The point of a simulation is not to quantify human behavior and complex systems. It is to set in motion a narrative from which people can take ideas and experiences.

Command and Control

Why do we overeat and refuse to burn it off? Why do we procrastinate; or even burn out despite our passion for a subject? What about the state of the world? Why are politicians so disappointing; what should we trust in when we vote for them—rigid rationalism, protocol; or the feeling deep within our gut? What about the problems that we just think are never going to end—is it willpower, self-experimentation or something else?

I've benefited a lot in recent months by letting go of reliance on two sides of the same coin—declarative knowledge and conscious "willpower." Both are important and play a role in many things, but they are the exception rather than the rule. The way I came to this was through, yes, some changes to how I ate and exercised. I've never had a weight problem, but I have some other reasons, such as asthma, to look after what goes in my body.

Upon investigating these ideas, I saw that there was a general flaw in the arguments about obesity. Moralizing self-help gurus have convinced us everyday laymen have taken the truism that people gain weight because they "consume more energy than they expend" and somehow used some discursive sleight of hand to translate this to the idea that obese people are being weak-willed by overeating and not exercising. To quote one great thinker: what horseshit!

Have we learned nothing from the mistakes of Descartes or the piles of research on the body's effect on the brain? I could even wager that thousands of years of wisdom would back this; but I really don't know and could be wrong about that. We are deeply connected to our bodies; they are the source of emotions, which are by extension the source of our decision making. Don't believe me? How about the fact that even with tons of analytic knowledge ("facts"), severing the connection between our brains and our bodily dispositions disables our ability to effectively make decisions. But I digress.

The reason why this "calories-in/calories-out" argument doesn't work is that our behavior is affected by all the biochemical reactions that are going on in our metabolism. When we eat too much junk food too regularly, our metabolism breaks down and our ability to efficiently process nutrients falls apart; insulin surges through the body at unhealthy rates, we store perfectly good nutrients as body fat and our brain does not get the glucose it needs to stop yelling "I'm hungry!" The result is that we find ourselves crashing and needing more food. So perhaps we just need to burn it off? Unlikely; where would you get all the energy needed if you can't even feel satiated?

Of course, all this could be wrong too; remember that bit about syllogistic knowledge. But I am convinced that these systems work something like this—the world is just too connected and nonlinear. And for this reason I've started to wonder, in light of just how embodied our decisions are; whether we need a whole new way of thinking about how to do things. When we procrastinate, it's likely that our mind is telling us that it doesn't approve of the plan. But couldn't that be irrational? Well, yes; we're not always cut out for the modern world that we've set up for ourselves—but the wisdom of emotions seems to be seriously underestimated. Our emotions really may be what's right when we're procrastinating; an unrealistic plan really can slow us down after all.

And how surprising is this when you look at something bigger like the markets? Sometimes we like to give credit to politicans for saving or ruining the economy; but how much say do they really have? What effect does the average tax policy or stimulus plan have? I'd argue that sometimes they work; sometimes they provide a big enough jolt to shift things into another equilibrium—but that's a big maybe; the fact is, we can't even seem to predict where the markets go.

What does that tell us? That yes, there are things we can do. We have some conscious control over our choices and we certainly have times where we just need to stop making excuses and apply elbow grease. But the parallels become even more striking when we hear about the limits to our willpower; how they can be increased through certain behaviors and states of health—but those behaviors and states must be brought about in some way to begin with. We have a very fragile modicum of control over a system that is highly belligerent and, on top of that (though somewhat related), quite random. We need to understand and appreciate these systems for what they are; not only economics and nutrition, but also our habits, the social interactions of people; and of course the very stochasticity of life.

To do that, we must let go of the command and control model but not think that this is some key to "hijacking" our behavior. We talk about tricks to fool ourselves, but it's hard to believe that we can really just "trick" ourselves into doing everything. Nothing is going gently nudge me to do 8 hours of nonstop work (if only...) No, not a chance. There's something more than that. We need to look at the equilibria of our life; on the harm of deterministic thinking and the benefits of random events; on the anti-fragility behind growth and discovery.

