Storytelling and Scientific Understanding
Andrew Gelman and Thomas Basbøll
Storytelling is central to science, not just as a tool for broadcasting scientific findings to the outside world, but also as a way that we as scientists understand and evaluate theories. We argue that, for this purpose, a story should be anomalous and immutable; that is, it should be surprising, representing some aspect of reality that is not well explained by existing models of the world, and have details that stand up to scrutiny.
We consider how this idea illuminates some famous stories in social science involving soldiers in the Alps, Chinese boatmen, and trench warfare, and we show how it helps answer literary puzzles such as why Dickens had all those coincidences, why authors are often so surprised by what their characters come up with, and why the best alternative history stories have the feature that, in these stories, our “real world” ends up as the deeper truth. We also discuss connections to chatbots and human reasoning, stylized facts and puzzles in science, and the millionth digit of pi.
At the center of our framework is a paradox: learning from anomalies seems to contradict usual principles of science and statistics where we seek representative or unbiased samples. We resolve this paradox by placing learning-within-stories into a hypothetico-deductive (Popperian) framework, in which storytelling is a form of exploration of the implications of a hypothesis. This has direct implications for our work as a statistician and a writing coach.
Learning from anomalies brings to mind Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of the exception proving the rule, proving in the sense of probing and testing the rule.
I like this idea of science as a rigorous kind of storytelling. Would be interested in a longer treatment of it…
Jdk:
Our longer treatment is in our article, When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences and the Dickens thing is in this article, but I’m sure there will also be new stuff in these talks going beyond what we’ve written before.
I’m really looking forward to this! I wrote a post on the subject five years ago for the LSE Impact blog. For those who are interested,
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/06/01/a-scientific-paper-shouldnt-tell-a-good-story-but-present-a-strong-argument/
And I’m going to be revisiting my working paper on the Alps story for my talk.
https://www.cbs.dk/files/cbs.dk/o._4._thomas_basboll_any_old_map_wont_do_improving_the_credibility_of_storytelling_in_sensemaking_scholarship_2012.pdf
My ideas have of course developed since then and I’m looking forward to talking about it all!
Will this talk be available online (either live or recorded)?
Chetan:
I’m not sure. I think there will be two talks, one by Thomas and one by me. There doesn’t seem to be a link to it anywhere yet. You could ask the administrative coordinator of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute, Lakita Mcneil, [email protected]
Thanks, I’ll reach out to the coordinator.
Andrew –
You write:
At the center our framework is a paradox: learning from anomalies seems to contradict usual principles of science and statistics where we seek representative or unbiased samples.
That’s interesting. For some reason it reminded me of once when I was working with a graduate student who was worried that he had run a long series of experiments and let his supervising professor down because none of the experimention had the results they were looking for. He felt that although he had worked long and hard he had failed his professor. I was struck that it didn’t seem to be a part of his model that there was information in not finding the expected results.
I’ll follow up on the links you provided but I wonder about the idea that there’s a contradiction as you described. Maybe it’s more a matter of the condition under which we’re looking at what we find than a contradiction? Maybe deciding whether an anomoly is an answer to a question or an obstacle to finding an answer isn’t so much a contradiction, as a function of what question is being asked?