The Power of the Narrative

Interesting take on conspiracy theories and other narratives:

Tim Powers, whose novels often involve secret histories, has said he encounters something similar while researching his books: He reaches a point where he needs to start "resisting paranoia because you'll find that your research genuinely does seem to support whatever goofy theory you've come up with." The lessons here apply not just to crank theories but to more plausible storylines as well, many of them embedded deeply in our culture. Anyone who's in the business of constructing narratives -- be we historians, journalists, or anything else -- ought to understand how easy it is to fall into this trap, when a combination of confirmation bias and serendipity blinds you to the ways your story might not describe the world. Marshall McLuhan, no stranger to conspiracy theories himself, famously said that the map is not the territory. What he didn't add was that, with sufficient ingenuity, a territory can be made to yield some very strange maps indeed

 

Confirmation bias can be very self-reinforcing, I guess.