Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

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Someone said something very similar to this in a fancy and articulate way, and since just about anyone else is more credible than I, I've been dying to figure out who and just how they put it.

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Mark Twain? "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."

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Probably a lot of people have said something to that effect, but the one I always think of is G.K. Chesterton: "Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction; for we have made fiction to suit ourselves."

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He's wrong, of course.

There are people whom one can observe who have a tropism for eccentricity. Thus, when such people create fictions, the very fact they make it to "suit themselves" means they add in a level of strangeness one never sees observationally, for flavoring.

And, as I say below-thread, "strange" just means, "doesn't match my expectations." Truth or reality can only be "strange" if one has a set of expectations that are disconnected from the real world. It is, as I say, the height of vanity to think this, because it means one thinks one's own expectations are the measure against which the universe should be measured. Compared to the vastness of the uncaring universe, the idiosyncratic expectations of any one human being don't even rise to the level of a rounding error.

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Mark Twain also said, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

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WWII plotholes: The failure of the British and French to deal with Hitler when he was containable (i.e allowing him to militerize the Rhine without a fight).

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Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

--- G.K. Chesterton

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I've always thought that the "the truth is stranger than fiction" thing is bullshit.

Just think of the strangest thing that is true and add a Penguin wearing a fez riding a shark to it.

Which of the two is stranger?

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The true thing. By orders of magnitude. My everyday life includes at least five or six things a week stranger than a penguin wearing a fez riding a shark. I don't even know HOW a fez can ride a shark, but my life includes weirder things than that most days.

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As George Burns is ascribed to have said, “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”

I read you as having hit the sincerity gap here.

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I've worked for five years to turn myself into a top-notch bartender. A brand-new bar just opened up a month ago, and has been getting rave reviews. I interviewed there, and after a week, I got a phone call, and we decided that I could start today.

This was the culmination of literally YEARS of work -- the level of bartending that I'm working is a highly skilled craft, not just making gin and tonics. In order to get that interview, I had years of networking, building my reputation and certifications, getting known.

On Saturday, there were extremely localized thunderstorms in and around Boston.

Yesterday morning, the restaurant's Facebook page reported that the extremely localized thunderstorms had resulted in a five-foot tidal wave ripping the door off the restaurant and destroying it.

That's WAY weirder than a penguin wearing a fez riding a shark.

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For all that I can appreciate personal perturbations to your life (and my condolences -- as someone between jobs for a year-and-a-half, I almost always feel some anguish when hearing of someone's work situation becoming unstable)... still, you're basically saying a quasi-random event happened in a quasi-random set of circumstances. Or, to put my Taleb hat on, you're saying a black swan happened to you. The consequences may be regretted, but the event itself is... unsurprising. {shrug}

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Why would a penguin wearing a fez riding a shark be any more surprising?

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Having now read a few things on Think Tank:

I think of Inman Square as my family's old habitat. Ma Savenor, Jack Savenor, and Max (I think he was Ma's son-in-law) used to let me ride the conveyor belt from the ground floor to the basement. Max would make pickles in the basement, and smoke cigars, and I'd hang out with him.

I remember a predecessor to Ryles' location, which was an Italian restaurant called Villa Capri. The six-year-old me loved that place.

Dad was big into firefighting as a volunteer. We would hang out at the fire station on the square often.

And, yes... Cambridge gets wacky weather every now and then.

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"Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."

Absolutely wrong. Truth always makes sense. Fiction has "sensiness."

The premise that truth doesn't make sense is really a premise that truth doesn't always match one's expectations. It's a sign of vanity La Rochefoucauld would be proud of that so many people then blame truth, rather than their expectations, for the dissonance.

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"Making sense" is a human experience. What you're calling "sensiness", (after "truthiness", I presume), is "making sense."

If something "makes sense", it means that it matches our human, subjective idea of what "should be". It IS about our expectations, rather than about objective truth.

Fiction must, in some manner, match our expectations about "what should be". Reality is under no such stricture.

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""Making sense" is a human experience."

A "human" experience, implying every human does it? Hm. How do you know? Who's your source? How do they know?

Kinsey, before he took up sex research, was an entomologist. His specialty was wasps. The collection he curated at Indiana University has over five million specimens. He was once asked what he could say about The Wasp. His reply: He hadn't really seen enough specimens to generalize.

I humbly suggest there is more variation among h. sap. than among wasps.

"What you're calling "sensiness", (after "truthiness", I presume), is "making sense.""

Yes on the "truthiness," but overall, again, I disagree, based on my sample of one. (I think I'm human. How would I falsify that? Hmm...)

Anyway. To me, "making sense," is asking, "What happened? How did it happen?" I try my level best to check "Why did it happen?" at the door. Not just because it's more the province of religion or philosophy than observation (though there is that), but because it leads to such bad results so much of the time.

One way of thinking of fiction is as training to have empathy for how others think. (I'm thinking here particularly of Rebecca Saxe's TED talk.) Still, the reason reality wins over expectations is that someone -- whether a person whose motivations you've guessed wrong or an uncaring universe whose properties you don't fully understand -- could well kill you when you ignore reality in favor of your expectations. For all that quoting the line from Galaxy Quest ("This episode was badly written!") might be amusing at that point, it doesn't make you any less dead.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking

Because "making sense" has a specific meaning, and it's about subjective reality.

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"Because "making sense" has a specific meaning, and it's about subjective reality."

Except it doesn't. At least, it's inconsistent.

As an example, one point from the article cited:

People favour plausibility over accuracy in accounts of events and contexts (Currie & Brown, 2003; Brown, 2005; Abolafia, 2010): "in an equivocal, postmodern world, infused with the politics of interpretation and conflicting interests and inhabited by people with multiple shifting identities, an obsession with accuracy seems fruitless, and not of much practical help, either" (Weick 1995: 61).

The article appears to emphasize contributions from Karl Weick as foundational -- he came up with the term, "sensemaking." Yet, from an interview Weick had with Wired in 1996:

Wired: You also say "discrediting" - purposely turning your back on what has worked in the past to avoid future traps - is a strategy for organizational survival and innovation.

Weick: Firefighters are most likely to get killed or injured in their 10th year on the job, when they think they've seen pretty much everything there is to see on the fires. They become less open to new information that would allow them to update their models. Discrediting tries to solve these problems of hubris or seeming infallibility.

Failing to "update one's models," in the face of reality, is exactly the kind of disconnect I'm talking about. And if there's something of more "practical help" than saving the lives of firefighters, not only to them but to society as a whole, I'd be interested to hear it.

It would be more persuasive to posit "sensemaking" has a specific meaning if the originator of the term used it specifically, and in a meaningful way.

Edited at 2010-07-12 08:45 pm (UTC)

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True that.

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Peter Hathaway Capstick wrote the bio of John Howard "Pondoro" Taylor, who was a gay, Irish, aristocratic, Muslim elephant poacher.

If I submitted that as fiction I'd be laughed at.

Dr Who's famous "Doh!": "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow."

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Two-Gun Cohen -- a Polish Jew who got arrested in London for pickpocketing, sent to Canada where he was a carnival barker, grifter, and gambler, then went to China and worked as a bodyguard and military aide to various Chinese leaders, and fought against Japan when they invaded China at the beginning of -- and this comes right back to the overall topic of this livejournal entry -- WWII.

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I have always favored Tom Clancy's remark on the subject: "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense."

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I prefer to say that truth is stranger than fact.

Fact is just that which is. Truth is a fiction we weave around the facts to explain them to ourselves. Some truths are more practical than others and some truths are just more cosey than others. We pick the truths that we feel serve us best.

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