TITLE: Narrative Fallacy on My Mind
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 12, 2008 12:24 PM
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In his recent bestseller <EM>The Black Swan: The Impact
of the Highly Improbable</EM>, Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses
the term <STRONG>narrative fallacy</STRONG> to describe
man's penchant for creating a story after the fact, perhaps
subconsciously, in order to explain why something happened
-- to impute a cause for an event we did not expect.  This
fallacy derives from our habit of imposing patterns on data.
Many view this as a weakness, but I think it is a strength
as well.  It is good when we use it to communicate ideas
and to push us into backing up our stories with empirical
investigation.  It is bad when we let our stories become
unexamined truth and when we use the stories to take actions
that are not warranted or well-founded.

Of late, I've been thinking of the narrative fallacy in its
broadest sense, telling ourselves stories that justify what
we see or want to see.  My entry on a
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-05.html#e2008-05-09T08_03_49.htm">
   response to the Onward! submission</A>
by my ChiliPLoP group was one trigger.  Those of us who
believe strongly that we could and perhaps should be doing
something different in computer science education construct
stories about what is wrong and what could be better; we're
like anyone else.  That one OOPSLA reviewer shed a critical
light on our story, questioning its foundation.  That is
good!  It forces us to re-examine our story, to consider
to what extent it is narrative fallacy and to what extent
it matches reality.  In the best case, we now know more
about how to tell the story better and what evidence might
be useful in persuading others.  In the worst, we may learn
that our story is a crock.  But that's a pretty good worst
case, because it gets us back on the path to truth, if
indeed we have fallen off.

A second trigger was finding a reference in
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A3W4CUXPE1WFNF">
   Mark Guzdial's blog</A>
to a short piece on
<A HREF="http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=97">
   universal programming literacy</A>
at Ken Perlin's blog.  "Universal programming literacy" is
Perlin's term for something I've discussed here occasionally
over the last year, the idea that all people might want or
need to write computer programs.  Perlin agrees but uses
this article to consider whether it's a good idea to pursue
the possibility that all children learn to program.  It's
wise to consider the soundness of your own ideas every once
in a while.  While Perlin may not be able to construct as
challenging a counterargument as our OOPSLA reviewer did,
he at least is able to begin exploring the truth of his
axioms and the soundness of his own arguments.  And the
beauty of blogging is that readers can comment, which opens
the door to other thinkers who might not be entirely
sympathetic to the arguments.  (I know...)

It is essential to expose our ideas to the light of scrutiny.
It is perhaps even more important to expose the stories we
construct subconsciously to explain the world around us,
because they are most prone to being self-serving or simply
convenient screens to protect our psyches.  Once we have
exposed the story, we must adopt a stance of skepticism and
really listen to what we hear.  This is the mindset of the
scientist, but it can be hard to take on when our cherished
beliefs are on the line.
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