Explanatory narratives - tell your stories!
I've commented on explanatory frameworks before. These are the unifying narratives that we use to make sense of ourselves, political concerns, economics, and even science and mathematics. Narratives are accounts of connected events or phenomena that attempt to express the connections in an explanatory story.
We're often afflicted with "just-so" narratives that attempt to reconcile or explain the way the world works with little or no evidence, like claiming inequality of inborn capacities, innate racial differences, or the intervention of supernatural entities and forces.
So this is everyone's chance to tell a story, at whatever length they find convenient, which explains something that concerns them. Possible examples of story topics:
"Why finding work is a struggle for me"
"Bayes' Theorem accounts for everything"
"Political parties can't handle reality"
These examples aren't about me or my beliefs - I'm just flinging things out there. This also isn't a college narrative essay exercise. So just tell a good story about something you care about, that's likely to engage others' interests and concerns.
Conspiracy theories are probably not a good idea here; the tendency towards them is a dysfunction of humans' ability to create, and desire for, narratives.
I ask that participants in the thread refrain from attempting to argue with or disprove others' stories here, but they can become jumping-off points for new Tildes topics.
If this exercise is well-received, it could become a monthly recurring thread. Feel free to advise on better structure.
I always think I have enough time, right up until I don't.
I allowed myself to become idle for a very long time, which in turn made me still and the stillness sedated me. But recently I went through a dead reckoning. And it has been terrifying.
My mother died from cancer last month at the age of 56 and I believe her own mother died from breast cancer when she was in her late 50s. As their daughter and granddaughter, I know that there's a decent chance I might be diagnosed accordingly when I enter my fifties, so I only have 27 years left to enjoy if something catastrophic happens.
But if this is how my story will end, then I'll make damn sure I had some good chapters; I'll make the next 27 years count for something, because I WANT them to count for something. I want to draw again and become an illustrator. I want to visit as many national parks as I can. I want to find my people and maybe even build a family and home for myself. But I can't do any of that if I don't fucking move.
So here's to 2020, and all the other years ahead of me, each of them unknowable and uncertain, but also each one giving me a chance to do something.
Best of luck. Stay strong.
My apologies to all for abandoning the thread I created! It's been a few days of undesired AFK for a bad arthritis flare-up. It could be the seed for my own narrative of disability, fear, and frustration, but that's not the story I'm interested in telling.
As @mrbig commented, I've asked for a difficult undertaking - sharing your own explanatory models and narratives requires effort to express the "meta" of your thinking. So, I'll provide a narrative that hopefully explains my explanatory framework for explanatory frameworks and narratives.
I started considering explanatory frameworks when looking at various psychiatric models for depression, and ran across the work of Arthur Kleinman, the medical anthropologist and psychiatrist who originated the use of explanatory models in cross-cultural psychiatry.
He basically differentiated diagnosis, the effort in Western medicine to taxonomize clusters of disease symptoms and develop physiological explanations for mental disorders; versus illness, the patient's individual experience of symptoms in the context of their values, family, culture, and society.
Diagnosis offers explanatory models for the phenomena of patient symptoms. Psychiatric narrative contains both the stories the doctor tells about what is wrong with the patient and how to repair the disease, and the patient's story about the distresses their symptoms cause and whether the cure is working.
In the introduction to Rethinking Psychiatry (2008), Kleinman advises as follows:
@vivaria and @zara already provided good examples of narratives here, for which I'm grateful. @zara places their experience inside an explanatory model - when confronted with the prospect of a short life, it's necessary to pursue meaning. @vivaria rejects the explanatory models (diagnoses) that have been offered, and is still searching for an explanation that doesn't distort their experiences and supports making rational choices.
I'm still working my way through Kleinman's What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger. The book relates the stories of people with diagnosed psychiatric disorders in the face of truly horrific experience (refugees, veterans, survivors, etc.), and their coming to terms with the choices they made or can make. Kleinman offers the explanatory model that much of the distress we experience arises from the fact that life actually is difficult and threatening, most of the time. Our internal distress at recognition of this reality offers the opportunity to make meaning through ethical choices, particularly when our distress comes from the conflict between our personal values and the morality of our culture and society. The patients experienced relief when they were able to explain their stories in new terms that enabled them to perceive the power of their past and future choices. Kleinman recognized that people may punish themselves for not having realistic scope to make their life narratives "heroic" in terms of their cultural values, but they can be brought to see or make their stories "good" in ethical terms.
