Shared by JohnH

It’s great to see NNT’s ideas put to use. Raise the standards!

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, has written about this. He calls it the “narrative fallacy” which is a fancy way of saying the news media takes the facts at hand and weaves together a story line that either a) they think readers/viewers want to hear or b) reinforces the reporter/editor’s point of view.

International or not, all breaking news reporters – this one included – are guilty of this. Even magazine journalists can make such mistakes – Maclean’s magazine’s “Too Asian” story is a recent, ripe example.

Taleb writes in his book:

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly the newspaper cannot perform an experiment, but it can choose one report over another – there is plenty of empirical research to present and interpret from … Being empirical does not mean running a laboratory in one’s basement: it is just a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over others. I do not forbid myself from using the world cause, but the causes I discuss are either bold speculations (presented as such) or the results of experiments, not stories.

So with my most recent piece on China’s scientific publishing industry – and in a forthcoming analysis on China’s mental health problems, I am steering clear of narrative fallacies and striving to produce more analytical stories, backed up not by anecdotes but by empirical research. But empirical research takes time, you see. It’s not something a political scientist, doctor or economist can always drum up in time for a reporter’s deadline.

These days, this reporter is enjoying a more flexible deadline. The result, I hope, is for a better, a smarter and a more accurate story for you, dear readers.