I went to an advance screening of the upcoming movie, “The Big Short,” (coming Dec. 11) based on the Michael Lewis book. It’s a fascinating and challenging movie — forcing you to run full speed with them as they do their best to explain all the tricks and cons at work on Wall Street in 2006, when the housing market bubble was getting ready to burst.

It almost feels like a Discovery Channel show at times as they bring on all sorts of fun non sequitur cameos to explain the most complex concepts — like chef Anthony Bourdain at his chopping block using squid and halibut to explain derivatives (I think) or Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining another concept while of course sitting in a tub full of bubbles.

There’s also a lot of breaking the fourth wall — actors looking into camera to explain what’s going on — almost like having a “benshi” at times (the name of my old blog!). It’s very complex material, yet they don’t shy away from trying to get the audience to understand what happened.

If you read the section in my new book about the fundamental divide between the more narrative form of archplot versus the more truthful form of miniplot, this is a movie that draws on all its muscle of star power and creativity to do an honest, as-accurate-as-possible miniplot job of conveying the truth. At one point, for one particular sequence, an actor talks into the camera and admits the real events didn’t happen like this for this bit, but that only strengthens the credibility of the rest of the film — that they would concede the few places where they did significant fabrication for dramatic purposes.

It’s really an excellent movie. It won’t reach as large of an audience as if they had gone the more archplot route of synthesizing a fictitious character who could then experience all the stages of The Hero’s Journey. And that’s just more reason to admire the filmmakers.

One more interesting twist — it’s directed by Adam McKay. Let’s see, what great hard hitting dramatic epics is he known for? Let’s start with “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” and “Step Brothers.” That’s how much the producers pulled out all the stops to make this very difficult yet important material watchable for the masses — they knew they had the solid factual story from the book by Michael Lewis. To that they added an incredible team of actors topped off with a director who knows how to lighten things up.

In the end, it’s a fairly sad and cynical story. There really aren’t any winners. Even the guys who became billionaires from their investment savvy ended up feeling at least a twinge of guilt that they did it off the savings, homes and retirements of all the less fortunate of America. And as most people know, only one of the culprits from Wall Street ever went to jail while the corrupt system underwent just about no reform. It’s a tragi-comedy of Shakespearean proportions.

 

In 1992 I helped with running phone polling for Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign in New Hampshire. I was a professor at UNH and it was still the first in the nation primary state. For probably a dozen nights I did phone calls with about five other people in the small campaign office in Portsmouth.

What struck me the most was the number of hang-ups. Not many rude comments, just the majority of people not wanting to answer the questions we were calling to ask. That was the start of my big time susipicion of all polling data. Why weren’t we concerned about the biases of this huge level of non-participation?

This is a major dimension of Jill Lepore’s excellent article in this week’s issue of The New Yorker titled, “Politics and the New Machine: What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy.” She has just the sort of critical perspective I subscribe to The New Yorker for, diggin waaaay back into the history of polling in America to show how much of it has been bogus for at least 70 years.

You would have thought polling itself would have gone extinct in 1948 when Gallup himself said of his prediction that Dewey would beat Truman the whole world would see, “how good we are.” He should have been tarred and feathered back then with “Gallup” being as culturally discredited as Benedict Arnold, instead of giving rise to the sacred Gallup Polls of today.

The article points out how the process of polling in America (which emerged in the 1920’s, back when it was exciting to be asked your opinion, resulting in over 50% participation), has now dwindled to “single digits” for almost all phone polling. Meaning I wasn’t alone with my New Hamphire “no thank you” experience.

 

In 2005 when I set to work on my documentary “Flock of Dodos” about the evolution controversy in Kansas I listened to my interview subjects talk about the “statewide” polls on support for the teaching of evolution. Which seemed impressive except for one minor detail — my younger brother, who at the time worked in the oil fields of Kansas — kept reminding me, “NOBODY in this state cares about this stupid issue — they care about jobs — it makes them angry when they see evolution on the front page of the newspaper.” Which I had already sensed just from talking to my old high school and college friends there. The public concern was largely manufactured by journalists.

The thought that kept running through my head ends up being exactly what Lepore addresses. She writes, “The first question a pollster should ask,” the sociologist Leo Bogart advised in 1972, is, “Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion.” EXACTLY!!!

That is exactly what I kept thinking — how many of these working class people in Kansas have really digested this issue of evolution versus creationism and decided they have a clear and strong opinion. The number was probably statistically indistinguishable from zero. So much bogusness.

 

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLLING

 

ABRACADABRA TRUMP!

