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Narrative, Science, and Unpredictability

Narrative,
Science, and
Unpredictability

Anne Dalke

August 2007

"We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our...thirst for...patterns: the narrative fallacy.

--Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

"...in genre, you’re...buying a guarantee that you are going to have essentially the same experience again and again. It’s a novel. It won’t be too novel. Don’t worry."

--William Gibson, "Back From the Future,"
New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2007

Randomness and unpredictability are two important themes running throughout Serendip, an on-line site for science education that presumes both that variability is intrinsic to the brain, and (following from that), that the disorder of the Web is one of its greatest virtues. Many of the on-line exhibits featured on Serendip are interactive games that allow viewers to explore the consequences of randomness in (for example) segregation and integration, in social organization more generally, in thinking about "purpose" most generally of all.

I have spent most of my life thinking about narrative: the various forms it takes and the various purposes it serves. The many new developments in emergence theory have recently gotten me to think differently about these things, about Why Words Arise—and Wherefore; about the Emergence of Genres; about (most generally) Learning to Live with Uncertainty.

I picked up and continued that conversation with a student who had a "transcontinental obsession" with the topic, and now pick it up here again with Brian Clark, an experimental narrativist who's been leading me further down this path....We've been talking about narrative, genre and improbability--and, improbably, science-- in ways that we hope others might want to join in. Let's see where we can go, and how we might get there....?