Reading in the Dark: Does fiction matter in a post-fact age? | Hacker News Reader

Reading in the Dark: Does fiction matter in a post-fact age?

harpers.org

44 pointsdiodorus39 comments

We're not in a post-fact age. We're simply at a time where people are more aware that a given subset of facts can support a narrative the conflicts with the narrative of another subset. Similar to unifying theories in science, we just need to always look for explanations that encompass more facts. Not throw our hands in the air and say, "This is too hard! There are no more facts, only narrative!"

That sort of epistemological nihilism isn't really supported by the facts :)

> That sort of epistemological nihilism isn't really supported by the facts

It is supported by a given subset of facts though.

To be precise, there exists a subset of facts that supports a narrative of epistemological nihilism.

I have no idea what you are all talking about, can you translate?

The replies in this chain are just joking around in a geeky and pedantic way (which is one of my favorite ways), but the original comment is serious and has a point.

The point of the original comment is just that we've entered a period where people are aware (perhaps hyper-aware) of any evidence that conflicts with other people's interpretation of events. This often happens to both sides of an issue, and they both denounce the others as hopelessly misled.

This doesn't mean there is no good way to view the overall events in question, and that facts are dead, just that we need to step back and try to view it all from a wider angle, with more facts in general.

Basically, think about history books for semi-recent US history. While they may still be biased in many cases, they generally have a good idea of what both sides thought and their motivations, and can describe them, and have the benefit of seeing how what they were arguing about turned out. That's obviously a hard or impossible view to get during most events, but it is something we can strive for by widening our view to encompass more information and points of view.

For elaboration on how cognitive bias causes people to interpret the facts in different ways, I always recommend:

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/08/17/how-to-know-youre-in-a-ma...

Man, it's too early in the morning to handle to unbelievable level of irony of this coming from Scott Adams of all people.

I can't help but think that his blog on persuasion is an attempt to lead the enlightened through work samples.

It almost feels like at some point he's going to turn around and be "I don't really believe all that, but I convinced you, and persuaded some of you of what I was saying. Buy my book on persuasion!"

I get a weird snake-oil vibe from his blog. It feels more like he's a PR department than an actual outside observer.

"We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight."

To be fair, the article is from August, two months before Papadopoulos pled guilty as the first in the investigation. Still, it doesn't exactly bode well for his guidelines to spot mass hysteria.

While it is clearly true that cognitive bias causes you to interpret facts in different ways, the article is really not very good at arguing it.

By the author's argument, anyone who believed the nazis were coming to power would have been deemed 'in a mass hysteria bubble'. I mean the ideas that ACTUAL NAZIS could come to power is clearly crazy... but it happened.

His argument almost sounds like a form of denial; "if it sounds really bad, it can't be true!"

It saddens my that Adams blog has devolved into this. While this post has some good points, he hitches it to a partisan wagon so strongly that it's hard to take without feeling like the whole point is to try to persuade you instead of educate you, which makes it feel kind of gross.

The rest of the blog is some mix of how to persuade people (including a reading list for help on that, with his own book included), and more opining on current political events.

It's also leaked into a few of the comic strips in kind of a "gotcha" way.

Sorry Scott Adams, you didn't "get me". I get where you're coming from, but I disagree. That's not the same thing.

An example where he "gets you" by assuming that if you disagree you must have missed a word- no one could have disagreed if they truly understood his message:

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/06/03/an-example-of-cognitive-d...

Ugh. The comic is fine, and highlights some of the over-vilification the left is known for, but the explanation for what it means is pretty extreme, and actually exhibits the same behavior he's calling out.

I continue to be unclear if he's playing some long con and these are just the easter eggs for the people that see it. Otherwise he's pretty self-unaware, to a frightening degree.

Fiction matters - it's good fun. Even if we're just now aware that we're swimming in a sea of fiction.

The only thing that's changed recently is that we're now just more capable of being aware how much bad reporting and government tomfoolery is going on - we always been lied to.

> The only thing that's changed recently is that we're now just more capable of being aware how much bad reporting and government tomfoolery is going on - we always been lied to.

We're post-fact for the specific reason that that statement is both true and utterly false.

Whatever mess we're currently in, it's explicitly because we (collectively) weren't capable enough of being aware of bad reporting, and while it's gotten louder this last year, I'm not sure we've gotten better at it.

It certainly is fun, but it's also a source of metaphysics and morals.

For example, children can read Harry Potter, want to be in Gryffindor (at least in their imaginations) and grow up better people as a result.

One could spend a decade citing the results of scientific studies, advertising all the fashionably-correct political opinions, extolling the benefits of eating more organic vegetables, exercising and so on. Never achieving a similar result.

I was thinking about this recently. I already knew from personal experience 25 years ago that I couldn’t trust what is reported in the news (if I know that they lie about things I personally know the facts about, how can I trust them on everything I do not know the facts about?)

It seems like every time there is a report about a science discovery, people jump out of the woodwork to complain about the state of science reporting and how the science news is wrong and misleading. I do not have the background to read and understand scientific journals to find out the truth, and it probably wouldn’t matter if I did. There are stories about fake articles being accepted and published by reputable journals all the time.