 

Stories begin with AAA (and, and, and). It’s called exposition — an assemblage of neutral facts that don’t yet engage the narrative centers of the brain. Not enough exposition and the story is confusing. Too much, it’s boring.

The LA Times reviewer for the new video game Fallout 4 says it took him 10 hours just to get to “the game’s first major city,” which he says was the first moment he began to actually warm to the game. That’s kind of like the end of the first act — the story is finally up and running, the audience is engaged.

He goes on to lament about that being just too much time — pretty much like a movie that takes forever to get to the first dead body. That’s an AAA problem — too much, “AND then we learn about this, AND then we learn about this, AND then we learn about this …” Enough already, get on with the story.

What’s a bigger concern is the overall feel of the game being just too complex. After 10 hours of play the reviewer says, “It still feels as if I’ve opened a board game for the first time, and before me lies the virtual equivalent of hundreds of tiny plastic pieces and the overwhelming dread that mastery won’t come easy.” This is the situation I’ve described in my new book as DHY — Despite, However, Yet — representing the situation of too many narrative directions at once.

It’s clear that the game is just too muddled — too much narrative, too many directions, too much detail. It lacks the simplicity of narrative that make stories popular. He reflects this by making references to simpler games of which he is more fond, by saying, “I miss the ease with which Lara Croft traversed ruins, and I miss the relative svelte nature of its story.”

The point of this post is not about video games (I don’t have the time to spend 10 hours just getting into one, though I wish I did). The point is how broadly the Narrative Spectrum applies to any world in which story is present. Show me a story, any story, and I’ll show you the forces of AAA, DHY and ABT at work.

 

Last spring we developed our Story Circles Narrative Fitness Training, running four prototypes at three locations. They ran surprisingly smoothly with only a few bumps to iron out over the summer.

Now we’ve moved out of the development phase — Story Circles is now operational. We just launched two new Story Circles with the southeast region of USDA/ARS — one “local” with five research scientists at their Fort Pierce, Florida research station, the other “remote” — five research scientists from several other locations who will hold their sessions via teleconferencing which will be the first time for this.

I was in Ft. Pierce last week to run the one day orientation session for both Circles. Unlike last spring, where it felt like we were making things up as we went along, now it is feeling firmly established. It works, it’s relatively simple, and now it’s up to the participants to put in the effort to make it effective.

If there’s one thing we learned from the prototypes, it’s that you get back what you put in. The harder people worked on the materials, the deeper the feel for narrative structure they gained. There are several other government agencies now talking to me about introducing Story Circles to their employees. It looks like USDA/ARS will be the model for all the others.

Last Saturday night my favorite TV show, 48 Hours Mystery aired a seemingly silly, but ultimately fascinating case. It fits right in to the dynamic of the fish of truth and river of story dynamics I present at the end of, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”

The murder case itself was pretty weird. A woman shot her husband of 15 years in the head twice, then claimed it was an accident, caused by their imitating a Bugs Bunny episode.

The story she spun in the initial trial was so unusual, specific and almost plausible that it ended up overriding the huge body of forensic evidence presented. The proscuting attourney, similar to so many prosecutors who present mountains of science-based evidence, was fairly stunned when the jury voted to acquit — as stunned as an evolutionist with all the science-based evidence who loses a debate to a creationist telling great stories.

Some of the jurors bought her story. She claimed that she and her wacky husband routinely quoted Bugs Bunny scenes to each other. In this case she picked up his handgun, he said, “no buwwets,” quoting Elmer Fudd, then she started “fan firing” the gun (similar to old western gunslingers holding down the trigger while “fanning” the hammer for multiple rapid shots). He leaned forward into the line of fire and oof, took two in the head, lights out.

Years later the woman was retried for the murder. This time around the prosecutor made a savvy decision. He opted to not present any of her post-arrest interrogation where she told about the Elmer Fudd thing in detail. Because of this, the whole wacky buwwets element never came up. The defense kept expecting him to get into it. He never did. As a result, all the jury got was the science-based forensics information.

Unlike the first trial where the jury ended up deadlocked after several days, in the second trial the jury took only one day to reach a decision — guilty. The prosecutor attributed it entirely to the removal of the Bugs Bunny element.

Bottom line, in the language of story — if you shrink the river of story (if it goes against the truth), the truth stands a better chance.

Don’t panic.  Just having some fun here.  The first wave of reviews on the book are out and they all have one thing in common: an appreciation of the power of the ABT.  Nature called it “the backbone of story” and the Science review at least quotes me saying it’s awesome (good enough).

