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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5536 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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There are 3 kinds of books:

  • Fiction novels
  • Textbooks
  • The rest

Fiction Novels entertain & enlighten. Textbooks educate. If your textbook can be condensed into a blog it isn't a good text book. If your Novel can be enjoyed just as easily in a video, then it isn't a good Novel. A book should be borne out of necessity, not narcissism. Sometimes you are desperate to express an idea or tell and story, and every medium falls short. Books are the last resort. But they work.

Growing up, I thought I was immature not not being able to enjoy non-fiction. But, I've since realized that non-fiction books are prime candidates for blog-i-zation. If the cliff notes for a book is no better than reading the book itself, then that's a gross failure.

The best non-fiction is either sufficiently fictionalized to be fiction novel, or sufficiently dense to be a textbook. There are no other types of books.

There's a contingent of people out there (including, I suspect, sbf) who see fiction as low status and generally not worth your time, ignoring the deep connections between human thought and fictional stories.

I’d say among very smart people, non-fiction in general is lower status than fiction. The archetypal midwit reads very little fiction but has a bookshelf full of Pinker, Dawkins, Harari, various biographies of businessmen and presidents and so on.

Most very smart people I've met limit their reading to technical literature.

Unless they’re extremely autistic I find it hard to believe someone only reads textbooks and journal articles.

Lots of people like this in STEM.

I think that there's an understated risk to reading a lot of fiction. Because it's all made up it can teach false lessons and prop up self serving narratives.

Non fiction has the advantage that you can learn true things from true events, even if the author is completely out to lunch.

With fiction, you know the author is making it up.

With nonfiction, nobody will believe you that the author is making it up unless they don't like the conclusions. There's no compulsion to report "true events" in nonfiction - compare Zinn's A People's History with A Patriot's History. Both chock full of "true events" narrowly defined, but which true things can you learn? Better never to begin.

Hey, what fiction have you read that wouldn't have been better as a six-paragraph blog post?

Well, there was that meta-porno in the other thread…

That one would have been better compressed to zero paragraphs.

Six paragraphs?! @FiveHourMarathon got War and Peace down to three words and I now demand all fiction in that format.

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