Most people learn by finding the nearest story and trying to fit the new thing inside it. The shape of the story becomes the shape of their understanding. This is why reasoning by analogy is so seductive and why it fails so often. It compresses complexity into something familiar, and if the structure actually matches, that works. But when the mechanics differ, the analogy is just camouflage for ignorance.
Early aircraft designers assumed flight required flapping wings because that’s how birds did it. They built elaborate contraptions with feathered, flapping mechanisms that were heavy, unstable, and dangerous. The analogy to bird flight ignored the differences in anatomy, muscle power, and scale between humans and birds. Only when engineers reframed flight as a problem in lift, thrust, drag, and weight (i.e. the underlying driving factors) rather than imitation of birds (i.e. the analogy) did powered flight succeed.
You get the same pattern in economics. Politicians argue that “a country’s budget is like a household’s budget”; therefore governments should cut spending in recessions. In reality, the credit / debt cycle behavior is different as a national economy can issue currency, can borrow in ways households can’t, and has a central bank to modulate demand. The analogy might fit some moral sentiment but it misses the broader system parameters. When applied crudely, real economic damage can last from slower recovery, unemployment, and debt-to-GDP ratios deterioration.
Political science students are taught realism, liberalism, constructivism — the big stories about how states behave and apply these models and lens towards models with preset stories. Psychology students get attachment theory, the Big Five, Milgram. These are valuable ideas, but they are local. They live in specific cultural and historical coordinates. Most undergraduates don’t learn how to interrogate those coordinates; they learn that the theory is “true.” The training is to match a new event to an old case and assume the dynamics will be the same. This works right up until it doesn’t, which is most of the time. Thinkers raised entirely on stories have less trained muscle for saying, “this one is different.”
Now, it’s not to say analogies are not powerful. Clearly, the above structures — from the engineer inspired by the bird to the politician arguing debt/credit concepts — help people gain some surface-level understanding of phenomena. At best, these analogies can drive someone to explore an interesting pathway to uncover the core derivative principles. However, the point here is not to undermine the power of storytelling but about the structuring of education to train individuals to identify underlying principles.
Physics, math, and engineering are structured differently, not because they’re innately superior, but because they punish this habit. You can’t just memorize the period of a pendulum; the exam will change the mass, add air resistance, tilt the pivot, and expect you to rebuild the reasoning from scratch. You can’t just know Ohm’s Law; you’ll be asked what happens if the temperature changes the resistance or the source voltage fluctuates. The point isn’t to trap you — it’s to make sure you understand the machinery well enough to reassemble it under new conditions.
The feedback is instant and unforgiving. If your calculation is wrong, the bridge falls. If your derivation is wrong, the simulation spits out nonsense. No one can politely agree to ignore the failure. The field itself forces you to find where the reasoning breaks and fix it. Over time, this conditions you to look for edge cases, model constraints explicitly, and treat every analogy as a hypothesis — not proof.
Starting in a narrow, story-heavy field is like learning chess by memorizing openings without understanding why they work. You’ll beat beginners who follow the same scripts, but one deviation and you’re lost. Even worse, you can find exceptions to nearly any strong statement (also a function of underlying conditions and assumptions), which can further cement any pre-existing dogma.
The path of learning matters because habits ossify. Someone who begins in math or physics and later studies politics or psychology brings with them a way of mapping cause-and-effect before adopting the local stories. They can look at a political crisis and separate the variables that drive the outcome from the ones that are incidental. Someone who starts in the story-heavy field has to backfill this skill, often against the grain of how they were trained to think.
Of course, plenty of physicists are just as brittle as the worst political scientists. The ones who survive by memorizing solution patterns fail just as fast when the conditions change. Give them a problem outside their pre-solved set such as applying mechanics intuition to a biological system and they flail. The field itself doesn’t grant immunity; the training method does. Framework-first versus framework-later.
The most effective leaders, builders, and decision-makers are hybrids. They did the intellectual bootcamp early, then layered in history, art, and culture later. This isn’t STEM evangelism; it’s sequencing. A physicist who studies history sees wars not just as moral dramas but as coupled systems of resources, technology, geography, and human decision. An engineer who studies art understands both the mechanics of light and the psychology of perception. The combination is rare and devastatingly effective.
Most people never get the order right. They inherit the first stories they’re taught, and then spend the rest of their lives pattern-matching to them. They don’t notice when the edges of the pattern don’t fit. And when the story fails, they have nowhere else to go.
Facts expire. Frameworks don’t. Start with the ones that scale.