universally accessible and they are accessible without specialist experience, study, or training.
It’s also more that they convey general principles more successfully (intuitively) even if they convey specifics poorly.
It’s also that all communication is in some sense storytelling. The question is, the degree of abstraction.
As such empathically accessible stories are more accessible and superior for conveyance of psychological content, while abstract accessible stories are superior for content that is NOT empathically accessible.
“Or as we say, calculus is hard. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Superstition, Sophistry and Deceit are easy. That doesn’t mean they’re right.”
Not everything can be dumbed down. However it is possible that everything important to teach a five year old about successfully (and morally) navigating life can be. 😉 There is more genius in Aesop than there is in most of the books of philosophical discourse.
Cheers
Reply addressees: @whatifalthist
Source date (UTC): 2025-05-10 02:32:34 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1921030573801541632
Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1920859142496960926
IN REPLY TO:
@whatifalthist
On a neurological basis, and this is where Jordan Peterson was genuinely an academic trailblazer before he became a political pundit, humans prioritize stories since they’re one of the most antifragile ways to convey info in a complex ways. Basically the story is the only way to convey large amounts of information in a way with high context and detail. This is why the field of history has for thousands of years percolated across the general public while science or metaphysics have not. That’s since the narrative structure of how humans live history is infinitely more comprehensible to people than a science textbook. If science develops a way to narrative itself, it will be the best thing for human progress since the public will be passively aware of scientific concepts which will raise the computational power of the culture engine enormously.
The story of the Bible is an easy example where it shows what did and didn’t work over Jewish history as a sort of play through video game model for how society or life works. Lord of the Rings can encapsulate highly complex theme of modern times or western civilization that would take an academic thousands of pages to explain intellectually, subconsciously added to the collective zeitgeist. Human society operates through empathy and stories are the most powerful empathic tools
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1920859142496960926
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