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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> You can tell a story without making up fiction. Just say you don’t know when you don’t know.

The point is that humans can't in general, because we don't actually know which parts of what we "remember" are real and which parts are our brain filling in the blanks. And maybe it's the same for nonhuman intelligences too.

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It’s hard even when you don’t take into consideration that you don’t know what you’ve misremembered. Try writing a memoir. You’ll realize you never actually remember what anyone says, but caveating your dialog with “and then I think they said something like” would make horrible reading.

Don’t people just bulk qualify the dialogue, e.g. “I don’t remember the exact words. Tom said … then Dick replied … something like that”.

Often we don’t quote people and instead provide a high level description of what they said, e.g. “Harry described the problems with his car.”, where detail is omitted.

Sure. Some memoirs state this in the foreword. There are also memoirs that are "fictionalized", like James Frey's book "A Million Little Pieces." Originally published as a memoir in 2003, it was later revealed that many of the events Frey described were exaggerated or fabricated. This caused a lot of controversy at the time, but many subsequent memoirs followed this pattern and I think it's become quite accepted in the genre.

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