*Torture of Prometheus* (circa 1646 to 1648)
Salvator Rosa

My first post here, feedback greatly appreciated.

Epistemic status: Reflective essay / argument sketch about the epistemic value of fiction in the LLM era. Confidence low-to-moderate; many claims are taste-level and philosophical rather than empirical. Seeking counterexamples, relevant studies, and pointers to prior LW discussions.
Epistemic effort: Several close readings (Dostoyevsky, Tanizaki, Locke) + familiarity with public statements by Sutskever/LeCun; no new data.

More recently, I’ve been preoccupied with why we still read novels. With a wealth of entertainment opportunities from movies to short form videos, a book can feel like large time commitment, and in a distracted world can feel more like a burden than enjoyment.

There is also a plethora of pretentious reasons to read a book. Certain ones are prestigious and can falsely elevate our perceived self-importance. They can also be tick box exercises, especially when received as a gift or loan.

On a personal note, this is the feeling I had when beginning ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, a book touted as the epitome of the form. As a 1000-page marathon, the prestigious charm and daunting compulsion to enjoy every word quickly fades. Yet still, it was completely transfixing, far exceeding my expectations.

Beyond the personal, classics help shape our collective understanding. Era defining books (novels or otherwise), demonstrate or introduce a new idea, concept, or aesthetic feeling. These ideas often leach out into our sociocultural structures, spreading their roots into other disciplines. They sometimes spawn entire trees of literary work, and looking back can feel like tracing the phylogenetic tree of human ideas. Great classics ride the fine line of being tangible enough to be compelling, but too abstract to be yet equation or scientific theory. For Tanizaki, it’s the aesthetic importance of negation and shadow¹, an idea already present in Japanese culture implicitly, and for Locke it’s the futility of using words to represent reality² (ironic as he writes in essay form).

But still, not all classics are novels. Beyond entertainment, how fruitful is fiction? There’s a qualitative difference between novels in comparison to scientific papers or philosophical essays. Novels show us what may otherwise be told to us. Nietzsche’s philosophical essays tell us abo...

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