I love the concept of WEIRD as a predisposition to facts and away from stories. Genuinely compelling
I think people who don't read fiction develop "shallow axioms." The basic rules that they reason with end up unsophisticated and relatively provincial, even if those rules are profoundly powerful in a localised way. For example, a hardcore capitalist can become fabulously successful if they work hard, have some smarts, and have a bedrock belief that companies are only responsible for their shareholders, that taxation is theft, and that if labor doesn't like their deal, they should quit.
But fiction gives us "The Ones that Walk away from Omelas." Profoundly short, not even a story, more a scenario. If you are open to fiction, you cannot escape LeGuin's implied question of whether you are one who walks away or not, and in fact she makes no explicit ethical statement. But by reading it, we are unmoored by our simplistic, non-fiction rules like "10,000 hours" or "grit" and encouraged to see how things may actually work.
Fiction is more powerful than simply a tool for community. It is a tool for resetting and challenging our axioms, and WEIRD people have far too many of them.
Well, apart from being entertaining and exposing our minds to new lines of thoughts, points of view and places in time, fiction seems to me uniquely able to teach things - about human interaction, ways of flourishing, alleys towards doom, etc. - in a way, a work of non-fiction simply cannot achieve. We humans are wired for story, and it has, since time immemorial, been the prime vector for propagating knowledge, especially about the most fundamental truths we hold dear.
I love the concept of WEIRD as a predisposition to facts and away from stories. Genuinely compelling
I think people who don't read fiction develop "shallow axioms." The basic rules that they reason with end up unsophisticated and relatively provincial, even if those rules are profoundly powerful in a localised way. For example, a hardcore capitalist can become fabulously successful if they work hard, have some smarts, and have a bedrock belief that companies are only responsible for their shareholders, that taxation is theft, and that if labor doesn't like their deal, they should quit.
But fiction gives us "The Ones that Walk away from Omelas." Profoundly short, not even a story, more a scenario. If you are open to fiction, you cannot escape LeGuin's implied question of whether you are one who walks away or not, and in fact she makes no explicit ethical statement. But by reading it, we are unmoored by our simplistic, non-fiction rules like "10,000 hours" or "grit" and encouraged to see how things may actually work.
Fiction is more powerful than simply a tool for community. It is a tool for resetting and challenging our axioms, and WEIRD people have far too many of them.
Well, apart from being entertaining and exposing our minds to new lines of thoughts, points of view and places in time, fiction seems to me uniquely able to teach things - about human interaction, ways of flourishing, alleys towards doom, etc. - in a way, a work of non-fiction simply cannot achieve. We humans are wired for story, and it has, since time immemorial, been the prime vector for propagating knowledge, especially about the most fundamental truths we hold dear.