For generating content that is pleasant to consume, many things have a better track record than rationality, e.g. some musicians can write really interesting music while drunk or high. But if you need actionable information, most instances of beautiful-sounding insight generated by “narrative-minded” people fail when you try to apply them, because they weren’t selected for correctness.
I mostly had in mind insight that’s interesting for reasons of intellectual curiosity rather than practical usefulness (which is still a higher bar than content that’s merely pleasant to consume, like music). You are of course right that practically useful insight is much rarer, but I don’t think the output of most narrative-minded people would be improved in this regard by making them adhere to stricter intellectual standards.
It would be great if their creative intellectual excursions could somehow be made to home onto correct insight more frequently, but I doubt this could be accomplished in any practical way. At best, you could make them apply a stricter bullshit filter to their existing output, but this isn’t much of an improvement over filtering it yourself. At worst, this could make them more cautious and improve the average accuracy of their output only at the cost of lowering its peak quality.
For generating content that is pleasant to consume, many things have a better track record than rationality, e.g. some musicians can write really interesting music while drunk or high. But if you need actionable information, most instances of beautiful-sounding insight generated by “narrative-minded” people fail when you try to apply them, because they weren’t selected for correctness.
I mostly had in mind insight that’s interesting for reasons of intellectual curiosity rather than practical usefulness (which is still a higher bar than content that’s merely pleasant to consume, like music). You are of course right that practically useful insight is much rarer, but I don’t think the output of most narrative-minded people would be improved in this regard by making them adhere to stricter intellectual standards.
It would be great if their creative intellectual excursions could somehow be made to home onto correct insight more frequently, but I doubt this could be accomplished in any practical way. At best, you could make them apply a stricter bullshit filter to their existing output, but this isn’t much of an improvement over filtering it yourself. At worst, this could make them more cautious and improve the average accuracy of their output only at the cost of lowering its peak quality.