You know where you find a clear, neat story with no extraneous details? Fiction.

From How Social Scientists, and the Rest of Us, Got Seduced By a Good Story by Megan McArdle.

Readers hate ambiguity. Write a blog post laying out the complexities of some issue and arguing that some question is hard, the data is muddy, that there are no answers and no obvious person to blame and I guarantee that at least one of the first five or ten comments will say something like this:

"I can't believe anyone wasted time writing this. What's the point? That life is messy and it's hard to tell who's right sometimes? Way to state the obvious."

But this is not a trivial observation: most of the time, it's the truth. It doesn't seem to be so obvious, either. If it were obvious, we'd show more affinity for the folks with messy, lifelike data, instead of the clear, neat stories that we actually love.

You know where you find a clear, neat story with no extraneous details? Fiction. And if we demand a steady stream of such stories from our journalists and scientists, we shouldn't be entirely surprised when fictions are what we get.