It isn't "just" propaganda. A success story is fundamentally a communication that relates to positive expected value. Picking examples might make it seem like success stories are just propaganda, but you can trick yourself with biased sampling quite easily.

Consider a different example of a success story: the communication of the presence of food by ants to other ants. A fundamental part of their thinking is tied up in the idea of communicating these successes. For them, it isn't "just" propaganda.

Interestingly - we've had something close to a controlled experiment about the viability of not communicating what we think success is with humans. There was once a theory that if you didn't tell anything to another human they would learn a divine language. To test this a child was separated from the general population and raised with caregivers who did not speak to them. As you might imagine, this did not produce a divine language or an especially intelligent child. It produced a feral child.

In actuality, I think you can relate communication of expected values back to a solution to a foundational problem and dialectic tension in learning problems in complex environments: the explore exploit problem. The literature calls these multi-armed bandit problems.

Social species, such as ants and humans, use communication about expected values to make their search over their reward landscape more effective. Actions are conditioned on the outcome signals communicated through the environment, creating a kind of lookup cache of better than random strategy.

So there is something deeper going on here than "just" propaganda.

If I'm right about that, a natural question is to ask "why would people conclude it was just propaganda" and I'll skip the obvious reason that the phrasing feels wrong and so the author just did it to attract attention.

This property of valuable utility information in expected value calculations makes sharing success stories high utility. However, some people are low utility producers and want to signal being high utility for various reasons. So there are going to be some success stories that are fabricated. We have a lot of people. So we have a lot of people sampling from stories and some of those people are going to draw samples of stories where propaganda really is the best description.

So you can arrive at this belief without needing to be attention seeking and then what happens when you test it? Well, it seems right - there really isn't guarantee of success.

Unfortunately, separate to this is the actual viability of following advice gleaned from success stories. To see why it can help to go back to a simple case, like an ant following the high confidence pheromone trail. It may indeed not find food at the end of the trail, but that property has a lot to do with the environment. It isn't fully a thing about success stories, but a property of how hard problems can be. They probably wouldn't be better off abandoning the use of pheromone trails.

This becomes more obvious when you start giving great examples of success stories. For example, when people comment that mathematics was useful and encourage that we teach it, should we conclude that the success they derived from it is "just" propaganda?

Or how about recasting their own great example of a great success story - they relates a success story about how people managed to infer something about failure cases. Their argument about why to focus on failure actually contains a sub-component - the success story of focusing on failure. By their own logic, we ought to conclude that their story was just propaganda, but this seems a bit harsh and I think it would be missing the point they are trying to raise.

Anyway, this has gone a little long and I suspect this won't be a popular opinion, because it is easy to misconstrue it. Some people will probably think I'm saying that the lucky ant who reports a great success wasn't exploring the landscape and didn't get lucky. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm just trying to talk about what is "underneath" success stories in general; why we tend to pay attention to them, maybe more than people feel is appropriate.