Storytelling and Scientific Understanding (my talks with Thomas Basbøll at Johns Hopkins this Friday)

Fri 26 Apr, 10am in Shriver Hall Boardroom and 2pm in Hodson Hall 213 (see also here):

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 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.

Basbøll and I have corresponded and written a couple papers together, but we’ve never met before this!

I posted on these talks a few months ago; reposting now because it’s coming up soon.