At the
Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting earlier this month, Randy Olson said, “The word ‘storytelling’ is
damaged.”
Coincidentally enough, this was something that had been drilled home to me when I gave an exam just a couple of weeks earlier in a technical writing class. I gave students an article that appeared in
Nature Methods by Krzywinski and Cairo (2013) arguing in favour of storytelling, and a response from Katz (2013) against it. There were other follow-up articles, but I just used the initial two to make it easier to complete an essay within exam time.
I asked the students to evaluate the two articles, and take a position on whether scientists should tell stories.
I was stunned by the students’ essays. Every single one of them said scientists should
not use storytelling techniques. I’d done these sorts of “Two opinions, which do you agree with and why” sorts of exams before, but I had never seen such a completely lopsided response.
A couple of phrases got used in multiple essays. One was some variation of, “Storytelling is okay for kid’s books, but not for science.” Another was, “Science is supposed to be about the facts.”
This is perfectly in line with Olson’s plenary, in which he noted scientists suffer from “
storyphobia.”
Scientists are afraid of the word “story", because of connotations of fabrication and “tweaking” of facts. These aren’t the same.
He advised people to avoid using “storytelling” and talk about “narrative” instead.
Because it was a final exam, I didn’t have a chance to follow up with the students about this. If I had, I would have asked them this:
If science is purely and solely about “the facts,”
why do we publish scientific papers at all? Why not just upload methods and datasets? If you have the data and the methods to generate them, isn’t that all you need to assess the “facts” in play?
The other point that I would have raised with them is that there is an inherent connection between stories and experimental science: they are both about causes. A satisfying story is built around
causal connections. Without those causal connections, you have a series of disconnected events that makes about as much sense as a random inkblot. Having a character win just because she got lucky makes for an unsatisfying story, because there is no explanation for luck: it just happens. From
here (my emphasis):
21. My Porn Director Name Will Be “Therefore Butts”
Click here and get schooled by the South Park guys. The key thing they’re getting across with this is that scenes and events in storytelling don’t happen independently of one another. There must exist a chain of cause and effect, of action and opposite reaction, of consequence. Dominoes do not fall separate from one another. They fall against one another. Embroider that profound shit on a throw pillow.
Cause is the great beating heart of any story... and experiments. The whole point of an experiment is to determine if one thing
causes another. Thus, any time you have done experimental science, you have a thread that might be woven into a stor—oops, I mean narrative.
This isn’t to say that non-experimental science can’t generate a narrative, but experimental science has an inherent advantage in doing so.
Additional: Some nice commentary on
Google Plus.
References
Krzywinski M, Cairo A. 2013. Points of view: Storytelling.
Nature Methods 10: 687.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2571
Katz Y. 2013. Against storytelling of scientific results.
Nature Methods 10: 1045.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2699
Some other researchers have been critical when I say things like this, because they see it as undermining the cause for federal research funding. This is like worrying about the blood loss from a mosquito bite in a patient with gunshot wound through major arteries.