It is indeed awesome, and is the central element of most everything I do now.  Next week I’ll be launching two new Story Circles with USDA in Florida (training built around the ABT), then a couple weeks later will be in Madison, Wisconsin to run an ABT session with 50 scientists from US Fish and Wildlife Service and other government agencies.

In addition to these training sessions, at the start of December I’m going to do a webinar on the ABT with a number of organizations.  If you haven’t watched the 2 minute animated ABT video, here it is — share it with everyone who is bored with boredom.

Lots more to come as we seek to rid the world of the “bo-ho-horing.”

It was 2008 when my good friend John Sterman had his MIT math and science grad students read the executive summary of the last IPCC report and try to translate it into understandable language.  In so doing, about half of them got wrong the basic contents of what the summary was saying.  He published a great short essay about it in Science, saying if MIT grad students can’t understand what you’re saying, how do you expect the public to.  You would have thought the IPCC might have improved things in response to being called out.  Not even close.

AS BORING AND CONFUSING AS THEY WANNA BE

 

THE ABT AT WORK

 

When my first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist,” came out in 2009 the very first major organization to contact me and ask me to come speak with them was the Union of Concerned Scientists.  It’s six years later and they’ve pretty much done it again with the review of my new book by Aaron Huertas, one of their long time science communication folks (who has just left to work in the private sector — he will be sorely missed).

It takes a lot of time and effort to write and publish a book.  It can be really frustrating when it finally comes out and you hear some people completely misread and misinterpret the contents.  It happened occasionally for my first book — one major review accused me of advocating “bending the science to tell better stories,” a group of scientists at a major research institution tried to have me un-invited because they thought it was an anti-science book (helps if you actually open the book).  And without saying who, there has already been one blog review for the new book by someone who also seems to have done little more than flip through a few pages and get offended at my critical comments about the humanities.

But Aaron Huertas has written a review that shows not only that he read and absorbed the message of the book, he also adds heft and validity to his review by applying part of the contents to the issue of vaccination.

I guess there’s an element of “takes one to know one” — meaning that Aaron understands the book so well because he’s dealt with the same challenges I address.  He hits on so many of the most important points of the book — like “Working the storytelling muscle.”  Thank you for highlighting this point.

It’s one of the biggest frustrations I contend with right now — people saying, “right, got it, ABT, three words, I’m all set.”  We got this with our Story Circles prototypes last spring — one participant asked why there needed to be ten meetings — basically saying, “I got the ABT on the first day and was done.”  What can you do.

That’s like lifting a barbell twice at the gym and saying, “right, got it, barbells, you lift them up, I’m all set,” then going home and never returning, yet thinking you’re buff.

It’s about “narrative fitness training” — that’s what Story Circles is about.  I had one scientist at a major institution tell me this summer, “our comms people have done a great job running us through their one day storytelling workshop over the past couple years — we’ve got it down.”

No, you don’t.  Sorry.  It doesn’t happen in one day.  It doesn’t happen in three years of film school.  It doesn’t even happen in an entire lifetime, even if you win an Oscar.  Last spring I asked Eric Roth, author of the screenplays for “Forrest Gump” “Munich” and countless other heavy weight movies, if at age 70 he feels like he’s “got it” on the storytelling thing — he chuckled and said, “are you kidding?”

I’m still figuring this stuff out and I’ve now written three books about it.  Please don’t tell me you’ve learned all there is to know about narrative.  If you have, you ought to be making millions of dollars in Hollywood.  Let me know when that happens.

(FINAL NOTE:  be sure to read Aaron’s account of the ABT Paul Offit tells about his wife administering a vaccination — it’s a powerful demonstration of the faulty thinking of anti-vaccinationists)

My good friend, screenwriter and author Mike Backes pointed this out to me and suggested this figure.

The AAA, which is the non-narrative default state, is common in kids who tell you about what they did today — “And then we went to the store, and then we saw a man, and then he said hello, and then we bought some ice cream, and then …”

At the other end of the spectrum is the learned academic whose thinking is so complex he ends up communicating on five separate narrative planes at once — “the classics are quite challenging despite their popularity, however some people would just as soon study poetry, yet I have a good friend who is fond of making his own haikus, but he’s not the only one who spends his spare time engaged in such activities, nevertheless …”

The real goal is right in the middle of the narrative spectrum.  People hit it at the prime of their lives.  That is when the brain is experienced enough, yet still sharp enough to construct clear, broadly understandable popular singular narratives.  That is when we have the best grasp of the ABT.

Such is the fate of humanity.