Best Story Wins (collaborativefund.com) 65
Morgan Housel, on the art and power of storytelling: C. R. Hallpike is a respected anthropologist who once wrote a review of a young author's recent book on the history of humans. It states: "It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously ... [It is not] a contribution to knowledge."
Two things are notable here.
One is that the book's author doesn't seem to disagree with the assessment.
Another is that the author, Yuval Noah Harari, has sold over 27 million books, making him one of the bestselling contemporary authors in any field, and his book Sapiens -- which Hallpike was reviewing -- the most successful anthropology book of all time.
Harari recently said about writing Sapiens: "I thought, 'This is so banal!' ... There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I'm not an archeologist. I'm not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research... It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.
What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.
It's nothing to be ashamed of, because so many successes work this way.
The Civil War is probably the most well-documented period in American history. There are thousands of books analyzing every conceivable angle, chronicling every possible detail. But in 1990 Ken Burns' Civil War documentary became an instant phenomenon, with 39 million viewers and winning 40 major film awards. As many Americans watched Ken Burns' Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all he did -- not to minimize it, because it's such a feat -- is take 130-year-old existing information and wove it into a (very) good story.
Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which I understand drives the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. His latest work is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it's so well written -- he tells such a good story -- that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and the Washington Post's Book of the Year. Charles Darwin didn't discover evolution, he just wrote the first and most compelling book about it. John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of valuing companies than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a good paragraph, so he became the legend.
Two things are notable here.
One is that the book's author doesn't seem to disagree with the assessment.
Another is that the author, Yuval Noah Harari, has sold over 27 million books, making him one of the bestselling contemporary authors in any field, and his book Sapiens -- which Hallpike was reviewing -- the most successful anthropology book of all time.
Harari recently said about writing Sapiens: "I thought, 'This is so banal!' ... There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I'm not an archeologist. I'm not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research... It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.
What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.
It's nothing to be ashamed of, because so many successes work this way.
The Civil War is probably the most well-documented period in American history. There are thousands of books analyzing every conceivable angle, chronicling every possible detail. But in 1990 Ken Burns' Civil War documentary became an instant phenomenon, with 39 million viewers and winning 40 major film awards. As many Americans watched Ken Burns' Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all he did -- not to minimize it, because it's such a feat -- is take 130-year-old existing information and wove it into a (very) good story.
Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which I understand drives the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. His latest work is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it's so well written -- he tells such a good story -- that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and the Washington Post's Book of the Year. Charles Darwin didn't discover evolution, he just wrote the first and most compelling book about it. John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of valuing companies than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a good paragraph, so he became the legend.
A simple explanation... (Score:4, Insightful)
...using lay language will always reach a wider audience.
One just has to ensure that explanation is at least correct, however.
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Some things, like General Relativity, you can't communicate to a general audience without misinforming them with easy to swallow tales of balls on rubber sheets.
Nigel Calder "Einstein's Universe (Score:3, Informative)
That's funny - the very first thing I thought of when reading the GP comment was Nigel Calder's "Einstein's Universe".
It's written in a way that it made sense to an extremely nerdy sixth grader.
Phantoms in the Brain (Score:4, Informative)
Hate Math? Maybe check out any of a number of short books by John Allen Paulos; two of my favorites were 'Innumeracy' or 'A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper'
I'm not into neurology but 'Phantoms in the Brain' by V.S. Ramachandran was a great read.
It is a series of case studies of neurological disorders presented in a manner similar to books by Oliver Sacks.
If you find yourself having issues dealing with friends/relatives that have issues in the brain bucket (and I know you do, you're on
Would be better than reading facebook , ever.
It doesn't even have to be right, to be right (Score:4, Insightful)
Picture an H2O molecule.
It has 10 electrons. If you're interested in chemistry you might have pictured those electrons. If you're not so much, you probably only pictured the nucleus, the Mickey Mouse share of the two hydrogen and one oxygen. Now that I mentioned the electrons you're likely picturing them orbiting the nucleus.
Funny thing, water molecules look nothing like that.
> One just has to ensure that explanation is at least correct, however.
In some cases, correct enough for the task at hand.
The image we have and use, of molecules is not at all correct - they don't look like that. But they ACT in ways that the image helps us understand. It's a very useful image that helps us have a correct understanding of their behavior.
Sometimes an explanation can be very helpful while it's not a bit correct. Helpful to clearly communicate the essence of the thing, the point. Sometimes you need to understand the main idea without it getting lost in the details, before you can start learning the details.
One just needs to communicate that it's not actually a realistic image, it's more like a diagram than a photo.
I'm not a chemist, but I'm told chemistry is like that - you have to learn the basics with the Mickey Mouse molecules before you can later re-visit that mental image and learn how it's wrong.
