From Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex ( link ):

Anyone who learned the obvious lesson from Moneyball (“Pure math always defeats fallible human intuitions) would fail at the 2016 campaign, and anyone who learned the obvious lesson from the 2016 campaign (“Real experience and domain knowledge beat overeducated Big Data hotshots every time”) would fail at the 2003 baseball season.

The solution is: stop treating life as a series of moral parables. Once you get that, it all just becomes evidence – and then you wonder whether a single data point about Presidential campaigns necessarily generalizes to baseball or whatever.

At the same time, consider from Dave Gray:

“If you give people facts without a story, they will explain it within their existing belief system. The best way to promote a new or different belief is not with facts, but with a story.”

See also: this piece from Mike Caulfield on our Narrative Neediness ( link ) and these written 1995 remarks from Alan Kay ( link ).

In order to be completely enfranchised in the 21st century, it will be very important for children to get fluent in the three central forms of thinking that are now in use: “stories,” “logical arguments,” and “systems dynamics.” The question is “how?”