Consume fiction wisely

It's not obvious to me that reading arbitrary non-fiction gives you more accurate beliefs than arbitrary fiction. No adult updates their probability that dragons are real after reading Game of Thrones, and nonfiction is full of both literal lies and statements that are technically true but deeply misleading that give you the feeling of being accurate information, such that you update on them.

Seems to me that the 'helpful' works you listed contain falsehoods and wrong associations. They also contain useful information and enjoyable aspects, true -- but couldn't the same be said of lots of non-"rational" fiction? As it stands this just looks like a list of fiction that's popular among our subculture.

I'm upvoting this for basically one reason: after reading about the Top Gun Effect, I strongly updated towards "Hollywood movies can seriously mess up your mind". Also this:

According to the US Navy, the box office success of Top Gun saw their recruitment rates balloon by a massive 500% in the year following the original movie’s release. This swell in numbers was due in no small part to the institution’s ability to tap into Top Gun fever when viewers of the movie were still at their most zealous and over-enthusiastic — as they walked out of the multiplex. The U.S. Navy set up recruiting stations outside of movie theaters when Top Gun was released, catching potential recruits as they were left the cinema hyped up by the movie’s dramatic climax. The strategy paid off, as the Navy soon had their highest number of applications in years.

If a single movie can make people do very serious life choices like signing up for the Navy, then we should probably be less confident in our ability to separate fiction from real-life.

(Also, I fully endorse the "avoid social networks like the plague" advice)

I downvoted this. I usually like the concise writing style exhibited in this essay (similar to lsusr, paul graham, both of whom I like) , but I apparently only like it when I think it's correct. :P

I especially downvoted because I think it is fairly likely to attract low-quality discussion. A differently-written version of a similar but perhaps more nuanced point, with better fleshed-out examples of why given works are net helpful or net harmful, would be a better post. I am sympathetic to the general idea of the post!

I downvoted this. I feel like large parts of the blogpost are you taking your personal taste and asserting that everyone should consume the stuff you enjoy.  You're saying: Don't consume fiction, except this genre and list of authors which I like. You ignore or are dismissive of the reasons why other people might want to do differently - you just assert that there are better alternatives. 

Personally, I think it is morally wrong to denigrate someone else because they have different taste in entertainment than you do. I realise I'm more sensitive to this than average - it's a combination of having been bullied at school for being different than other kids; and enjoying sci-fi & fantasy which often get sneered at by literary people - but  I'm fairly sure that the world would be a better place if we could all just accept that other people have different tastes than we do. I don't think you intended to invite readers to disdain people who enjoy the 'wrong' kind of fiction, but you are only one step away from that behaviour, and it's dangerous. 

You also dismiss the reasons why someone would want to consume fiction with a blunt assertion that there are better ways. 1) People have different ways to relax, if they like watching/reading fiction of whatever kind, that's cool, whatever works for them. If you personally enjoy non-fiction audiobooks, great, keep enjoying what you like, but you don't get to demand that other people like the same thing or relax in the same way. 2) Fiction has other benefits, in particular as a way to convey experience. You can't know directly what it's like to be someone with a radically different background or sexual orientation or whatever, but fiction can help you understand anyway. I remember seeing an interview with a Saudi lady who had persuaded her father to read a novel about the experience of an unhappy woman in a forced marriage - this lady was also in a forced marriage and had been trying to explain why she hated it for years,  but it was the novel that finally got through to her father. You simply don't get that kind of understanding with a non-fiction work.

There are genuine, high-quality arguments to be made about the non-obvious disbenefits of some kinds of content. For example, I would recommend Elizabeth's post [LW · GW] about the effect of distractions from social media.I also agree with your argument that TV news is so heavily filtered it has similar properties to fiction. There are high-quality discussions to be had about how individuals can change their media consuming habits and/or choose different content so as to avoid downsides, bearing in mind the principle of equal and opposite advice, and the fact that what works for one person may not be right for another. But, I'm sorry, this post isn't one of them.

I don't think what you term 'falsehoods' in fiction per se are harmful (more on that shortly). Falsehoods are most harmful when they're indistinguishable, or hard to distinguish, from the truth - or indeed masquerading as truth. In that sense, social media has the most potential of the things referenced above for damage via insidious falsehoods. Phenomena like self-curation, implied endorsement, groupthink, lack of nuance, social pressure to conform in public (to name a few) all cumulatively add up to an objectively skewed picture of reality, but which most people will accept as being ostensibly real/true. Cf. layers of bias in news media.

I think fiction is net beneficial. We know, upon opening a novel, say, that what's contained in the pages is the product of the author's imagination. The world depicted most likely takes its cues from the world we live in, sure, but we know from the outset that that world is not real. Because we understand that framework from the moment we begin, we are able to compartmentalize and to compare/contrast that world and its characters, on the one hand, to/with our world and the people in it. Critical thinking through analogy leads us to learn more about - and understand more deeply - the world we live in, to consider points of view that are different from our own, and to identify parts of ourselves and our worlds we wish to improve and why. It's hard for me to see how that's harmful.