It's hard to say for sure what it all means, but a lot of things have helped me towards this path. Eating and exercising more stochastically, cutting out certain food groups but not worrying if I cheat once in a while; not pushing the serotonin buttons of e-mail and Facebook first thing in the morning (getting bad at that), finding peace and discovery in fiction, walking, meditation and unscheduled activities; not adhering to rules too tightly.

But I'd hardly say that I read fiction for "knowledge" or take walks for "exercise"—more accurately I exercise to learn and read for the sake of my body. Exercise has a specific scent of discovery to it, it resides at the core of so many things in our hunter-gatherer past; reading makes me feel more whole, my body relaxes into a new state—just as well that I run anaerobically and weight-lift aerobically.

Maybe you agree, maybe you disagree. If you agree, how have you applied this to your life? If you disagree, you can have a say too ;)

Truth

Truth (capital "T" intended) exists.

But there are no such things as platonic forms. Only forms that we imagine.

We create forms and change them when we find that they cannot adequately describe the essence that we're attempting to capture.

It's in that moment of change, that flux between isomorphisms, that we see Truth. It's an aether that can only be seen via flux.

And that may be all that reality is; flux.

Meta-Entrepreneurship

I'm honestly hoping to get this blog back to being a regular thing. The past few weeks were pretty hectic, but now that we're finally getting through a long slog, I think I'll be able to start posting more.

Fear of Software should have a new demo up soon, btw, so keep a lookout for that.

There are a lot of things that I'd like to back-post about, but one concept recently came to mind that is not the most original but may well be overlooked. I called it "Meta-Entrepreneurship", and it came from the thought that the source of all entrepreneurship is problems. Now everybody knows this; every single book asks "what is the customer pain?"

And yet, everyone says that they don't have an idea. On second inspection, this claim is absurd. You're pretty much saying "I don't know of any problems." But this is silly; we cite problems every day as an excuse for not getting something done. In fact, this goes doubly for entrepreneurs. We do so many things that we seem to end up dealing with astronomical amounts of inconvenience on a daily basis. Even a fraction of our problems should be more than enough to give us new problems to solve and make some money from (or maybe change the world, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Now, of course, we all have our domains. I can't just go creating a new branch of my company that deals with the fact that I don't have a dishwasher in this house (or maybe I can); but there are plenty of inconveniences that must have some relation to our domain that if we set our minds to it, we can not only make our own processes faster but create new routes for success and profitability. That is, there's so much we can do if only we'd get a little bit more Meta about it.

I think there's also one other thing to take from this, however; and that's that if you're an entrepreneur, you shouldn't be blaming anything on inconveniences. Yes, some of them really are just that; but the whole spirit of entrepreneurship is capitalizing on the fact that there's a problem to be solved. If problems are such a, well, problem, then how can you convince yourself, let alone other people, that you're ready to solve a major one. As entrepreneurs, we have to go beyond the cliches and actually learn to love problems in every shape and size; not just the ones that we've cited to support some vision that we want to manifest:

That which rules within, when it is according to nature, is so affected with respect to the events which happen, that it always easily adapts itself to that which is and is presented to it. For it requires no definite material, but it moves towards its purpose, under certain conditions however; and it makes a material for itself out of that which opposes it, as fire lays hold of what falls into it, by which a small light would have been extinguished: but when the fire is strong, it soon appropriates to itself the matter which is heaped on it, and consumes it, and rises higher by means of this very material.

If we can do that, then every problem that we encounter, whether our own or someone else's, will be another fresh start.

Erudition and Innovation

My confession is that I'm writing this post in preparation for a lecture I'll be giving in a few days to the AIESEC conference. I figured what better way to help jog my mind than present the general gist of what I'm thinking to my viewers.

So without further adieu, what will I be talking about on this post? Something that I think hasn't been paid close enough attention: the usefulness necessity of broad erudition and its role in innovation. So let's begin.



