Let Me Tell You a Story

A lifelong friend of our family inspired me to become an engineer. He was my parents’ age and an electrical engineer of some renown in our community. My job after graduating was close to home, so our relationship turned professional. We took continuing-ed classes together, drank together with classmates, and shared yuk-yuks about our mutual associates. He sponsored my registration as a Professional Engineer. I always made sure to share a table with him at our social gatherings, which our families often held in common.

As my career developed, we competed in our local marketplace to hire the same talent. I often won. My industry, robotics, was new and sexy at the time. I was young and enthusiastic. He was aging and ostensibly crabby. But that never interfered with our relationship. He was a treasured resource for me until his dying day. I achieved more because of the irreplaceable confidence he conveyed.

As he aged, I noticed things he did that felt off kilter. We were technical careerists. Yet, he participated in Toastmasters. He attended civic meetings and wrote responses to them. Soon after retiring (which he never really did), he joined a story-telling club. I remember thinking what a waste of time all of this was. There were so many technical hills to climb and commercial opportunities to pursue. We looked at several ideas together, but he soft-pedaled them. I felt he was distracted with his otherwise low-value pursuits.

Now I’m old and ostensibly crabby myself. And maybe reflective enough to be self-critical. I was always skeptical of the value of soft skills development. I resented my employer requiring me to take personality assessments and people-management classes. Cynically, I observed that nobody I knew had flunked Dale Carnegie, and that after a couple months, I couldn’t tell someone who went from someone who didn’t. Besides, we were engineers and technologists. Science substantiated our work. We used data, graphs, and equations to direct our choices. If others couldn’t adapt to that, maybe they should be re-educated – not us.

Unusually for an engineer, I was comfortable writing. My technical papers were unassailable. A succinct hypothesis, critical variables identified, crisp discussion of historical data, analysis to substantiate a recommendation with quantified uncertainty. No spelling errors. Everything properly formatted and punctuated. My documents read like neat, long-form math equations with undeniable conclusions. If someone misinterpreted that work, they must be unable to read or think clearly.

Yup, there was some ego involved. Somehow, I was that good and ended up NOT a billionaire. Hard to figure.

Recent political fashion claims to “follow science.” Policy makers, economists, pollsters, and marketeers assert benefits from being “data driven.” Given how I’ve characterized myself, this should be my element. Reassuring. But the longer I observe it, the less I find it so.

Science is our means of understanding nature. Ever-improving measures of time, distance, and mass have described our world more accurately and provided data to predict farther into the future. While primitives were reasonably certain the sun would come up each morning, we now know where all the planets of our solar system are going to be for thousands of years. (That is, if everything stays the same. Who knows if a rogue planetoid might enter our solar system and screw up all our models? Some uncertainty needs to be built in.) But in general, we can launch a probe with extreme confidence that it will intersect Saturn’s orbit at a precise time and date several years from now. In turn, science equipped us to interact in more creative ways. Because of such exchange, we take for granted technologies that seemed like science fiction a hundred years ago; and divine miracles five-hundred years ago.

To accomplish this, barriers had to be broken. Galileo and Darwin elicited dangerous controversy defying orthodoxy to socialize theories which ultimately proved correct. But that doesn’t pre-ordain that all scientific assertions are correct. After all, turning lead into gold and fountains of youth were similarly claimed by scientific hucksters. That had to be sorted.

Yes, science has been a great tool to inform humanity.

And so has storytelling.

Throughout human history, our forbears communicated mostly by words expressed face-to-face with rhythm, actions, and images keeping engagement with each other. Stories concerned not only daily rigors, but life’s lessons passed on. Wisdom and foolishness were characterized as tales of heroes and villains, told and retold, modified with new experiences, between generations. Their origins may have been unrecognizable, but the lessons were real. Was there really a boy who cried wolf? Did Icarus really fly too close to the sun? Did a serpent really convince Eve to eat an apple? Myths, fables, and religious history were story-told long before they were written, embodying the composite learning of storytellers along the way.

The stories we heard underpinned our beliefs. The ways of the world, conventional wisdom, and common sense were conveyed to us in dimensionless simplicity. Tortoise compared to hare without units of speed, but we understood slow and steady. We don’t know the clarity of Narcissus’ reflection from the pool, but the image must have been arresting. The ant and grasshopper had no hourly wage, but we learned the value of their time spent. It is our nature to be compelled by a story. Regardless of science, stories harbor valuable lessons. When a story is substantiated by science, it is that much more compelling.

Uniquely, humans can take a thought, move it to another’s brain, and in turn receive thoughts from others’ brains. But to accurately convey a thought, we need to describe it in a recognizable form. In other words, we need to tell the story. It’s work. Scientific evidence is just one aspect of a well-told story. But in the absence of a story, science is vacuous. The concept of “following science” doesn’t make a lot of sense. It implies that we should just lazily believe what alleged scientists say.

But which scientists? Fauci and his ilk, or the signatories of The Great Barrington Declaration? And what should we think when science declares story-told wisdom obsolete? When social scientists assert “words are violence” to rival sticks and stones? When counterevidence is reflexively dismissed as anecdotal? Claiming authority based on science, but absent a convincing story to a skeptical audience, is just a scheme for power. No less a religion than religion.

I’m still learning from my mentor, even though he passed away almost 15 years ago. I now think I know what he was about in his later years. He understood that people could misuse science to convince themselves of anything. He’d probably done it himself, as I now acknowledge I had. He probably knew that about me, too. To be relevant, science needs to triangulate around common sense and worldly observations. Good storytellers are valuable to make sense of it. He was trying to be one.

So am I.