This was originally posted on blogger. When I was little, I used to love playing with numbers. I’d try the New York Times Sudoku puzzles with my mom. I would hone my skills in arithmetic in games online and then zoom through the “minute multiplication” in school, loving the competition of it. I even learned a trick to calculate the day of the week of any date, past, present, or future, inspired by a TED talk I watched. Every bit of math and numerical manipulation enthralled me.

There is something intoxicating about studying mathematics. It follows the rhyme and reason not of Shakespeare, but of propositional logic; the only thing you need to do to “prove” something is write a few statements that indicate it is so. Those nasty word problems involving lots of algebra seem impossible at first, but after a moment of realization it’s clear that all that’s needed to solve them is to write an equation in a special way. The harder the problem, the more complicated the equation – this is a trend that follows some for years beyond high school.

In a certain way it seems ridiculous. But I have always believed in numbers. I have always trusted data, so long as there’s a lot of it. And this is a conviction that is widespread in many fields – that the best way to solve climate change is to “engineer” a solution, that the best way to solve inequality is a more progressive wealth tax, that the best way to stop disease is to model it with differential equations. Such a belief, again, is intoxicating. It turns the big, bad, messy world into an easy model. The unspoken assumption in economics, science, engineering, is that there’s a solution if you simply level up the mathematics – that with sufficiently detailed equations, you can describe our society.

It was shocking to me to realize that this is not how the world works. I realized that despite the hundreds of millions of people trapped in poverty – a number so big it should shock any numerate person – no one really cares. I realized that despite the certainty that the world is dying – through hundreds of scientifically proven statements – the political forces are simply not there. And I realized that despite the billions of non-human beings we murder, ruthlessly, every year… No one wants to talk about animal rights.

Why is this? Why are we as human beings so unwilling to accept facts right in front of us? Why do we cling to what is known instead of what the data says?

I feel what is lacking in raw numbers is a story. Truly, a story. Stories last for thousands of years – myths and legends from ancient India, China, Greece… anywhere have been passed down through generations. I remember when I was little, too, I would beg my mom to continue reading Enid Blyton’s The Five Find-outers as she sat by my bedside. I would be entranced by the mythological world of Percy Jackson, and by the magic of Eragon and Guardians of Ga’Hoole.

These stories, statistics, have no basis in reality. They probably don’t even follow the laws of physics. And yet I was, am, and will always be transfixed by stories. And I think others are too. Barack Obama’s speech in 2004, simply telling the story of his family coming to America, is known as the one that made him president. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle shed light on the horrific meat-packing industry in a way that labor statistics never could, thus bringing about massive legislative changes in the meat-packing industry. And of course, the story of Rosa Parks in the Civil Rights Movement – not the countless facts about discrimination in America – is what sparked a wave of resistance across the South.

There’s no science to story-telling. However much I may long for it, no equation can predict which stories will cut to the hearts of people. No computer (not yet) can write a real story – one with characters you fall in love with, one that shakes you at the core. Thus the story-teller gains an extraordinary power. When I find time to read a novel (recently, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns) I remember the magic it takes.

I’ve always been told numbers – big data, statistics, economics – are the way to land a job and change the world. I think now that to really make people care, it’s really important to nourish the art of story-telling. There’s really nothing like it.