I think what would be useful is to distinguish a story (a typically linear narrative) and a model (a known-to-be-simplified map of some piece of reality). They are sufficiently different and often serve different goals. In particular, stories are rarely quantitative and models usually are.
I like to think about how the two complement each other. You can build a model out of a mass of data, but extrapolation outside the data is tricky business. You can also start with a qualitative description of the phenomena involved and work out the details. A lot of models start off by making some assumptions and figuring out the consequences.
Example: you can figure out gas laws by taking lots of measurements, or you can start with the assumption that gases are made of molecules that bounce around and go from there.
We might be understanding the word “story” differently.
To me a “story” is a narrative (a linear sequence of words/sentences/paragraphs/etc.) with the general aim of convincing your System 1. It must be simple enough for the System 1 and must be able to be internalized to become effective. There are no calculations in stories and they generally latch onto some basic hardwired human instincts.
For example, a simple and successful story is “There are tiny organisms called germs which cause disease. Wash your hands and generally keep clean to avoid disease”. No numbers, plugs into the purity/disgust template, mostly works.
The three laws of Newton are not a story to me, to pick a counter-example. Nor is the premise that gas consists of identical independent molecules in chaotic motion—that’s an assumption which underlies a particular class of models.
Models, as opposed to stories, are usually “boxes” in the sense that you can throw some inputs into the hopper, turn the crank, and get some outputs from the chute. They don’t have to be intuitive or even understandable (in which case the box is black), they just have to output correct predictions. The Newton’s laws, for example, make correct predictions (within their sphere of applicability and to a limited degree of precision), but we still have no idea how gravity really works.
I was using “story” in a much more general sense. Perhaps I should have chosen a different word. I saw a story as some bit of exposition devised to explain a process. In that sense, I would view the kinetic theory of gases as a story. A gas has pressure because all these tiny particles are bumping into the walls of its container. Temperature is related to the average kinetic energy of the particles. The point here is that we can’t see these particles, nor can we directly measure their state.
Consider, in contrast, the presentation in Fermi’s introductory Thermodynamics book. He eschewed an explanation of what exactly was happening internally and derived his main results from macroscopic behavior. Temperature was defined initially as that which a gas thermometer measures, and later on he developed a thermodynamic definition based on the behavior of reversible heat engines. This sort of approach treats the inner workings of a gas as unknown and only uses that which we can directly observe through instrumental readings.
I guess what I really want to distinguish are black boxes from our attempts to guess what’s in the box. The latter is what I tried to encapsulate by “story”.
I think what would be useful is to distinguish a story (a typically linear narrative) and a model (a known-to-be-simplified map of some piece of reality). They are sufficiently different and often serve different goals. In particular, stories are rarely quantitative and models usually are.
I like to think about how the two complement each other. You can build a model out of a mass of data, but extrapolation outside the data is tricky business. You can also start with a qualitative description of the phenomena involved and work out the details. A lot of models start off by making some assumptions and figuring out the consequences.
Example: you can figure out gas laws by taking lots of measurements, or you can start with the assumption that gases are made of molecules that bounce around and go from there.
We might be understanding the word “story” differently.
To me a “story” is a narrative (a linear sequence of words/sentences/paragraphs/etc.) with the general aim of convincing your System 1. It must be simple enough for the System 1 and must be able to be internalized to become effective. There are no calculations in stories and they generally latch onto some basic hardwired human instincts.
For example, a simple and successful story is “There are tiny organisms called germs which cause disease. Wash your hands and generally keep clean to avoid disease”. No numbers, plugs into the purity/disgust template, mostly works.
The three laws of Newton are not a story to me, to pick a counter-example. Nor is the premise that gas consists of identical independent molecules in chaotic motion—that’s an assumption which underlies a particular class of models.
Models, as opposed to stories, are usually “boxes” in the sense that you can throw some inputs into the hopper, turn the crank, and get some outputs from the chute. They don’t have to be intuitive or even understandable (in which case the box is black), they just have to output correct predictions. The Newton’s laws, for example, make correct predictions (within their sphere of applicability and to a limited degree of precision), but we still have no idea how gravity really works.
I was using “story” in a much more general sense. Perhaps I should have chosen a different word. I saw a story as some bit of exposition devised to explain a process. In that sense, I would view the kinetic theory of gases as a story. A gas has pressure because all these tiny particles are bumping into the walls of its container. Temperature is related to the average kinetic energy of the particles. The point here is that we can’t see these particles, nor can we directly measure their state.
Consider, in contrast, the presentation in Fermi’s introductory Thermodynamics book. He eschewed an explanation of what exactly was happening internally and derived his main results from macroscopic behavior. Temperature was defined initially as that which a gas thermometer measures, and later on he developed a thermodynamic definition based on the behavior of reversible heat engines. This sort of approach treats the inner workings of a gas as unknown and only uses that which we can directly observe through instrumental readings.
I guess what I really want to distinguish are black boxes from our attempts to guess what’s in the box. The latter is what I tried to encapsulate by “story”.
Isn’t that what science usually calls a “theory”?