On topic, this is a really cool New Yorker story making a case against story telling

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-sto...

"Story" covers a lot. But "x causes y" is the barest story, and also literally how we understand the world.

More often in my experience "x causes y" is how people misunderstand the world. "x causes y" is true in physics, but it is almost never true in metaphysics (anything involving humans).

Trying to explain deeper complexities of metaphysical causality in a logical or scientific way almost always is rejected with a story, and higher base intelligence or a science background tends to amplify the problem rather than reduce it. More cognitive power = better, more persuasive stories I guess?

> it's that, if there's no story, we often cannot understand what is being said.

There's an interesting corollary here to the mundane art of stakeholder management:

One of the first things you learn in this art form is that, if you don't provide a story, people make up their own. Ten people can look at the same stew of random events and come up with 10-20 different stories about what's happening and why.

I'd say it's not just that stories are interesting; it's that we manufacture stories as a way of parsing and compressing the world into something understandable.

Memorization experts use this too.

To memorize a Rubik's cube configuration, for example, they convert it to a story, because that's what our brains are best at storing!

Yes, very important point as well! If there's no story around the facts, we can either ignore the facts, or build a story to fit them in. Stories are where we store facts.

It is very difficult for humans to remember just a set of facts and reason over them. So stories are how we spread the facts out thin and link them. This is also the technique which athlete memorizers use to remember the order of deck of cards. Story telling or associative memory or stream of consciousness is how we remember stuff.

Have to agree with part of this. I'm not sure how bad the New Yorker is.

Over thanksgiving did have this happen. Wanted to lookup a recipe. Just Instructions.

But had to wade through 3 paragraphs about the authors trip to see her grandmother as a kid, riding in her parents car through the country, the sun through the trees, etc......

I just wanted a recipe.

As much as I recommend telling stories, do keep it to the point.

I'm pretty sure those awful recipe stories are just there so an advertiser thinks you saw their ad when you click 'skip to recipe'. Or maybe that's just a story I tell myself to make sense of things.

I used to think this way about recipe stories, but I've changed my mind about it.

There are arguments about people doing this for SEO or ad revenue. But also personally I really don't mind the stories. I think it can give a lot of interesting background context for a particular recipe. If it's not interesting it takes like 2 seconds to scroll past it.

Also it feels just a smidge karen-y complaining about a recipe that's shared with readers for free on someone's personal blog just because it also has an easily skippable life story attached (you know, life stories, the kind of thing that you'd normally put on a blog).

Maybe you could make an argument that such an author could optimize for less frustrated viewers from search engines looking for recipes if they removed the fluff. But I think either (1) they would prefer to optimize for the more loyal recurring viewers with an interest in the author rather than the grab-recipe-and-go type of viewer, or (2) the fluff is what adds the SEO that brings in more of the viewers in the first place.

Sure, if it is a home grown personal blog. And it's a real story, then fine.

A lot of them appear to be just churned out by a corporate like Food Network, and many others, that are just filling up the online-recipe-ad-industrial-complex.

They seem very much like vanilla created stories to give the 'veneer' of 'quaint homespun' stories to provide the feel good quality.

I would argue that we can do without stories if we choose to - most people don’t think about it, don’t see the value in it, and aren’t committed to doing so.

Stories are simply the path of least resistance for how our brains work - they satisfy something primal. It takes hard work to countermand that internal process.