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.
As for heuristics, I find analyzing tropes as highly useful.
Firstly, tropes help with finding the fiction that have the traits I perceive as helpful. For example, there is a page that lists hundreds of works that depict mind uploading, one of my most favorite topics.
Secondly, tropes can be used as additional indicators of the quality of the fiction. For example, someone recommended Deadpool 2 to me. But after scrapping the page for tropes, I found that it contains a lot of tropes that I perceive as harmful, but almost no good tropes. The movie is not worth watching.
For me, the benefit of studying tropes is that it makes it easy to talk about the ways in which stories are story-like. In fact, to discuss what stories are like, this post used several links to tropes (specifically ones known to be wrong/misleading/inapplicable to reality).
I think a few deep binges on TVtropes for media I liked really helped me get a lot better at media analysis very, very quickly. (Along with a certain anime analysis blog that mixed in obvious and insightful cinematography commentary focusing on framing, color, and lighting, with more abstract analysis of mood, theme, character, and purpose—both illustrated with links to screenshots, using media that was familiar and interesting to me.)
And by putting word-handles on common story features, it makes it easy to spot them turning up in places they shouldn’t. Like in your thinking about real-life situations.
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:
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.
I agree with all of your points.
As for heuristics, I find analyzing tropes as highly useful.
Firstly, tropes help with finding the fiction that have the traits I perceive as helpful. For example, there is a page that lists hundreds of works that depict mind uploading, one of my most favorite topics.
Secondly, tropes can be used as additional indicators of the quality of the fiction. For example, someone recommended Deadpool 2 to me. But after scrapping the page for tropes, I found that it contains a lot of tropes that I perceive as harmful, but almost no good tropes. The movie is not worth watching.
For me, the benefit of studying tropes is that it makes it easy to talk about the ways in which stories are story-like. In fact, to discuss what stories are like, this post used several links to tropes (specifically ones known to be wrong/misleading/inapplicable to reality).
I think a few deep binges on TVtropes for media I liked really helped me get a lot better at media analysis very, very quickly. (Along with a certain anime analysis blog that mixed in obvious and insightful cinematography commentary focusing on framing, color, and lighting, with more abstract analysis of mood, theme, character, and purpose—both illustrated with links to screenshots, using media that was familiar and interesting to me.)
And by putting word-handles on common story features, it makes it easy to spot them turning up in places they shouldn’t. Like in your thinking about real-life situations.