My story is one that some readers of this blog probably know, but if there are any new readers out there, perhaps not. It was half a year ago that I found myself signing on as the co-founder of Fear of Software, and only a couple of months ago that I quit my day job as my initiation into becoming a fully funded entrepreneur. In that time, a lot has happened as I gained erratic but valuable experience and learned from the wisdom of my co-founder Nick LaRacuente, who was wise enough to get me out of the misguided logic of thinking "I'll just build it and they will come" or expecting to have a 2 year development cycle without any kind of intermediate prototyping. And yet I can't say much about this sort of a thing because with this startup, the story is really only in its opening chapter; the most shocking, difficult and serendipitous episodes have yet to arrive.

On the other hand, there's a whole lot that led to my standing right here (or in this case; sitting in front of this computer.) My story begins, well, probably from when I was 5 or 6, but zooming forward a bit... one could safely begin in high school. In middle school, I taught myself how to program and started making video games. Most of the products were over-ambitious, but they were always fun and once in a while I completed something exceedingly simple. I remember specifically, however, in my first year of high school coming across an editorial in Game Developer magazine, which I had a free subscription to, about the potential for games to be a legitimate art form on the level of cinema, books or even fine art. The idea hit me very hard; I was your average 14 year old, mostly interested in video games, coca-cola and generally trying as best I could to look cool; but this idea for some reason was just like a shot to the head; I couldn't shake it!

Unfortunately, I didn't always have my stuff together in high school, so my projects generally got a running start and fizzled out just as fast, but something else was going on at the same time. I found myself for the first time extremely interested in literature; I started reading novels all of the time, even as it interfered with my schoolwork; for a while I even thought that I wanted to become a novelist and writing fiction of my own. Film and music also became more interesting to me; before then, I pretty much just watched whatever Hollywood blockbusters looked sufficiently entertaining and listened to whatever was loud enough to ensure hearing loss. At one point I even found myself fortunate enough to collaborate with several artists in my high school on a graphic novel; a project that actually went surprisingly well--it was certainly childish, with all sorts of elves and demons reminiscent of Lord of the Rings with a twist of Saturday-morning anime; but interspersed with poems and philosophical digressions (but don't get me wrong, it wasn't particularly good; this was high school!)

Life was actually pretty interesting in high school. Not much got done, at least not on the surface, but a lot was brewing. I still remember all of the afternoons I frittered away with friends hanging around nearby diners and walking the streets of Manhattan; but I digress, you don't want to hear that mushy stuff. But my point was something was going on in all that time; metamorphosis is never as straightforward as one things. Soon afterwards, I entered college; and luckily, a college where I'd have the same good fate of meeting friends that would help me develop further; there's another digression I need to take—good friends are important, they'll be the ones who enrich your experiences and lead you to your greatest ideas. This counts double for entrepreneurship, which is about people, your customers; not just the abstract ideas that one can go on for pages about in a novel or express in a piece of music.

Despite some initial confusion as to what I wanted to do with my time in college, I found myself as a double major in English and Computer Science; English because I had always had an interest in literature and found myself enchanted with the study of books when I tentatively took a class on John Milton and fell in love with Paradise Lost—so dense with potential criticism that I read the entire thing at a rate of about 3 pages per minute, which admittedly left me a stressed out mess as I never had enough time to get my work done and barely passed my all-important math class.

But along the way I also found a few books on my own that opened my ideas to the process by which ideas are generated. In freshman year, I came across a book by the esoteric but highly renowned game designer Chris Crawford*, which rekindled my dying interest in game design. Later, in junior year, I came across The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb—which if you read this blog (or know me in person), you know that I never shut up about it.

It's writers like these (a list of which would amount to some light name-dropping) that I hope to pay homage to in this post by using their ideas to explain the creative process and get across the simultaneously childishly erratic and gut-wrenchingly rigorous nature of innovation.

