Fiction Considered Harmful

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 we shouldn't "escape" using music, sex, or ice cream? What makes sex or music part of this world but (the experience of) fiction not? Both engage the senses. (Fiction doesn't yet engage taste or touch, but when technology allows it to do so, it will and it will be better fiction for it.)

If you argue that we should make this world more like the fictional ones so we can enjoy it directly, it seems neither possible nor desirable. A big attraction of fiction is that everyone can choose and consume different works and genres at different times and places, while we all live in the same world. Another is that people enjoy e.g. tragedies they wouldn't want to happen in real life. (As well as most comedies, for that matter.)

Fiction is used to trigger strong emotional responses, but we don't want the real world to contain things that would trigger them, because things in the real world aren't chosen by people - they're the precise thing we need escape from.

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/

Fiction is just imagination set to words.

Are you willing to argue against imagination?

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 sense, since these genres are ones that focus the most on interpersonal interaction.

Fiction is practice.

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 be at the moment. Or you have science fiction, which possibly includes various scientific laws, or at least obvious facts such as the claim that many bodies are solid, and so on.

The problem is that the reader doesn't go through line by line and distinguish between elements that are in common with the real world and ones that are not. He does this subconsciously. This means that he may often mistake something for an element of the real world, when it is not, simply because the author presents it as though it were part of the common background. The reader isn't in the mood for thinking about what is a fact and what isn't, and anyway he may not know. He just subconsciously absorbs it.

To give one minor example, in one of Dan Brown's books, someone ends up crippled for life, and a priest says, "He must not have had enough faith." Obviously this is supposed to be fiction. But if you present a priest saying this, most people would assume that the common background is that this is the kind of things that priests say. If you are not familiar with Catholic priests, you might end up believing that this is a credible thing for a Catholic priest to say, even without thinking about it explicitly. But basically no priest would say such a thing, so you have ended up believing something false.

Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth. [...] Why should we allow fiction to warp our view of reality?

Congratulations, you have discovered Plato.

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 writer to express understandings about the world in an abstract form. Rather than teaching the specifics of a real event the writer attempts to reformulate pertinent information into a new narrative . Lessons learned in this abstracted form should be more generally applicable. Because the writer must draw from reality, the fiction is an analog of his reality. Because readers respond best to fiction that meshes with real world experience, writer attempts to make his works essentially realistic. Fiction is a retelling of reality through the lens of a writer's experiencing mind.

Second, Fiction is the product of what the writer wishes to say, or believes readers wish to hear. It is a very honest form of disseminating cultural beliefs. Reading fiction can tell you as much if not more about the attitudes of a culture than examining the real actions of those within it. The morals and lessons do not have to be adopted by the reader to be understood by the reader.

Lastly, if fiction is deemed worthy in the reader's mind it can serve as an experiential expansion. You might argue that reading non-fiction can have the same effect, but I refer back to my first point. Fiction is a more concentrated and abstracted form of experiential expression. Reading well written fiction can allow the mind to simulate many emotional and cognitive scenarios before they are encountered in real life. While basing real actions on fiction may seem ungrounded, it's how the mind works anyway. Even if someone else is not writing the fiction for us, our minds are doing it all the time anyway. We predict the outcome of action by simulating - creating a fiction.

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 advantages of additional life experience. You have to be a little careful to pick authors that don't teach you the wrong lessons, but in general I haven't found a lot of histories or biographies that really try to tackle the problem of what it's like to make choices from the inside in an adequate way. If you've read lots of historically accurate works that do manage to give easily digested advice on how to make good decisions, I'd love to see your reading list.

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 things people could be doing. Ultimately, I don't think this is a good reason to read a lot of fiction, but those who have read a lot of fiction in the past and now think it was a waste of time have a good reason to think that it wasn't entirely a waste of time.

I'm not sure if you could make similar arguments for fiction in other forms of media, or other things like video games.

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 skills.

The rationalist case against fiction seems to be based on its not being factually accurate, that is based on placing a higher value on facts than on values. Narratives aren't well optimised for transmitting facts, they are not replacements for encylopedias. Narratives are well optimised for general rules ("In situation X do Y") and values.

Rationalists seem to have a problem with human values, regarding them as more or less fixed, individualistic, and arbitrary, none of which is true. Nations and religions have their own narrative sot instill their own values.