Sometimes I wonder if that's a big issue with many people's understanding of what some call "God". People hear an analogy and take it as a literal description. They take the diagram as if it were a photo. That leads to misunderstanding. One variety of that is some people think of God like Santa Claus - Santa is of course not real. Saint Nick is real.
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One variety of that is some people think of God like Santa Claus - Santa is of course not real. Saint Nick is real.
Santa Claus, Saint Nick. Semantics. Either way if that varmint climbs down my chimney I'll be waiting with my shotgun.
Re:It doesn't even have to be right, to be right (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes you need to understand the main idea without it getting lost in the details, before you can start learning the details.
This. I wanted to single out and highlight this idea, because nerdy types so often don't get it at all.
The insistence to make every single utterance correct to the point of rendering it unintelligible is a great temptation to rational minds. However, the rational thing to do is to realize that this is a horrible communication strategy.
It is a much better strategy to present a simple and intuitive idea, even if it gets some specific (yet irrelevant) details wrong. You can always iterate on the idea and refine those details to set them right later; just the same way that you don't usually expect a program to be entirely correct the first time you compile it. Building effective communication is pretty much like building a working program, it requires several stages.
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> just the same way that you don't usually expect a program to be entirely correct the first time you compile it. Building effective communication is pretty much like building a working program, it requires several stages.
That's a good analogy. Thanks for posting that.
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This, btw, is the reason why a lot of Common Core is garbage: it starts with the presumption that, as a for-instance in math, kids will eventually take Calculus. And so every lesson is structured to head in that direction and make Calculus easier to understand once they get there. Which completely ignores that some kids will never take Calculus, and also ignores that we want them to have to have a good grasp on basic math, Algebra, etc - not make those more complex (maybe even too complex) to make Calculus
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A simple explanation is very hard to write though. That is the point. Any expert can write a complicated explanation that will not be understood - or worse, misunderstood. It takes a delicate touch and a solid understanding of several disciplines to write a simple explanation.
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I've reported you for spam.
That seemed like the most fitting punishment to me...
not original (Score:5, Informative)
(Often attributed to Samuel Johnson, but apparently the original was Martin Sherlock: https://quoteinvestigator.com/... [quoteinvestigator.com] )
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is not a /. story. (Score:4, Funny)
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We could just edit the headline: "The Best story Wins (unless we're talking about the Hugo Awards)" and then we're back on point.
This is a /. story. (Score:2)
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My friend is 70 years old and rather well read in science. He loves the two Cosmos TV series. I consider them a children's story. Cosmos covers material that everyone on Slashdot already knows. We read about these things in Scientific American and other rich sources. Cosmos turns the most colorful bits of that information into a golly, gee whiz visual performance.
My friend is easily amused, I suppose, like the vast bulk of humanity. If you can make something important look like a Marvel comic, they will pay
News for nerds. (Score:3)
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How to effectively communicate technical or quasi-technical information to a non-technical audience is a useful skill.
Not new but important (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not new but important-Man pages. (Score:2)
Maybe a lesson open-source writers can take to heart.
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It's the new trend we are going to see in news writing. The logic goes something like this: "Trump won because he used story telling, not fact. Therefore we should use story telling, not fact."
Probably none of that is exactly true (Trump wasn't much of a story teller, he was a sensationalist), but it's going to be inflicted on us in any case.
Re:Not new but important (Score:5, Interesting)
One of Akin's laws of engineering:
A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
Cosmos? (Score:2)
Compelling? Because of fact (Score:5, Interesting)
Charles Darwin didn't discover evolution, he just wrote the first and most compelling book about it.
The Origin of Species wasn't compelling because of "storytelling," anyone who says that has certainly never read it.
The Origin of Species is compelling because it is the distillation of 30 years worth of collecting and analyzing evidence related to the topic. It is a mountain of evidence, and it was this mountain of evidence that convinced every scientist within a year that evolution was real.
It also today a very convincing book for the same reason. It convinced me (raised very religious) that evolution was real many years ago when I read it. And it wasn't because of story telling. That's nonsense.
Re:Compelling? Because of fact (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah that sentence irked me.
Darwin was absolutely not the first to propose Evolution. That idea has been kicked around since the ancient greeks. What Darwin DID do is propose an abstract mechanism, survival of the fittest (The non abstract mechanism required the discovery of DNA before it could be revealed) and provided an exhaustive set of evidence to support his notion.
Darwin was NOT a pop sci writer, and Origins is actually a fairly terse and complicated piece of writing.
