# Narratives are how we deal with uncertainty People are constantly acting in the face of deep uncertainty. Arguably *most* of our actions look more like [[Knightian Uncertainty]] than situations with a finite number of outcomes that could, or do, have probabilities associated with them. If we needed to do an expected value or risk calculation for everything we would be utterly paralyzed. This does, in fact, happen to people — I’ve been overwhelmed to the point of inaction with the multiplicatively cascading possibilities for what I could do and the resulting potential outcomes. At this very moment I could be writing this, or I could be sending an email, or I could be sipping coffee, or lying on the floor with my eyes closed, or going for a walk, or calling a friend… One could imagine navigating this uncertainty like Twoface from Batman, flipping a coin at every decision point. You could also imagine finding the best approximation to a risk curve for everything you do and doing a back-of-the-envelope expected value calculation. Most of us don’t do either of these things, and yet we manage to act through the uncertainty pretty well. Instead, we act based on the stories we tell ourselves. “This is the most important thing because X,” “I’m doing this because …” “I have no choice but to …” Heuristics are narratives — “X is true enough that it’s worth acting on.” *We act through uncertainty by telling stories that collapse the massive decision-space to either measurable risks or a raw narrative.* Accepting that most people are acting off of narratives most of the time might seem like a rejection of logic and rationality. You might be tempted to say “well we *ought* to strive to act more from evidence and logic.” or to throw your hands in the air and say “so the only thing we can do is to make shit up?” The former is the path to self deception — if you actually accept that real uncertainty exists, by definition you can’t create risk curves and therefore acting based on evidence and logic is fooling yourself. The latter is overly nihilistic. I’m belaboring this point because I suspect that if we acknowledge that narrative is the only mental tool we have to act through uncertainty, we might be able to improve it. *There may be more powerful ways of constructing narratives.* For example, in the uncertainty-fraught case of creating new technology, you might ask: [[What role does scenario planning have in technological program design?]] ### Related * [[Philanthropies are forced to show consistent short term progress]] because they need to do constant narrative maintenance * [[Historical narrative is not scientific inquiry or engineering design but it is valuable]] * Perhaps this is just an extension to the distinction between [[Systems Thinking and Story Thinking]] * [[Science fiction is a powerful tool for transmitting science or economic ideas]] * [[Good science fiction can enable more awesome sci-fi shit]] ### References * [[linStoryLieStory2020]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Narratives+are+how+we+deal+with+uncertainty) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Narratives+are+how+we+deal+with+uncertainty)