What’s the difference between a narrative and a story?

Starting in the 1960s and continuing well into the 1980s (and beyond) we see a renewed interest in stories and narrative across a variety of disciplines, literary criticism (including narratology), folklore, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale was revived by the structuralists, George Lakoff recast it in the terms of formal linguistics in an essay, “Structural Complexity in Fairy Tales” (The Study of Man, 1, 1972), and everyone was reading Lévi-Strauss on myth. One of the questions that came out of this research is simple: What’s the difference between a mere narrative and a story? By the time I stopped following that research in the mid-1980 the question was still open.

According to an informal review by Mark Riedl that’s where things stood as of August 2021, “An Introduction to AI Story Generation” (The Gradient). He defines three key concepts:

• Narrative: The recounting of a sequence of events that have a continuant subject and constitute a whole (Prince, 1987). An event describes some change in the state of the world. A “continuant subject” means there is some relationship between the events—it is about something and not a random list of unrelated events. What “relates” events is not entirely clear but I’ll get to that later.

Story: A narrative that tells a story has certain properties that one comes to expect. All stories are narratives, but not all narratives are stories. Unfortunately I cannot point to a specific set of criteria that makes people regard a narrative as a story. One strong contender, however, is a structuring of events in order to have a particular effect on an audience.

Plot: A plot is the outline of main incidents in a narrative.

Let’s consider a very simple kind of narrative: someone leaves home, travels to the grocery story, purchases some items, and returns home. An actual narrative would mention a specific individual, specific places, events along the way, items purchase, and so forth. By Prince’s definition that’s a narrative because there has been a change of state in the world, several in fact depending on how you count them. Items have been taken from the store and transported home (involving two state changes per item) and money has been transferred from our “protagonist” to the owner of the store (two state changes).

I doubt, however, that anyone would consider such a narrative to be a story. Now consider a Japanese reality show that has been shown on Netflix, Old Enough! Young children, three to six years old, are given simple errands to perform. Going to the store, purchasing something, and returning with it is a typical errand. I have watched a number of these and would consider them stories. Why? Because the errands are challenging for the children. They’ve never done it before, there is no line of sight between home and the story, they have to remember the items, remember to ask for change, and so forth. It’s a challenge for them. We see them confronting and overcoming obstacles, including simply fear. That makes it a story proper.

Note, however, that I watched a video of the journey, one edited to amplify the challenges the children face.  That is to say, the events were edited “in order to have a particular effect on an audience.” It would be easy to write these stories in such simple and reduced form that the “storyness” is completely eliminated, leaving only the bare narrative husk. But someone with only modest story-telling skills could also write these stories in a from that includes accounts of the challenges faced by the children, thus making a story out of a bare narrative.

Now consider a six-word statement that’s been mistakenly attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” However, versions of that statement have appeared as early as 1883. Those six words don’t even give us an event, and yet we seem willing to treat them as telling a story. Why? Because those words lead us to infer something like: the baby shoes were purchased in anticipation of the birth of a child; the child was either still born or died soon after birth; the shoes are no longer needed. Question: At what age is a person sophisticated enough to make such an inference from those words? I doubt that a six-year old would do it.

What, then, is the difference between a narrative and a story? It depends, doesn’t it? How are the events narrated and what can we expect the audience to infer from what is said? It’s not an easy question to answer.

Cream into coffee, three moments

Once again, the appeal of The Rockford Files [Media Notes 164 B]

Once again I find myself working my way through The Rockford Files thinking, “Gee, this is my intellectual comfort food, I should write a post about that.” And once again I discover, “Hey! I’ve already written that post.” And so I have.

That means that, to justify this post, I’ve got to cover new material, so I will. Here’s what I said in that previous post:

Garner is a handsome middle-aged man, six feet and perhaps an inch or two tall. He plays an easy going character, James Rockford, who is masculine without being macho. He can handle himself in a fight, which he frequently has to do, but he’s not a martial artist or a superhero. He’s competent, but vulnerable and takes his lumps. He likes sports, going to games, going fishing, often with his dad. He’s single, but is attractive to women, and kind. He’s had affairs in the past, and has one or three in the course of the show, he may even have been close to marriage.