The recent revelation of deep porn shows that someone like myself, without the skills to analyze videos to know if they are fake or not, has to assume that all videos are fake. The same applies to images, audio, and other media.

When I can trust no text, video, audio, images, etc. to not have been manipulated and to have no reputable authority that I can trust to help me to distinguish between truth and fiction I am left adrift having to assume that everything I do not personally experience is false (and even then I know that human memory is flawed and no two people experience the same event in the same way - so I cannot even trust myself).

This seems like a rather nihilistic and cynical viewpoint, but knowing that I cannot trust anything is actually rather liberating and fills me with optimism. I cannot trust the bad or the good things that are reported.

Does news matter?

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Yes, and largely for the arguments that he concedes. The fact that a substantial fraction of news is gossip and speculation just means that not everything on a news outlet is news. In the same way that not everything done by scientist is science or everything done by an artist is art.

Everything published by a scientist in a paper should be science. Everything presented by an artist in an exposition should be art.

Everything published in a newspaper (and presented as news) should be news.

I am much more inclined to consider news a form of entertainment nowadays. And I am not even talking about fake news.

We are not in a “post-fact age”, no matter how much some people want us to believe we are.

What does that even mean anyway?

It’s just as bad as the term “fake news”.

Some people are. Some people aren't. That's the entire issue.

"I'm right no matter what everyone else says!"

Kind of the defining problem of this topic.

I have a hard time imagining any other conclusion than that a person who genuinely, confidently, takes the whole "post-fact" idea seriously is someone who doesn't think enough about the things that are coming out of their mouth.

Fiction has always existed in a "post-fact age" (whatever that is). Nothing has changed but our awareness of our own absurdity.

I'd say even more than ever. Knowing all is not that interesting past some point. Imagination keeps providing pleasure.

Sounds pretty much like what one could say about sex.

We are not in a post-fact age. A certain someone who is on TV and Twitter a lot who you don't like tells lies and half truths. Like people always have. This person is just more brazen about it, and you really, really don't like this person.

You still live in a world with facts. If you get charged for a pound of lunch meat at the deli but are given half a pound, you complain and this gets straightened out. Most delis won't assert that we now live in a post-fact world and thus your half pound is really a pound.

If you make up your own facts at work, you're not likely going to keep your job very long.

You still live in reality. The world is not spinning out of control. Everything is going to be OK.

That's not what people mean when they talk about a "post-fact" age. They mean facts related to people's perception of the world beyond their immediate perception.

See Karl Rove's quote about the "reality based" community, or Trump's aide ironically invoking "alternative facts" in reference to provably false claims made about his inauguration, or the fake news phenomenon itself. A pound of lunch meat remains a pound of lunch meat even when you believe in Pizzagate, or that jet fuel can't melt steel beams, or that the world is flat.

Fact is no longer relevant in shaping many people's interpretation of reality, because many people are abstracted from that reality by layers of media, by and large mistrust mainstream gatekeepers of truth, and can live in a subjective pocket universe of inputs and acquaintances that reinforce their biases.

lol, no, they will tell you they can't weigh it because you already touched it, and that would contaminate their kitchen and therefore there is no way for them to give you a refund or straighten it out... while this specific situation hasn't happened to me, very eerily similar situations have.

Have you ever been grocery shopping? Are you from the US? The national chains are pretty liberal about accepting returns and customer service in general.

It looks like everyone's reacting to the title rather than any of the content of the article?

Welcome to HackerNews.

Welcome to HackerNews of the last year or so.

Well, it is the ultimate click-bait title geared to hit at the heart of everyone's confirmation biases.

In fairness, the article is quite a sneering review of a book by a professor who, I'm guessing, was disappointed with the advance he was offered and so went on a bit of an anti-literature venting.

It was a vaguely amusing read. Could have done without the Trump-ety bit that seemed to be a ranty digression.

But I can't really say I was enlightened in any particular way. I mean, literature professor thinks most people are Philistines, shocker.

Seconded. Aside from some nicely crafted sentences I found this review only offered a surface-level critique of a book on literary theory, snide summations of said book, and a forced element of personal reflection on reading in the context of our current zeitgeist. Excellent writing. Poor criticism. The author's critical position is also very transparent and does not seem very nuanced (reader-centric, drawing on and abiding by much of the wealth of work in reader-response criticism without qualifying any of their major tenets). I tend to formalism myself, so I am always harder to sway toward these arguments that desire to transform literature into a privileged instrument of self-definition and morality--you cannot deny that literature has roots in those realms, but those dynamics have shifted, which judging by the cursory glance we're given at the work in this review, was precisely Marx's point.

The part about William Marx, the French zealot professor, is interesting but how the writer tried to connect the topic to Trump seems amateurish. The title of the reviewed book is "The hatred of literature" and seems to make a bunch of much more radical points not related to our post-fact age (every age is a post-fact age, just ask Galileo).

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