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Stories
3 min read · 568 words
Stories are the structures through which the mind makes sense of experience — and the operator’s stories shape what experience even is.
The mind is a meaning-making engine. It takes input and produces narrative — this happened, then this, because of that, leading to this, meaning this. The narrative is partly construction, partly tracking of actual events. Most operators experience their stories as the actual situation rather than as the system’s construction of the situation, and proceed accordingly. The conflation has consequences, because the constructed narrative is not always accurate to what actually occurred or what is occurring.
The categories of story the operator runs. Stories about self: the narratives the operator carries about who they are, what they’re capable of, what their history means. The Self-Image entry covered related territory. Stories about others: the narratives about who other operators are, what they want, why they do what they do. Stories about the world: the narratives about how things work, what’s happening, what is to be expected. Stories about the past: the narratives about what occurred and what it meant. Stories about the future: the narratives about what is coming and what to prepare for.
Each story is partly accurate, partly construction. The operator who treats their stories as fact is operating from inaccurate maps. The operator who treats their stories as entirely constructed loses the partial accuracy that the stories did contain. The functional configuration: hold stories as the system’s current construction, with parts of them accurate and parts of them not, with periodic willingness to update them based on new evidence.
From the chair: identify the major stories the operator is currently running. The narrative about themselves. The narratives about the significant operators in their life. The narrative about their work or the situation. Each can be examined. What is this story actually based on. What evidence supports it. What evidence contradicts it. Is it accurate, or has it become an interpretation that’s running independently of actual conditions.
The other application: stories can be revised, but the revision is slow. The operator who has been running a particular story for years cannot replace it through a single decision. The replacement requires sustained operation with the new story, sustained encounter with evidence that supports the new story, sustained recognition when the old story is firing automatically. Across time, the new story can become more available than the old; the old typically does not disappear entirely but becomes one available story among others rather than the dominant default.
The other discipline: notice when stories are being inflated past what the evidence supports. The dramatic story that is more compelling than the data warrants. The catastrophic story that exceeds the actual stakes. The simplified story that is missing significant complexity. The system tends to prefer stories that are cleaner and more dramatic than reality, because cleaner stories are easier to process. The operator who can resist this preference, holding the messier accurate version rather than the cleaner constructed version, operates from better information.
The stories the operator runs are not neutral. They shape what the operator perceives, what they decide, what they remember, what they expect. The work to know what stories are running, evaluate their accuracy, and update them when evidence warrants — is one of the more leveraged operations the operator can engage in.