Much of the appeal stems from the fact that he’s an interstitial character, if you will. He falls between the keys, lives in the cracks. While he makes a living, just barely, he’s not chained to a 9-to-5 job. He’s not been broken to harness.

I also noted that he doesn’t live within the confines of work mode. He’s not a slave to Homo economicus.

Moreover, he’s not married. His police buddy Lt. Becker is married, but Rockford himself is not. We do see Becker’s wife in a handful of episodes, but that’s all. She’s there as an adjunct to Rockford’s relationship with her husband. That’s all she could be in the show. So it doesn’t make sense to have her in too many episodes. She’d be in the way.

But why couldn’t Rockford himself be married? We know that he’s thought about, maybe even came close in the past. But married himself? How would that change the dynamic that makes the show work?

What if he’d married his attorney, Beth Davenport? It seems that they’d dated in the past and she pretty much confessed that she’d thought of him as a husband. Well, if they’d have gotten married, what kind of life would they have lived? I can’t imagine her living with him in that trailer; that’s not at all her style, not at all. Nor can I imagine him living her life style, with the elegant apartment. What of his PI business? Would he have taken it upscale to suit her clientele as a lawyer? I don’t think so.

Now, can I translate that paragraph into a statement about audience preference? That is, whoever finds Rockford appealing, male or female, finds him appealing as he is, an interstitial bachelor who likes women, dates them occasionally, and has longer term affairs, but that’s it. Whatever the basis of the show’s appeal, it’s incompatible with marriage as we currently conceive it.

Now, David Chase wrote and produced many episodes of The Rockford Files. But he’s best known as creator of and writer for The Sopranos. Marriage is central to that show, both Tony’s relationship to his wife and his two children, in addition to his many responsibilities as a gangster. What I’m suggesting is that, in a way, Tony Soprano is a Jim Rockford who’s married. Obviously, they’re very different types of people. Tony Soprano is overbearing, aggressive, and violent in a way that Jim Rockford his not. And if Jim Rockford is interstitial, then Tony Soprano is interstitial on steroids. And where Jim had is lawyer, Beth, Tony Soprano had his psychiatrist, Jennifer Malfi. That’s a very different kind of relationship – and I note that Rockford’s most substantial affair within the show was with a (blind) psychiatrist.

What interests me is that neither Rockford nor Soprano are “broken” to work mode. They make their living in (something like) play mode. I’m thinking something like: If you want to center a program around a Rockford-like character AND have him be married, you have to make him a gangster to do it. That is to say, our conventions about men, women, and marriage are such, that that’s what you have to do.

Do I believe that? Not quite. After all, I just made it up. It’s worth exploring with shows like Breaking Bad and Ozark, both about married couples (forced) to live on the wild side. The Hunting Wives? Sex/Life? Hmmmm....

Friday Fotos: From Wednesday's breakfast run

Step on it!

Skateboarding the eclipse

This skateboard trick may never be eclipsed.

Danny León, a Spanish Olympic skateboarder, set up this shot and landed it during today's eclipse in Spain.

Perfect planning! pic.twitter.com/D6A6JQAFWj

— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) August 13, 2026

Gort, Robert Wright, and A.I. @3QD [GT-5]

My latest 3 Quarks Daily article is up:

Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wright’s The God Test

It’s a review of Robert Wright’s current book, The God Test. It turned out to be a tough slog, more than I’d anticipated.

I started blogging about it well ahead of time. I figured I’d write a half-dozen to ten or so blog posts ahead of time and then wrap things up with the formal review. I wrote some blog posts, but by Tuesday, August 4, less than a week before my article was due, I was still blogging about coming up with an approach and hadn’t gotten around to the various things I wanted to cover in the lead-up. Then the weekend arrived and I had to start writing. So I did, here and then. But things wouldn’t converge. Still, I managed to write something and post it on Sunday afternoon. But I wasn’t happy.

