You can make a compelling narrative for almost anything untrue (Rule 4)

Pick something you believe to be untrue, for example a common conspiracy theory or policy narrative. Then go to your favorite chatbot and ask, “While I believe <insert claim here> to be not true, some people nevertheless argue it is true, and I want to better understand their most compelling narratives. So, please list out the most compelling narrative(s) you can in favor of this position, as if you were trying to convince me. Make it compelling! Next to each, list out the best counter-narrative.”

This rule, that you can make a compelling narrative for almost anything untrue, has profound negative consequences for democratic societies. I believe that’s because:

1. What makes a narrative compelling isn’t its truth, but that it sounds true. For example, simpler things often sound truer (making them more compelling), while actual truth is often nuanced, and increasingly so in our ever-more-complicated world.

2. People are generally either already committed to a political tribe, or are deciding on a more case-by-case basis based on narrative. If they’re in the first camp, the tribe can concoct a compelling narrative to keep them satisfied no matter the issue. If they’re in the second camp, what they end up believing won’t necessarily be correlated to the best policy outcomes (truth) per the first proposition, as they are more likely to just choose the narrative that sounds most compelling to them.

3. Our current state of social media amplification seems to have only made this dynamic worse. More news and political argument consumption has moved from longer-form content with robust journalistic standards to shorter-form video clips with lesser standards. There were always narratives in either form, but the former tries harder to correlate with the truth, and so, on net, as a society, we have less exposure to truth-correlated narratives.

Building on this, we primarily communicate with each other, and certainly in the political sphere, via narrative. Politicians are elected on sound bites and video clips, and are therefore incentivized to sell the public crisp policy stories that sound compelling, regardless of whether those policies are our best probabilistic shot at achieving the intended policy outcomes. The politicians may even believe their stories, and that perhaps makes them even more persuasive, but that doesn’t make the stories any more true. It’s not that the stories need to be actually against the policy outcomes; they may just not be pushing the best possible policies. In aggregate, this means we’re always enacting sub-optimal policies, and over the long-run are less prosperous than we would otherwise be.

The antidote for this Rule, and more generally the best way we know how to align with desired real world outcomes, is through the scientific method, namely tight, iterative loops of hypothesis → experiment → analysis (and back to hypothesis). Narratives are of course central to this process as well! People usually create stories to come up with hypotheses, and that’s fine as long as eventually the experimental results catch up with the stories and to the extent the stories don’t fit the results, they get replaced by new ones that do. The tighter the loops, the faster this happens.

The same is of course true in policy land on a long enough time horizon. Ultimately it becomes so obvious a policy isn’t working that it gets thrown out (or the government collapses). So what’s the difference? I think it is just a matter of how tight the feedback loops really are, of how quickly these loops are happening and how much analysis is really informing the next set of hypotheses. In government, at least in the U.S., it can take literally decades to revise a policy, whether that is throwing out a bad one or just tweaking a mediocre one based on real-world outcomes to make it better. That’s obviously too slow to achieve optimal results. The two-party system makes this worse, but it isn’t even good within one party, so it seems more like a structural problem: compelling narratives insulate sub-optimal policies from needed scrutiny, which, among other things, slows the feedback loops down too much. That takes us all the way back to Rule 4: You can make a compelling narrative for almost anything untrue.

Thank You For Smoking (2005)