These writers, namely Crawford, left me with a new sense of purpose in my endeavors as well. I dreamed of a new kind of video game that would fit my changing self; the more serious self that found video games fun once in a while but couldn't feel engaged in them the same way as when he was a child. They were no longer as captivating, I had grown older and suspending my disbelief was not as easy as it used to be. I felt that this was what had turned most people off of gaming; and I wanted to bring the experience I had had with video games as a child to everyone. So with a new sense of purpose, I decided that I wanted to make video games that were serious intellectual challenges that engaged people's critical thinking, that would create decisions where people would have to inevitably look back and wonder about the consequences of what they did, that would make the player empathize with characters and be too engaged to move through its world as nothing more than a cold and calculating machine. I wanted to make an experience as universal as a movie or a book.

That put me on the path to today's startup, albeit in a very weird way. In junior year I applied for the honors program in computer science in order to work on a technology called Interactive Storytelling. This would be for creating games with stories that the player could change the course of through their decisions; and they would involve lifelike characters and difficult choices that would fit into complex narratives; there would be closure and catharsis, but also ambiguity. I was accepted, and soon enough I found myself overwhelmed. Luckily, a torrent of ideas came from a class in literary theory I had tentatively signed up for; which I'll talk more about soon.

To make things short, after two semesters of hard work, I cobbled together a tiny prototype and presented it to a general audience as well as the computer science department. The reviews were mixed, but I was happy nonetheless. After graduating college with Honors, I went on to work on it in my spare time before taking a hiatus and getting by with my day job as a paralegal. That is, until Nick convinced me to join forces with him to create a startup; and I couldn't say no.

Our two projects, when compared, shared a lot of theoretical qualities. But we decided to put our respective goals on hold when a new market opportunity came up. But I'm not here today to advertise our project, I wanted to talk about ideas!


So, what is "the stuff that dreams are made of?" Well, not dreams; we all know that those come from living in your parents' basement wondering when you're going to have a car—no, I meant ideas. Where do we get those?

On the most fundamental level, ideas come from metaphors. That's right, every idea starts as a metaphor; a connection we see between two ideas because of their similarity. In your brain it looks a little bit like this two fold illustration I put up once before (you can praise me on my artistic talent in the comments section):


Your brain...


...getting an idea!

So, those two dots that lit up, what are they? Let's come up with a couple of ideas for concepts... okay, right, this isn't the lecture; just a blog post. Okay, so let's say that the one on top is the business cycle in economics; and let's say the other one is... partying! Because who doesn't love a good party, especially during an economic boom! Well, these two ideas are separated because, well, they don't really have anything in common.

Or do they? Let's think about this one. What do we do at parties? We sometimes have a few too many drinks. Did I say drinks? If any of you are religious or just generally more well behaved, let's just say extra-sugary fruit punch, the kind of stuff that will make you bounce off the walls before you get dizzy from all the running around and then crash. So, either way, you feel GREAT, and then you have a big stupid hangover; and we know that that's the price we pay for it, at least I hope we're all on the same page about that...

Now, what about an economic boom? Well, sometimes these booms are caused by a bubble. People get very enthusiastic about making a killing on the hot new asset, like say... big houses in the middle of suburbia. The price goes up 20%, then 50% then suddenly they're three times as expensive as they were two years ago. It can't just continue like this though; how many people are really going to pay a million dollars to move into a new house? Are you going to do that?

So what happens? The bubble bursts! And mind you, for those who are interested in the history of finance, this once happened in Holland over the price of tulips until... guess what? Somebody realized you can just grow them yourself. So suddenly, prices have to return to a level that actually makes sense; but with everyone having spent so much money on houses and others expecting to make a lot of money selling houses and all the people who were hired to build houses because they were so profitable, guess what happens to all of them? Not very pleasant to think; a lot of jobs, money and opportunities lost. The economy goes through a recession, readjusting to the sudden change that's happened.

But wait, there's a connection there. Something caused things to go up, to become super-active, and now that it's gone, everything comes crashing back down. And that's when we get the idea that maybe there's a connection; we realize that we need lows in order to correct the highs. So there you have it, now you know that binge drinking is a lot like a bad asset bubble.