Of course, while sometimes I’m satisfied with my 3QD pieces, that’s not always so. This was just one of those times. But still.

On Monday, when the piece actually appeared, I thought I had one of those situations I often had as an undergraduate. I’d write the term paper, turn it in, and then it would hit me, “this is what I should have done.” The process of writing the piece had taken me to a different intellectual place, one where I saw what had to be done. I had such moments of illumination on Mondey, Tuesday as well. But none of them held.

And so, here I am, still not knowing how I could have done a better job of reviewing that book. On the one hand, I wanted to give it a good review. Wright’s a smart guy, I’ve followed him for a long time, I think his “cosmic perspective” is important and I think his views on international cooperation on AI development are important as well. On the other hand, I don’t think much of his account of how LLMs work, but I just didn’t want to get into that. Yes, I indicated one problem in the review, Wright’s casual treatment of semantic relationships. As I indicated in the review, Bert Idem has discussed other problems. But I see still other problems. And I just didn’t want to get into that morass. Going into that would have swamped the review. (Let me say, moreover, that I think Wright is unnecessarily credulous of the Silicon Valley view of the technology. He should have listened more carefully to Gary Marcus.)

It is what it is.

But I will say this. I am working on my own book in which I present my own “cosmic” view: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. On this I agree with Wright. That is the perspective we need to take. But I approach it in somewhat different terms, terms which I’ve sketched out in a piece I published four years ago, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. Note that in the book length version I do not intend to even try to explain how LLMs function internally. The technology that will take us there – whatever and wherever it is – will necessarily involve different architectures. The last chapter of Play will sketch out the kind of research program I think we need to take us there. Here’s a sketch: Brave New World: Notes on the next 30 years in AI [Work in Progress].

As for explaining how LLMs work, that’s a different project. I don’t intend to work on that. But I am thinking about a book that would be useful to anyone who is interested in that subject. The book I’m imagining would be preliminary to such an account: Language, Memory, and Mind: A Supplement to The Computer and the Brain.

Some wild flowers in blue, yellow, and white

Brains, AI, The Geometry of Thought

Maggie Vale, AI & The Geometry of Thought, Seeds of Science, Aug. 12, 2026.

Minds build an internal architecture of curved spaces, folded structures, and traversable shapes.

Across neuroscience and AI research, a shared picture comes into view. Concepts gather in high-dimensional manifolds, and cognition moves through those manifolds like paths across a landscape.

In brains, ideas appear as smooth, population-level patterns spread across many neurons at once. Brain imaging studies show that sentences, scenes, and abstract themes light up constellations of activity that form continuous subspaces. Nearby regions carry related meanings, and distant regions carry more distinct ones. The geometry of these patterns preserves relationships between ideas.

Large models form a similar inner space. During training, they learn embedding geometries where words, images, and concepts settle into neighborhoods. Related items land close together, and meaningful directions through the space capture transformations such as analogy, composition, and abstraction. Clusters, trajectories, and curved subspaces emerge as a natural result of learning.

Across biological and artificial minds, the same structure appears: meaning takes the form of a shape, and thinking unfolds as motion across that shape.

There's much more at the link.

Colleges are already trade schools

Jessica Grose, Even Elite Colleges Have Become Trade Schools, NYTimes, Aug. 12, 2026.

As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.

Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.

The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.

Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.

That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.

There's more at the link.

Happiness and war in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Sinikka Parviainen, William Pyle, Measuring Rally Effects Under Authoritarianism: Evidence from Russiaʼs War in Ukraine, Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research - CESifo GmbH, August 2026.

Abstract: Measuring politically sensitive attitudes in authoritarian settings is difficult because ex- pressions of political support may reflect repression and social pressure as much as genuine belief. We propose a complementary approach: using responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive to provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes. Using subjective well-being (SWB), we ask whether within-person changes in life satisfaction, after accounting for changes in material and personal circumstances, can provide evidence of incorporation into a wartime national project. Drawing on more than a decade of panel data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2013–2024), we find that life satisfaction rises significantly following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gains are initially larger among ethnic Russians and smaller in Moscow and St. Petersburg, consistently larger in military-industrial regions, and sharply lower among those nearest the front. This theoretically patterned heterogeneity is difficult to reconcile with generalized social-desirability bias and is consistent with differentiated wartime incorporation. By 2024, rising non-response and attenuating subgroup differences suggest that the informational value of SWB may deteriorate over time.