@mrbig complained that explanatory frameworks suggest a relativistic relation with truth. As illustrated above, there is relativism in how we taxonomize truth - which facts are grouped together to formulate explanations for what has been observed. Present-day Western psychiatric diagnosis tends to group observations in terms of disordered physiological processes that can be treated with drugs. Isaac Newton observed one set of facts about gravitation and offered a mathematical framework that explained them, while Albert Einstein grouped in additional facts and generated a new explanatory framework. Neither was wrong, but Einstein offered a more generalizable explanation. "Scientific" racists claim heritability of IQ as an explanatory framework for difference between races, but this depends on whole branches of fact exclusion (and frank inaccuracy).
As usual, I've gone on too long and not always clearly, but I hope this sheds some light on the why and how of the thread.
As much as I better understand the goals of the thread now, I respectfully decline from partaking on it. There's a reason for psychiatric methods to be as they are, and Newton's and Einstein's findings are both examples of sound rational pursuits of the truth. Lumping them together with pseudoscience and anecdotical personal narratives is dangerous and unsound. There is such a thing as soundness beyond history. This is even more true for much of the exact sciences. Science can and should be continuously proven wrong, but only in the face of (at least) equally strong proof, not by merely being re-framed on a subjective paradigm.
And since I tend to look for science and logic as means to substantiate my world views, this kind of meta-thinking would be useless for me.
Besides, meta-theories such as these are self-invalidating. I can very well frame the theory itself in another framework that makes it invalid.
I was not referring to alternative treatments per se (they're mostly harmless as long as they remain a mere alternative), but rather irrationalisms such as flat-earthers and the anti-vax movement.
Besides:
To quote myself:
Well, that makes things less clear to me! I thought they were off-target. Like I said before, I've been waiting for examples of an "explanatory framework" to turn up here, which seems to be a personal framework that explains how/why things happen. To my eye, one of these "good examples" is just a personal resolution to not waste precious time, while the other "good example" is a series of questions and musings. Neither of them seemed, to me, to meet the criterion of being a framework that explains things. So you saying they're good examples confuses me even more. :(
Maybe my explanatory framework is that there is no explanatory framework. Life is random, and we deal with it as best as we can. Nothing more than that.
I'm going to have to agree here that I can't really believe in a narrative or diagnosis. I was diagnosed with autism at somewhere around 2-3 because my case was particularly apparent (I was actually the kind of autistic baby who bashed my head into the wall). But how did I change into who I am today? Is my autism 'fixed' or 'getting better'? According to most sources yes and that happens, but how, and when? And then you get into what separates 'high functioning' autism from asperger syndrome or how many of these mental disorders oftem share symptoms with each other (like ADHD, aspergers, OCD) and things that occur independent of these disorders, which makes it that much harder to seriously fix it (or anything really) into my 'identity' and take it as a part of me.
I don't know but I can talk about other stuff this reminds me of, and maybe some of it will be useful?
I think many skills come from deliberate practice in the right environment, until you can do it consistently. Throwing yourself into something that's too hard for you may be practice in muddling through or in surviving bad situations but it's often not the sort of practice that builds confidence in core abilities.
Sometimes to learn how to move faster you need to slow way down and work on fundamentals. Consistency comes from doing the same things many times until it becomes a habit. The first time you succeed at something difficult is a milestone (because you've shown it's possible) but that doesn't mean the skill is solid yet and you should expect you will still see some failures until you practice it more.
Trying to predict in advance whether you can succeed seems less important than finding the right environment where you can practice it safely?
Or at least, that's how it works for me when learning a musical instrument. Whether it works for other stuff, I don't know, but maybe it's a useful narrative?
I'm not sure I understand the exercise. Do you want me to tell the story of my life? Do you want me to explain how something else works?
You don't have to tell the whole story of your life, but if you have a theory about x (your life, politics, your cat, a scientific factoid, etc.) that you want to explain as a story, please proceed..
I also have trouble wrapping my head around the concept. If I understand correctly, you're asking for some kind of meta-thinking that can range from extremely hard to impossible. The things I believe in are not "explanatory frameworks", they're conclusions derived from facts. As such, they might be wrong. But calling them "explanatory frameworks" seems to devalue them from the start.
It also suggests a relativistic relation with truth. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I still don't get it. It feels like it should be a good idea, but it's beyond me. I'll leave it for more creative people. Maybe if I see some examples, I'll get it.
Thanks for trying to explain it, though.