There are different dimensions of fiction. Fiction can be used to teach lessons in science (hard science fiction), history (historical novels), logic and attention (some who-dunnits) and of course literature. But fiction can also be optimized solely for consumption by engaging our curiosity with surprise without depth, our empathy with crime without reason and our happiness with humor without relation.
I tell my sons nighttime stories that secretly teach ideas and I prefer fiction that does so too.
See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/jnv/brainstorming_childrens_stories/
Whether it's useful for restorative purposes or not, it's good that society keeps churning the fiction mill, because it's one of the things which makes life worthwhile. Some people will readily agree with this, while others will feel it's very close to advocating wireheading. At a recent LW meetup here in LA, one person argued that if you're going to enjoy living in some universe, it might as well be the real one.
The consumption of fiction is a way to produce a pleasurable experience. We act in a certain way to induce a desirable state of mind and body. How is fiction different from eating tasty food, listening to moving music, going on a nature trip with pretty views, or having sex? These other things also use time and energy that could be "spent on fact".
I suppose the idea is that we should seek to make the enjoyable aspects of fiction into a reality, rather than exercising shallow escapism.
What's wrong with "escapism", and why do you call it "shallow"?
If you argue that we should spend more resources (time, attention, money, etc) on improving this world rather than "escaping" into a fictional one. Then why would you not also argue ...
Neil Gaiman on the value of fiction.
We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.
Reading fiction seems to improve empathy and theory of mind; see e.g. Mar et al. 2009, Kidd & Castano 2013, Bal & Veltkamp 2013, Dijkic et al. 2013, Oatley 2012, to name just the ones that I could find with a very basic search.
Not all genres are necessarily equally useful for this purpose, though; Fong et al. 2013 note that out of four genres investigated in their study (Domestic Fiction, Romance, Science-Fiction/Fantasy, and Suspense/Thriller), only Romance and Suspense/Thriller were significant predictors of interpersonal sensitivity; which makes...
It's easy to tell a misleading narrative by adding real facts about history together. It's quite possible for a good science fiction novel to contain more information than than a history book where every fact is true but the narrative is misleading.
There are two options: Either we have terminal goals that include "having a good time" and "living enjoyable lives", so that a pleasant life is good in itself. Or else we have terminal goals that are finitely achievable, and when we've achieved them we should shut down humanity as useless. In the latter case, we can throw out anything that doesn't advance us towards those finite goals; not in the former.
I think one may hold the first belief without advocating wireheading, in that our terminal goal may be "enjoy a wide variety of pleasant things that exist outside your skull".
If anything, fiction is one of the best ways to manipulate people's beliefs, because people believe that they are not being asked to believe things about the real world, but they are.
They are, because all fiction is based on selecting a common background with the real world, and then adding some unreal elements to that background. So for example you have historical fiction, where the background includes many real world historical events, or facts about a certain period. Or you have contemporary fiction, where includes facts about how the world happens to b...
I'm going to make the argument that fiction is as much grounded in this reality as a biography or textbook it is just referencing a different facet of that reality. Fiction is not an honest appeal for the reader to accept an alternate reality as fact. None of the events are considered real by writer or reader and thus do not enter into future decision making. It is instead a reflection of the mind of the writer. Because of this there is real world information to be gleaned from fiction.
Primarily fiction is a teaching tool. Metaphor and analogy allow the w...
It could be that, like sleep, the benefits of reading fiction aren't obvious and aren't on the surface. IOW, escapism might be like dreaming - a waste from one point of view (time spent) but still something without which we couldn't function properly, so therefore not a waste, but a necessary part of maintenance, or summat.
The truth value of biographies and memoirs is highly questionable. These things are hardly just a step by step recital of facts.
But the idea that we just let books take a toll on us without vetting them first is an interesting one. It occurred to me recently that my point of view on many things was highly consistent with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which was assigned to me by an English teacher when I was 15 years old. How different would the last 43 years have been had I read different books when I was 15?
Fiction is written from inside the head of the characters. Fiction books are books about making choices, about taking actions and seeing how they play out, and the characters don't already know the answers when they're making their decisions. Fiction books often seem to most closely resemble the problems that I face in my life.
Books that have people succeed for the wrong reasons I can put down, but watching people make good choices over and over and over again seems like a really useful thing. Books are a really cheap way to get some of the intuitive adva...