From the Introduction:

How can politically sensitive attitudes be measured when citizens believe they cannot safely reveal them? The problem is particularly acute in authoritarian regimes, where repression, self-censorship, and social pressure complicate the interpretation of survey responses. It becomes even more difficult during war, when expressions of support for the state may reflect social expectations of patriotic solidarity and strategic conformity as much as genuine belief. Under these conditions, conventional survey measures of support for political leaders or government policy provide an uncertain guide to underlying attitudes.

Existing efforts to address this problem have focused largely on improving the measure- ment of politically sensitive attitudes themselves. Indirect questioning techniques, including list and endorsement experiments, seek to make truthful responses less risky (Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro 2011; Blair and Imai 2012). These methods have substantially advanced the study of authoritarian public opinion, but they continue to measure politically sensitive attitudes through survey items whose purpose is to recover those attitudes. We take a different approach, asking whether responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive can sometimes provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes.

The intuition is that politically sensitive attitudes may manifest themselves in ways that extend beyond explicit political expression. They may shape how individuals experience and evaluate their lives, producing psychological outcomes that respondents have little reason to perceive as political. If these downstream consequences are less susceptible to strategic misrepresentation than direct expressions of political support, they may provide complementary evidence about those attitudes. We test this idea using subjective well-being (SWB).

Wartime rally effects provide a particularly demanding setting in which to evaluate this argument. Existing work typically identifies such effects through increases in support for political leaders or governments, despite longstanding concerns that these measures are espe- cially vulnerable to social desirability pressures in authoritarian settings (Hale 2022; Kizilova and Norris 2024). Because questions about life satisfaction do not ask respondents to evaluate political leaders or government policy directly, they may be less vulnerable to the strategic distortions that complicate the interpretation of conventional approval measures. At the same time, life satisfaction may respond to the same feelings of collective purpose and national sol- idarity that underlie genuine rally effects. We therefore ask whether SWB, after accounting for its material and personal determinants, can serve as an indirect indicator of incorporation into a wartime national project.

H/t Tyler Cowen .

Posts on the waterfront

Where “the will to live” resides in the brain

Neuroscientists found a brain region that physically grows when you do things you don't want to do. It shrinks when you stop.

It's called the anterior midcingulate cortex. It's smaller in people who struggle to delay gratification. It gets bigger when obese people diet. It's… https://t.co/Bba5FL6RiM

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) August 11, 2026

We Need To Talk About Leopold [& Situational Oblivion]

From the YouTube page:

Last week, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner — former FTX staffer, ex-OpenAI researcher, and author of the viral 165-page essay "Situational Awareness" — managed to lose roughly two-thirds of his $45 billion hedge fund in a matter of weeks. The margin calls arrived during his wedding weekend.

In this video I break down how a trader with no professional experience raised billions from Silicon Valley, why his AI "hedge" wasn't a hedge at all, and how leverage plus a concentrated bet on artificial intelligence stocks turned a great-looking expected return into a catastrophic outcome. Along the way we look at the cultural gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, why Ken Griffin's Citadel ended up buying the collapsing portfolio in an overnight fire sale, and the maths of volatility drag — the reason a high expected return can still drag an investor's typical outcome straight into the ground.

It's a story about leverage, risk management, expected versus median returns, and what happens when you go "full Kelly." Featuring reporting from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times, plus Victor Haghani's lessons from The Missing Billionaires.

I’ve listened to enough of Boyle’s stuff to have decided that he’s an absolute master of dry humor. But he really outdoes himself here. This one is so dry it could have sucked up all the rain that’s fallen on the East coast in the last several days.

Spain - Chick Corea | Rhythm Shaw & Purbayan Chatterjee