Science Fiction Makes Us Smarter

The effects of pop-culture on a society's trajectory are very subtle and complex. However, it becomes much more pronounced whenever a large group is quickly thrust into a novel situation, one that requires the emergence of collective decision.

I’ve been inspired recently by Dr. Jacob Foster, a UCLA sociologist and former physicist who studies collective intelligence. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he gave a fascinating talk about his research on the social nature of cognition.

A fascinating point he presented is that people often fall back on stories to determine their actions in a new situation, so if a large group of people is working under a common narrative, surprisingly coordinated behavior can emerge. He gave the example of the January 2021 GameStop short-squeeze, which was neat.

This essay will explore the nature of stories in the collective decision process. I will first outline my definitions of intelligence and collective intelligence. Then I will attempt to motivate simple stories as the only basis for collective intelligence, and discuss what makes a story so persuasive to large groups of people.

Then I will speculate on what type of stories are most helpful in navigating times of social upheaval. As the title suggests, I think science fiction is the answer. I will conclude with some reasons why science fiction will yield better decisions, and then give a personal example of how science fiction improves my thought processes.

Intelligence

I define intelligence as the ability to act effectively in a novel situation by performing complex, abstract pattern matching on the information you have available.

Most intelligence research tends to focus on the pattern matching part. For example, IQ tests ask participants to find the next element in a complicated sequence. This approach to measuring intelligence makes sense, because pattern matching is the only part of an intelligent process that can be isolated for standardized testing.

However, it’s not the most important part.

In the wild, the outcome of an intelligent decision has more to do with the data available than the IQ of the person making it. Whenever someone is presented with a novel situation, they immediately start scouring their schema for a relevant concept or experience which could inform their next action.

The less familiar the situation, the more of you need to explore concept-space to find something relevant. In a trivial situation, like making coffee, all you need is the procedural and episodic memory from yesterday morning. But in completely foreign situations, like huge, abstract societal changes, you might not have any direct experience or domain knowledge. You’re suddenly navigating by in situ exploration (news, friends, etc) and the vagaries of human morality.

Collective Intelligence

An act of collective intelligence requires a critical mass of people to make a decision (by definition). This poses some interesting constraints on the types of information that can be “reasons” about.

In such a situation, we are limited by the lowest common denominator in pattern matching ability (IQ), and group behavior tends to become irrational despite individual intelligences, regardless

Group actions will never be based on a nuanced and insightful observation, or one that takes a lot of domain knowledge. This is because everyone needs to buy into it quickly, so the ideas need to be phrased in a way that quickly resonates.

As discussed, understanding unorganized collective action becomes most important when societies enter uncharted waters. Unfortunately, when everybody is made to deal with something new at the same time, everybody becomes dumber (since nobody has strong prior experience). In other words, the lowest common denominator becomes really, really low.

I argue an emergent collective intelligence is most likely to reason about simple, widely understood ideas that are obviously relevant. Under those restrictions, we cut out most of the schema that could be used by an individual agent.

So what are we left with?

The Narrative

In the moments where a society's collective action really counts, there is just one mode of communication left: Stories.

The power of stories on human decision making has been written about by people much smarter than me for much longer than I’ve been alive. So the following is not exhaustive nor particularly well informed.

Let Stories Breathe is a good start if you want to dig.

Here are 5 reasons why stories are so persuasive to a society.

Simple - The events of a story are compressible, ie. they need to be streamlined into some causally connected plot. Life in general is obviously not like that, but addressing it in totality, as a chaotic, convoluted, smudge of particles, makes you go nuts.
Sticky - Good stories are engaging, striking a chord with the listener. This makes them memorable. Additionally, humans are set up for this type of sequential, episodic memory because it was adaptive to a hunter-gathering lifestyle.
Viral - Stories are designed to be told. As we are acutely aware, exciting stories can spread through the internet almost instantaneously. For good or for ill, packaging your ideas in a narrative container will get them farther.
Actionable - Stories have characters with well defined roles. You can easily slide into one and act it out. The cognoscenti call this process interpellation.
Predictive - Actions derived from narratives assume some certainty in the outcome. Every action in a story has a consequence, and knowing what that consequence will be is comforting. This is much different from analytical thinking, which recognizes uncertainty and reasons about it directly.

Science Fiction

Ok, to the point now. My argument is that in the space of all stories, SciFi is the best equipped to inform us in periods of societal change. Apparently lists are the second most persuasive idea vehicle, so here are 5 reason why SF is helpful:

Specifically crafted for this purpose - One of the broad goals of the science fiction genre is to help us visualize the future. This idea is formalized by Neal Stephenson with Hieroglyph Theory, which considers canonical SF tropes (spaceships, robots, etc) as easily recognizable symbols to help people reason about the future. For example, reading Huxley’s Brave New World provides a visceral understanding of what a world with gene editing could be. (Hint: bravery required).
SciFi respects nuance - as best as a simple story can. Other genres like to keep it simple regarding hard topics such as good vs. evil, but SF regularly enters the grey area. It embraces the Trickster archetype. The gift of the trickster (ie. fire, or technological progress in general) is always a curse and a blessing. The conflicts in SF center around this complicated double-edged sword.
Self-Consistent and Logical- Most stories don't need to make sense, but SF does. Authors put lots of work into crafting a world that could actually exist. Even if you admit some impossible technology and light fantasy, every plot point tends to happen for a reason. If we are considering stories in the context of motivating real-world decisions, I would prefer them to be as close to actualizable as possible.
Analytical Protagonists - SciFi fans cherish the genius hero. The small guy who has to beat the system with foresight and clever tactics. I really like Wendy Lesser’s characterization of the classic Asimov protagonist: “An individual with good powers of analysis and logic, as well as a great deal of modestly worn courage, confronts a giant system that is out to thwart him because he threatens, wittingly or unwittingly, to bring about it’s downfall” If you are looking to interpellate a fictional character, thats not a bad choice.
Broad Scope - SF has to be self-consistent and plausible, but after that everything is fair game. SF allows some truly far out plots and premises, which allows authors to present ideas without the historical baggage of earth-based narratives. This lets readers think about old ideas in new ways and shake the status-quo.

To close, I’ll give a concrete example based on my personal experience with science fiction. I’ve been heavily influenced by stories that take place over long time scales, like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or Frank Herbert’s Dune series. A lot of my understanding (for good or ill) of society comes from these stories featuring long duree power struggles.

So whenever I hear something crazy from the US Gov’t I tend to step back and consider its consequences over the next few years. Of course, I won’t know if this is a good approach until those next few years pass, but I think I can safely say it’s better than a knee jerk reaction grounded only in this news cycle.

My point is that stories starting with “A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far far away” may give you perspective that a closer story won’t, and SF is saturated with these galactic epics relative to other genres.

Thanks for reading! Do you have any stories that have been influential to your thought processes? If so, pop it in the comments, I would love to hear what you think.

Adrian's Science Blog