Good post. I've argued along similar lines before.
One thing that's worth mentioning is that reading a lot of fiction generally makes one a pretty fast reader. Or at least that's been my impression. It could be that fast readers are more likely to enjoy fiction. While I'm sure that has some element of truth, in most things you get better with practice, so it seems likely to me that reading a lot makes one a better reader. I don't think that reading a lot of fiction is preferable to reading a lot of textbooks in useful fields, but it's better than many other...
From what I've read, the proposed mechanism behind literary fiction enhancing empathy is that it describes the emotions of the characters in a vague or indirect way, and working out their actual psychological character becomes plot-relevant. This was distinct from genre fiction, where the results were less obvious. So the 'good guys are always rewarded' bit, which is prevalent in genre fiction, doesn't seem like the best explanation for the effect. It could be compared to an extended story problem about empathy - at least as far as predicting motives and emotions.
I will point out that fiction gives us compressed references to complex concepts. Explaining a concept can be often done quicker and easier when able to use terms like "The Matrix".
Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth
It's also a variety of truth, since it is impossible to invent something entirely unrelated to the reality you know. To say that fiction is enjoyable is half an answer to questions about why people engage with it..why did we evolve to enjoy it? Fiction is enjoyable,because we are wired to enjoy it, because it encapsulates and distills useful lessons, it is a means by which information is passed down generations. Likewise, we are wired up to enjoy play because it is a way of self-teaching practical s...
Epistemic status: playing devil's advocate.
I wrote the following a couple of weeks back for a meet-up post, and Gunnar_Zarncke suggested I should turn it into a discussion post:
Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth. It absorbs time and energy which could be spent on fact. Although we make a conscious distinction between fictional worlds and reality, we will often use fictional examples when evaluating real-life situations. It has been argued that we should learn to take joy in the world we actually live in. Why should we allow fiction to warp our view of reality?
Perhaps fiction offers a fun, relaxing break. I can understand this claim in two different ways. The first version is that reading fiction gives us a rest from serious thinking, restoring us in some way. So, is this really true? Often when we feel tired of thinking, we're really tired of thinking about some particular thing. We gain new mental energy when we switch to something else. We think this means we're unable to do productive work, and need to take a break; but often, we could continue to be productive on a sufficiently different task, which gave us the same variety as a "break" would. (This is anecdotal. I recall seeing a discussion of this in a lesswrong post, but didn't figure out which one.) Alternatively, if we really are exhausted, reading fiction might not be restoring our energy as much as taking a nap or perhaps meditating. In either case, the pro-fiction argument seems murky. Answering this question is difficult, because it's far from obvious why certain types of thinking seem to take "mental effort" and leave us feeling drained. (It seems it might be a mechanism for sensing high opportunity cost, or it might be due to depleting a physical resource in the brain.)
A second way to interpret this is that consuming fiction is closer to being an end, rather than a means. The joy which fiction creates, or the rich inner experience, may be a good in and of itself. Whether it's useful for restorative purposes or not, it's good that society keeps churning the fiction mill, because it's one of the things which makes lifeworthwhile. Some people will readily agree with this, while others will feel it's very close to advocating wireheading. At a recent LW meetup here in LA, one person argued that if you're going to enjoy living in some universe, it might as well be the real one. I suppose the idea is that we should seek to make the enjoyable aspects of fiction into a reality, rather than exercising shallow escapism. I'm not sure this view can be defended, however. If you've got something like a computational theory of mind, and believe that uploading yourself into a virtual world is OK, how do you draw a firm line between "reality" and "fiction" to say which kinds of experiences are really valuable and in which you're just fooling yourself? Is it a matter of a sufficiently detailed simulation, which includes other conscious beings rather than puppets, and so on?
Maybe...
Robin Hanson discusses the social value of stories: those who read fiction are more empathetic toward others, seemingly fooled by story logic into acting as if good behavior is always rewarded and bad behavior punished. Although clearly valuable, this gives me the uneasy sense that stories are manipulative control directives. I mayenjoy the story, but does that make me comfortable accepting control directives from this particular author? Or should we examine the moral character of the author, before reading?
To make our arguments stick, we've got to compare fiction to relevant alternatives. It seems to me that we can havealmost as much fun reading biographies, memoirs, and (entertainingly written) history as we can reading fiction... and all with the advantage of being real facts about the real world, which seems at least a little useful.