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 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 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.
I didn’t say that. And the post is not about personal taste or favorite kinds of entertainment.
The post can be summarized as follows:
a rational agent who has the goal of understanding the world—avoids consuming fiction, unless it’s the rare kind of fiction that benefits this goal more than it harms it
If you have a different goal (e.g. to maximize your enjoyment), there is nothing wrong with consuming whichever fiction you like.
I’ve edited the post to make it more clear.
enjoying sci-fi & fantasy which often get sneered at by literary people
BTW, for the purposes of mind uploading, I write down the title of every book / movie / game / etc I’ve consumed (with some metadata). Doing it for more than 20 years. According to the table, I’ve read about 200 science fiction books. I’m not a science fiction hater, but an ex-addict.
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 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 didn’t say that. And the post is not about personal taste or favorite kinds of entertainment.
The post can be summarized as follows:
a rational agent who has the goal of understanding the world—avoids consuming fiction, unless it’s the rare kind of fiction that benefits this goal more than it harms it
If you have a different goal (e.g. to maximize your enjoyment), there is nothing wrong with consuming whichever fiction you like.
I’ve edited the post to make it more clear.
BTW, for the purposes of mind uploading, I write down the title of every book / movie / game / etc I’ve consumed (with some metadata). Doing it for more than 20 years. According to the table, I’ve read about 200 science fiction books. I’m not a science fiction hater, but an ex-addict.
Thanks for the edit, that helps. I un-downvoted it.