These are the metaphors that help us advance in technology and discover new customer needs. Don't believe me? Sim City, one of the most successful video games of all time, was inspired by the reproduction of cells.** The beautiful paintings by M.C. Escher are derived from mathematical concepts of recursion, topology and infinity (among many others.) More recent AI methodologies such as neural networks are inspired by biological systems rather than straight-up computations. Even our own idea of what goes on the world is shaped by far-away stories; we look at politics through the lens of historical narratives and fictional fables. People in the United States are always asking "Are we Rome?" Sometimes overtly, but also implicitly whenever they ask about the future of that country.

This happens even on a deeply neurological level. Our brains are ultimately pattern seeking devices and look to find patterns that match other patterns. We see it even in our everyday lives; have you ever seen a shadow and thought a dangerous person was waiting in a corner to attack you; only to find out that it was a garbage can? What about being startled at the sudden rustle of leaves in the middle of silence? This is pattern recognition at its most basic, and it finds its way even into our highest levels of thought.

But before dismissing it all as illogical and irrational, you should remember just how smarter you, or anybody reading this post, is than a computer. That's right, we're so good at this game because we're not computers! Embrace it, be childish and let yourself find connections wherever they are. But how do we go about doing that? Well? Two things.

First, read. Read on every subject you can and don't worry about working on your specialty. You have your entire life to learn the newest Java API or the latest updates to the .NET framework (this part is for tech entrepreneurs; ignore it if you're just a reader that happened to get this far in my rant.) In fact, you'll find that the demands of most situations are so specific and strange that you won't be able to figure out what you need to know in advance; so don't sweat it (but do study your fundamentals, they come in handy.) Pick up some fiction and poetry; or if you're the more serious kind (like myself for a while), bury your nose in some history, economics, psychology or anthropology. Be sure to learn some math too; big concepts that can help you understand things as systems. But you should all in all be looking to understand things in three categories: systems, ideas and the human condition. The third of those comes in fiction and poetry; stuff that really gets at what makes people tick, but that also requires doing another thing...

Live! There is no erudition without experience. Or put another way:

  "Experience, though no authority Were in this world, would be enough for me" -The Wife of Bath

A lot led to where I am now; much of it serendipity and a slowly accumulated pile of books, but I'm most prepared for where I am now from the experiences I've had messing up, doing the wrong thing, doing all kinds of things that left me kicking myself in frustration. If it weren't for that, there would be nothing to hold all this together, just a bunch of gobbledygook.

Mistakes, there's an important word, and it reminds me of another question. What do we do with all these crazy ideas? Where is the empiricism? Ah, there's another idea I have to credit Chris Crawford with...


A T-Rex for ideas!

That's right, our ideas are just all vulnerable little sheep, and we need a T-Rex to rip all but the toughest of them apart. That means attacking your ideas from every angle. Forget all this about being nice to yourself, be a contrarian, drive yourself crazy; be like that kid who keeps asking endless questions about why he needs to take a bath! Not only that; go out and talk to people about your ideas. This is how Nick and I figured out what to do with our own product; we went out and talked to people. And as always, you don't always hear what you want to hear; but that's good, you're growing. Finally, go out there, and just make some mistakes. Not too big though, I don't want anyone coming back here with a missing limb!

As Kanye West once said; "that that don't kill me, can only make me stronger!" So go out there and get stronger, I'm rooting for all of you. And thank you for reading.

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*He has a wonderful website for those interested: http://www.erasmatazz.com

**See John Conway's The Game of Life

That Old Humanities Argument

We've all been asked this question before: why study the humanities? Why teach literary criticism? What is the point of learning about things that never happened and inapplicable interpretations? Math and science have certainly been hyped up in the past few years by the presidential administration with the looming economic fears of being uncompetitive in the face of rising powers and the political activism of people who want to see our money spent better.

As an English major in college, I had to struggle with this question myself; I was asked by other people and even had to deal with the prompt in a literary theory class (which I utterly failed at doing.) It is worth noting that a lot of my work in literary theory has been applicable to what I'm engineering now, but that's besides the point to me because I know that it wasn't all that this was about. I certainly see literature as an important metaphysical experiment for philosophers, but I don't know how I feel about philosophers either.

