I agree that all of the things that you listed can be issues, and if the two of you are just advocating a temporary break in order to recalibrate, then I don’t have an objection. I feel like I’ve seen sentiments in the rationalsphere that weren’t just about taking a temporary break but actually seriously recommending giving up all fiction for good, and I might have been responding more to my recollection of those sentiments than what you were actually saying.
On the thing about fiction as a source of bad training data specifically: agree that this can be an issue, especially if one has a very one-sided diet of fiction. There’s a lot of fiction out there that conveys outright toxic thought patterns and expectations about relationships. (One of my abhorrences is the whole “you get married and then you live happily ever after” trope and stuff related to it, which I suspect does damage in more subtle ways than just the obvious one.)
But at the same time, I would feel that the training data available to someone who didn’t consume much fiction, was also much impoverished compared to someone who consumed a varied diet of quality fiction. Any single person’s life can only provide them with direct experiences of a very small slice of all the possible human experiences and perspectives; somebody who supplemented their ordinary life with fiction could experience a vastly larger amount of them. Yes, those experiences are fictional, but good authors will draw on enough of their own actual life experience—as well as on actual background research—to make their fiction feel plausible and real. And if you are, say, reading an author from a different culture than your own, their own cultural perspective and assumptions will inevitably color the work and give you a taste of entirely different (real) perspectives and underlying assumptions. For example, this was an interesting comment that I happened to read recently:
Personally, I find that a focus on subverting norms of gender, race, and power hierarchies is the surest sign that a fictional work is thoroughly suffused with contemporary Western culture.
Part of it is that I read a lot of Korean and Japanese stuff. Their fiction, and their societies, are generally a lot less concerned with such things. Sometimes horribly so, to be honest (some Japanese fantasy works have a disturbing fascination with slavery).
(The work you consume doesn’t need to be geographically remote, either—if you take novels from even a century or two back, they’re already starting to be more delightfully alien than anything that an average science fiction or fantasy novel is capable of presenting.)
I don’t really find very compelling the psychological studies claiming that literary fiction can boost one’s ability for taking different kinds of perspectives—they suffer from all the standard cautions and caveats of psychological research, plus it’s a proposition that’s difficult to test experimentally—but I would be surprised if that claim wasn’t actually true. One definition of empathy says that it’s about the ability to put yourself in someone else’s head, and good fiction is about exactly that.
I agree that it’s possible to consume fiction in a much healthier, mind-expanding, empathy-increasing way than what I described. We can make a pretty strong analogy with food: many people consume junk food, junk food is plausibly somewhere between pretty bad and extremely bad for you, and taking a break from food (that is, fasting) can be a way to recalibrate yourself and get better attuned to the difference between good and bad food, none of which is to say that we should live our lives entirely without food. Similarly for “junk fiction.”
I agree that all of the things that you listed can be issues, and if the two of you are just advocating a temporary break in order to recalibrate, then I don’t have an objection. I feel like I’ve seen sentiments in the rationalsphere that weren’t just about taking a temporary break but actually seriously recommending giving up all fiction for good, and I might have been responding more to my recollection of those sentiments than what you were actually saying.
On the thing about fiction as a source of bad training data specifically: agree that this can be an issue, especially if one has a very one-sided diet of fiction. There’s a lot of fiction out there that conveys outright toxic thought patterns and expectations about relationships. (One of my abhorrences is the whole “you get married and then you live happily ever after” trope and stuff related to it, which I suspect does damage in more subtle ways than just the obvious one.)
But at the same time, I would feel that the training data available to someone who didn’t consume much fiction, was also much impoverished compared to someone who consumed a varied diet of quality fiction. Any single person’s life can only provide them with direct experiences of a very small slice of all the possible human experiences and perspectives; somebody who supplemented their ordinary life with fiction could experience a vastly larger amount of them. Yes, those experiences are fictional, but good authors will draw on enough of their own actual life experience—as well as on actual background research—to make their fiction feel plausible and real. And if you are, say, reading an author from a different culture than your own, their own cultural perspective and assumptions will inevitably color the work and give you a taste of entirely different (real) perspectives and underlying assumptions. For example, this was an interesting comment that I happened to read recently:
(The work you consume doesn’t need to be geographically remote, either—if you take novels from even a century or two back, they’re already starting to be more delightfully alien than anything that an average science fiction or fantasy novel is capable of presenting.)
I don’t really find very compelling the psychological studies claiming that literary fiction can boost one’s ability for taking different kinds of perspectives—they suffer from all the standard cautions and caveats of psychological research, plus it’s a proposition that’s difficult to test experimentally—but I would be surprised if that claim wasn’t actually true. One definition of empathy says that it’s about the ability to put yourself in someone else’s head, and good fiction is about exactly that.
I agree that it’s possible to consume fiction in a much healthier, mind-expanding, empathy-increasing way than what I described. We can make a pretty strong analogy with food: many people consume junk food, junk food is plausibly somewhere between pretty bad and extremely bad for you, and taking a break from food (that is, fasting) can be a way to recalibrate yourself and get better attuned to the difference between good and bad food, none of which is to say that we should live our lives entirely without food. Similarly for “junk fiction.”
Yes! I actually thought of a very similar food analogy while typing out my comment, but then didn’t write it down.