A layer model of myth

Myth is part of a cloud of related concepts, each with a huge academic literature. As a first approximation, I think of them as arranged in two fuzzy and intersecting layers, with the lower-level concepts aggregating into the higher-level ones.

War historians debate myths

John Mosier's essay War Myths (2005) contends that myths "are believed because they provide us with coherent and convincing explanations of complex events." His paper is the opening volley in a debate with several colleagues that has helped me think further about the definition of myth, and the roles of logos, mythos and pathos in argumentation.

Objectivity, subjectivity and myth

In my recent post Counterparts to logos, I wrestled with the characteristics of logos and mythos-pathos: empiricism and logical proof vs. intuition, feelings, and experience. It occurs to me that the logos/mythos axis might align with the objective/subjective binary.

Counterparts to logos

A Talking Politics podcast about the challenges of political journalism in a deeply polarized age (“Facts vs Opinions,” June 4, 2020) increased my confusion about logos (reason, rationality) vs. mythos. While I’ve been puzzling over how profoundly logos-inflected tech reporting and policymaking seem to be, current events are swamping logos-based journalism with pathos (passion, emotion, sentiment). This post is groping towards ways of thinking about what’s going on today.

"Myth" in tech journalism

I think of myths as widely shared stories that societies use to make sense of the world, but for most people, most of the time, myth means a widely held but false belief (Oxford, sense 2). Over the week-end I made a quick inventory of what counts as tech myths on the internet, and the results helped me think about the semantics of the term.

Another Trickster Story

Here’s another technology-trickster story; the first one is here.

Trickster was very good at entertaining people. It was a great gig: he arranged for people to entertain each other, and they gave him credit for it.

Technology, conspiracies, and control

Kaitlyn Tiffany has a nice piece about “the great 5G conspiracy” in The Atlantic. I was intrigued by the link between feelings about technology and feelings of powerlessness.

A Trickster Story

I’ve been grousing that I can't find contemporary myths that seem to explain how technology operates. Petri Mähönen and Pam Heath independently encouraged me to come up with my own. Here’s a first attempt.

#5Gcorona: Pathos vs. Logos

It’s clear – as Martin Sims argued in a recent PolicyTracker editorial – that the cellular industry and its associated regulators and scientists have made a pig’s ear of the 5G/radiation issue. However, the 5G/COVID concern (e.g.  #5Gcorona) is just the latest installment in a long tale. 

OK, Negroponte

A friend of mine at a tech company says that their data centers are running at ~80% capacity; that’s apparently way too hot for comfort – SOP is ~50%. Their telco partners are running out of comm server capacity, and are even (!) borrowing hardware from each other. Clearly the limiting factor today is atoms, not bits.

Narrowing down narrative

I concluded my post ‘Shiller’s Narratives: AEA 2017’ by suggesting that many people use the term narrative too widely, and gave a list of concepts that Shiller and others sweep up under the term ‘narrative’.  I’ve found encouragement in Galen Strawson’s essay ‘On the use of the notion of narrative in ethics and psychology,’ in The Natural Method: Essays in Honor of Owen Flanagan, (MIT Press, 2020; link is to a slightly expanded version).

Technology as Seducer

I loved Gluckman & Hanson’s remark that “Technology seduces us” in their new book, Ingenious. I’m surprised that I hadn’t thought of this as a mythical template before.

Coronavirus stories

COVID-19 is a convenient source of widely shared stories that people are using to make sense of something important. They've help me think about what I mean by 'stories'.

Shiller’s Narratives: EconTalk 2020

Russ Roberts chatted with Bob Shiller about his book Narrative Economics on the EconTalk podcast in February 2020. (What looks like a complete transcript is available on the podcast page under “Audio Highlights.”)

Shiller’s Narratives: AEA 2017

Robert Shiller’s 2017 AEA presidential address helped me understand what he means by narratives ("Narrative Economics," NBER Working Paper 23075). He explicitly includes explanations, and implicitly includes beliefs and descriptions; I think is far too broad. It looks like he’d count any concept as a narrative.