But around a year ago I had read about Stanley Fish's book Save the World On Your Own Time, which apparently* argued that trying to find some political or economic justification for the humanities denigrates it by denying the idea that it may just be good in of itself (does everything really come down to money and survival?)

While I was taking a break today that line of thinking crossed over with all the time that I've spent thinking about Edmund Burke and Nassim Taleb and it dawned on me that I had been missing the obvious for years; that perhaps the importance of literary criticism is in the fact that despite having no explicit justification for it, we still continue to read, teach, analyze and deconstruct stories; value a supposedly "arbitrary" literary canon, ask questions about things that never happened and give interpretations in the absence of right or wrong answers.

To me, asking why we value literature, spend so much time teaching it to students and even have tenured academics who spend their whole life studying it is like asking why we have religion or inauguration ceremonies or act hold doors open for other people. At this point, it's tradition and part of a deeper logic that we can't ever presume to understand--a point made tirelessly by Edmund Burke in the wake of a disastrous French revolution based on simple top-down models. Simply put, I don't think that the world would be better off if we stopped holding doors for other people and I don't think that we'd be better off not studying literature.

On a more concrete note, I think it is possible to glean the value of literary criticism and it is related to the importance of things beyond economic concerns. We live in a world richly populated by cultural phenomena. Being part of that world means understanding our cultural heritage and our shared idea of what it is to be human (cliche, I know, but isn't it true?) Would you refrain from teaching your kid table manners or how to talk to elders?

Whether it's through high school English, Hebrew School or wrestling in the grass with your classmates, we all have and all need rites of passage. Part of the humanities is spiritual training, the rest is something else.

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*No, I haven't read it, just making that clear. A second-hand summary did in fact raise some interesting points for me.

Childhood

Working on my own and trying to start a business has unsurprisingly been the source of a lot of anxiety. Sitting inside all day working starts to take a toll and even the weekends can be challenging if I don't get myself out and about. But as I was taking a walk today, I started to look around the city streets and enjoy them in the way that I have for so many years and this song popped into my head:

Most people would wonder why I remember such a song, let alone have the mp3 file for it; it's a bit nerdy to say the least. But for me, it has a very strong association with my childhood and evokes a refreshing sense of playfulness; everything becomes more atmospheric and a strange grandeur imbues itself on the symbols that populate the city skyline and the scenery of downtown Brooklyn.

It takes me back to the visceral pleasure I found in a game that most people passed over and considered one of Will Wright's more mediocre works. While most people didn't care for it, SimCity 3000 was the first time that I came to an understanding of what I was looking for in games, a sense of exploring a narrative, of decisions that impact people and the often contradictory and conflicting demands that they make both as individuals and as a whole.

The music of that game, especially this song, now brings me back to a sense of childlike playfulness; a feeling that to me is the ultimate remedy to anxiety--a sense that the world is yours to explore at your leisure. I never thought of childhood as idyllic, but it always did offer the opportunity to play; it placed a priority on learning, it gave space. In my quest to find the intersection of narrative and technology, to bring to the rest of the world the visceral inspiration that lies behind the screen of a personal computer, I've come full circle in having the opportunity once more to learn, to grow, to be a kid; being an entrepreneur might be a lot of work, but I once again feel the ability to explore the world and leave my mark on it.

The Poverty of Online Information

This is a post I wrote for another website, Good to Know, Inc., but I wanted to share it on this blog in its unedited form (since they're likely to make edits to my writing.) Here it is:

Also, I have no idea why the font is being so screwy.

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There are three concepts that, when one looks closely enough, can be seen as a single indivisible triad: narratives, context and memory. They all fundamentally deal with an associative way of thinking and they are noticeably robust: one doesn’t easily forget things (my cousin and I still occasionally debate who was at fault in a scuffle we had when I was seven) and we seem to understand things best when they’re told as a story. They also have another trait in common: they are often lacking if not non-existent when I try to find information from the internet.