Given that I'm only reading this post after following a long chain of fanfiction which lead me to Methods of Rationality, I have to disagree. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that if we surveyed all of the readers on this site, we'd find a very strong tendency toward fiction reading when compared to the general population. The brittish cohort study famously found that reading for pleasure in childhood is one of the most important factors for childhood development. https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/briefings_impact/?s=&filter=1&and=1&post_type=briefings_impact&studies[]=&types[]=impact-case-studies Additionally, I'm very aware that a majority of my moral values are derived from fiction. The Sword of Truth series probably shaped my political leanings more strongly than my grade school social studies classes did. Rational examination over the years has held up most (though certainly not all) of the ideals subconsciously granted by through starry-eyed gazing at heroic protagonists. Modern politics would be very different if every adult today had read through the fiction section of their local library as a child. It is a valid idea, and I think reading your post will help me be more cognizant of potential memtic hazards in future fiction. I might agree more with a narrower argument that a fully developed rational adult should focus mainly on non-fiction though. Thanks for the well thought out post.

Without getting too into the weeds and looking at the specific examples you gave in the post, I agree with the overall point you make. There exists more falsehood than truth in the world, and navigating the information landscape requires strategic effort. The reasoning for this belief is simple: suppose that you want to make a vehicle from raw material. There are vastly more permutations of that raw material resulting in something other than a functioning vehicle. Similarly, there are vastly more permutations of information representing the reality they are trying to model inaccurately than accurately.

A suggestion: rather than giving specific examples of good/bad fiction, it could be more timeless and more generally applicable to come up with general heuristics about what is good content to consume if you want to systematically improve your modelling of the world vs what is content that consistently worsens the accuracy of your modelling. An implicit assumption here is that our goal is to improve the accuracy of our modelling, which is not always instrumental. For example, you might want to deceive yourself into adopting certain beliefs by consuming 'bad' fiction to fit in or attract mates. ("The Elephant in the Brain" is a good book on the importance of self-deception.)

The value of fiction is in helping me understand the experience of other minds, but this is not particular to fiction as I can also acquire the same knowledge from reading biographies or psychology or just socialising. This quote from the preface to the Lok Sang Ho translation of the "Tao Te Ching" captures this idea well:

Joseph Conrad [...] wrote that the role of the artist is no different from that of the thinker or that of the scientist. Like the latter, he is after the Truth, but whereas the scientist seeks the truth about the physical world, the artist seeks the Truth about the human mind. "The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition..."

A general heuristic I use to judge the quality of content is whether prestigious people I respect endorse that content. This is not a catchall heuristic, but it is better than nothing. If someone like Scott Aaronson, a highly rigorous rationalist, endorsed a book or a blog, it's likely of good epistemic quality.

Listening to an excellent non-fiction audiobook will give you both the escape and a better relaxation (including a good rest for your back and eyes). 

It's not my experience that non-fiction would generally give me better relaxation than fiction. (Nor that audiobooks would generally be more relaxing than the written word.)

I've been watching Dr. Stone and it absolutely has wrong things in it. One example is where the protagonist points out that he has to be using up energy to think while made of stone, and the energy has to come from somewhere and must run out. He invokes E=mc^2 for that, in a way that doesn't make sense.

There's also all the feats that are, literally, possible, but would be difficult in practice, like making an iron forge or an electrical generator from nothing in at most a few days.

How is it that authors get reclassified as "harmful, as happened to Wright and Stross"? Do you mean that later works become less helpful? How would earlier works go bad?

I’m a fan of some of the “helpful” authors like Iain Banks. Which Taylor are you referring to? The Strugatsky brothers are new to me. Which of their books do you recommend?

Fiction can be consumed in an unhealthy way, but it doesn’t have to be unhealthy. The same is true of news, cookies, and drugs. I’ve mostly kicked news, but I still enjoy occasional morsels of the others. I gotta have some fun.

One could frame this as a need for more media that is both yummy and true/useful. Since there is statistically so much yummy media that isn’t true/useful we might gain the (somewhat false) intuition that yummy is a good signal for not true/useful. But that’s how the world is now, not necessarily how it should be. Sam Rosen had a similar argument on the Clearer Thinking podcast (timestamp in the link): https://overcast.fm/+kgCChiF9A/1:29:39

Products and content can be designed without the effect of addicting you, without making you a lotus eater (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwdcMts8P8hacqwrX/noticing-the-taste-of-lotus [LW · GW]).

Have you tried to think what other benefits consuming fiction may bring? For example, a way of gaining experience without putting yourself in jeopardy.

Regardless, though, this instrumental understanding of fiction doesn't sit well with me. What if good stories simply offer enjoyment and a sense of communion with the creator? Isn't that enough?

I think there's a potentially confusing fact which you're neglecting in this post, namely the reality of literature as territory not map. If you're interested in literature, then when you read it you get lots of knowledge of what e.g. certain books contain, what certain authors wrote, and that can be very instructive not just within literature. I'd like to see you and others with this kind of viewpoint wrestle more with this kind of consideration.

TV news is not in the category of fiction but fact. I think it is harmful fact.

I recommendation also tries to imply that a non-fiction audiobook will be non-harmful. Fact has its own telling and pitfalls and the bewarness sensors should still stay on.

For example, as a consumer of Hollywood movies, you see an aged businessman in a slick suit and automatically associate him with “evil capitalists”, even if the man is Chuck Feeney or Elon Musk. The reason is simple: you have learned to have such associations, by consuming the fiction written by people of certain political views, from Simpsons to Star Trek to pretty much every movie that depicts businessmen.

Many people have had enough interaction with businessmen in slick suits to independently form negative associations. No fiction needed.