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In the vapid head of the author of that piece, Darwin's theory is just that "living things evolve and were not created by some god", which makes Darwin's natural selection and Lamarckism/Lysenkoism equally valid and only differing in unimportant details, since they're both on the correct side of the Great Americal Culture War "debate" between "evolution" and "intelligent design", which is the only thing that really matters and to which /everything/ should be subsumed.
The idiocy and contempt for any intellec
James Burke (Score:5, Informative)
James Burke has been doing this sort of thing for quite a while, in both books & video. Check out his "Connections" series from 1978 on YouTube. Wikipedia calls him a "Science Historian" and I guess that suits what he does.
Re:James Burke (Score:4, Interesting)
"Connections" should be required viewing for patent inspectors, to explain clearly how inventions depend heavily on prior inventions and how the same invention has happened almost simultaneously in more than one place, or, indeed, more that one country.
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Connections - all three television series, plus his monthly column in Scientific American are still as brilliant and relevant today as when they were first produced.
What's more is that by laying bare the connections between past events and the interweaving of the stories and dependencies, Burke's work has enabled some of us who grew up reading/watching him to make new connections of our own, which mayen't have been possible without his as-interesting-as-it-was-non-pioneering work.
you mean Steve Jobs didn't invent GUI? (Score:4, Informative)
It was ... (Score:2)
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Suddenly, a shot rang out.
More than just a good story (Score:1)
Bryson does not claim to be a scientist (Score:2)
Bryson does not have an agenda, other than meeting people, interpreting and adding entertainment to their work, and selling it, as far as I ca
Politics is a storytelling competition (Score:2)
This is also true about of modern events as they are happening. Politics (and PR, and marketing) is all about controlling and creating a dominant narrative, and whoever is able to successfully spin public perception in the most favorable direction for their team will win the day.
It is typically an advantage to align with reality and take actions that are popular and favored among the general populace, but recent history has shown that if you are unscrupulous enough, you can get surprisingly far by fabricati
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Like when you lock eyes with an advisary at work and you both try to get to the HR monkeys first to plant your story?
Ha, probably. Your workplace sounds more exciting than mine.
reaching a little... (Score:2)
The knock on Bryson may be true for some of his books, but his early stuff was mostly "journals of his travels", hiking (with various degrees of success) the length of England and the Appalachian trail. So yeah, it's not like he created those landmasses, but the *experience* of making journeys like that is always unique; and if you can add a good story to them, so much the better.
Nonsense (Score:2)
This article is nonsense. Whatever Sapiens' faults, it isn't merely repeating general knowledge. Harari is greatly overestimating the average person's understanding of human history. The article also says that Darwin didn't discover evolution, but only wrote a book about what Wallace found out, but the consensus today is the same as it was then, that Darwin and Wallace both had all the key ideas figured out independently.
Different skills (Score:2)
Researching and gaining new insight is not the same as great communication. News at 11, as they say.
I'm surprised it doesn't mention religion (Score:2)
Religions are the living embodiment of that principle.
Religions are nothing more or less than well-told stories dealing with transcendental themes. Because they are catchy, they propagate and evolve within a community over several centuries; because they are the story that survived other competing tales, they end up cofifying procedures for the community to thrive in adversity.
The problem with this storytelling principle is that a very good story can end up being counterproductive, once it goes beyond its i
As Ike said... (Score:3)
Presentation is as important as the material (Score:2)
Making a story compelling is not entirely a function of the material.
It is funny to see anyone surprised about it.
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Depends on your view, I suppose. Having just finished the book and barely cracked open the follow-up, I think the bits that some would find depressing are a valid viewpoint on humanity's effect on the environment we've grown up in. Some of it I was aware of going in, but there were parts I wasn't aware of as well. It was good to see such a broad summary of where we came from laid out in such a compelling way.
Then again, my subjects have been pretty grim lately. A couple of the last few books I've read w
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I haven't yet, but it's on my reading list for sometime this year.
Reality is a story (Score:2)
To paraphrase the book, reality is a story we tell ourselves. And in fact, many people have said the same thing, albeit in many different ways.
The author of Sapiens, however, said that in a somewhat different and more interesting way, one that provides more context to not only the past but to the future. That's the difference between good and not-so-good writing.
People have said the same thing about Gladwell's stuff, and you know, who cares. When it comes to humans reality is a construct that's based on a t
No mention of Galileo Galilei? (Score:2)
A secret to good science writing (Score:2)
I like how the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett [lisafeldmanbarrett.com] explains great science writing, in the appendix of her new book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain [amazon.com]:
"The biggest challenge of science writing is deciding what to leave out. A science writer, like a sculptor, chips away at complex material until something compelling and comprehensible takes shape. The end result is necessarily incomplete from a strict scientific perspective, but (one hopes) still correct enough not to offend most experts.
"An example