Take Wikipedia as an example. It certainly has a wealth of raw information; just about anything one can think of seems to have an article, whether your interest is in hermetian matrices, hardcore bands, Lacanian psychoanalysis or Pokemon trading cards. Even so, I never feel the same sense of fulfillment reading material on Wikipedia that I get from reading a book; I often find myself struggling to walk away with something to hold on to after browsing through this seemingly infinite pool of collective knowledge.

Maybe I’m just of a dying breed of people who hold on to physical books, but more universal reasons seem to be at play. Our brains work in an associative manner; rather than record our memories in a serialized manner like a video camera or a computer’s hard drive, we create memories by connecting various objects, sensations, thoughts, images, sounds and other past experiences. Conversely, we recall memories from the past by seeing, hearing, feeling or thinking something that we’ve associated with it; anyone remember the scene that everybody talks about from Swann’s Way where the narrator takes a bite of a Madeline cookie and his entire past rushes back at him?

A single sensation or reference brings back a rapid cascade of memories and this same phenomenon underlies what might be our memory’s inherent preference for books: we associate its content with the distinct look and feel of the book’s cover, pages, printing, wear and tear. Simply put, you can remember something much better when you attach it to a physical object of some kind.[1] But just as the physical context of knowledge may matter more than we think, so too might the relevance of that knowledge to some larger narrative. The journalist Malcolm Gladwell might oftentimes be criticized for the lack of empirical rigor behind his theses, but I prefer any one of his books to a series of entries on Wikipedia because I believe him to be a masterful storyteller able to weave a larger number of data, anecdotes and ideas into a single story that makes sense of them. Knowledge is much more easily remembered when there is a narrative that brings it all together.

One way of thinking about this is that a narrative introduces redundancy to knowledge. It’s much easier to remember an idea when it’s linked to a number of other ideas as part of a larger theory. If you learn something in a vacuum, there will be nothing to give you any clues to it should you forget it; but by relating it to something else, we have something to remind us of the original idea.

But is it really the case that there are no narratives on Wikipedia? If I look up David Bowie, I’ll find a summary of his life and career and with it there will be hyperlinks to more detailed summaries of particular works or to biographies of his contemporaries; there’s definitely a narrative. Even so, there’s something about Wikipedia that is too summarized and distilled to be the kind of story that sticks well after I’ve finished reading an article. It offers not so much a story as a summary in which details are relegated to the various articles that it links to.

But these links on Wikipedia are inadequate to finish telling the story. They are details that are told in a complete vacuum, unaware of the fact that I came from a page talking about one thing and not another. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the defeat of the United States Navy 7^th Fleet at the hands of Paul Van Riper’s meager force in the 2002 Millennium Challenge War Games is talked about in the context of how human intuition can be more powerful than the world’s greatest computers, but a Wikipedia article summarizing the thesis of Blink could only tell it in sufficient detail by providing a link to an unrelated page summarizing the incident; one that would fail to have the interpretive richness of Malcolm Gladwell’s own retelling.

A story, as opposed to a simple summary or functional narrative, speaks to us about what is not obvious. Whereas summaries compress, stories interpret by bringing together a wealth of information and constructing a unique idea. Furthermore, through this same process of bricolage, a story is filled with a rich variety of prose and impedimenta that allow us to create a rich network of associations and have an experience that is eminently memorable. A summary, as a simple compression of one or more stories, simply doesn’t have the same informational richness as those stories and as such cannot create the strong mnemonic associations that stories do.

At the end of the day, storytelling is something that is hardwired into us. We comprehend and remember things as stories, not data, and the tradition of storytelling has been a universal ritual as far back as recorded history takes us. This natural affinity of ours towards telling stories can teach us a lot about how we learn and should be taken into consideration as we expand our educational tools into the domains of the internet and cloud computing. The ability to express ideas as dynamic and interactive programs as opposed to static texts and the interconnection of vast amounts of user-created data will doubtless allow us to inform and educate in novel ways; but these innovations must cultivate the human faculty for storytelling if they are to be truly effective as pedagogical tools. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected and hyper-abundant in information, context has become the essence of knowledge; and one cannot understand context without understanding stories.

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[1] For further reading on this idea, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notebook, Opacity (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.html)