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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

this misunderstands what fiction is. for people with the capacity, it's a tool for reasoning about hypotheticals and counterfactuals. sometimes its fun, but mostly it's serious.

for the people who get it fiction is a public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary would be like watching golf and thinking it's random. there's a literal mindedness or incapacity for abstraction I can't apprehend in that.

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The problem with using fiction as a discourse about possibilities is that fiction is governed by the rules of the author's mind, not the rules of reality. So the fidelity of the model being used to drive the discourse is directly dependent on the congruence between the author's internal model of the world and reality, which can often be deceptively far apart. This is especially bad when the subject is entertaining, because most of us read fiction for entertainment, not logical discourse. So we create scenarios that are entertaining rather than realistic. And the better the author is the more subtle the differences are, but that doesn't mean they go away. It feels like a somewhat common experience in my life that I'm discussing some topic with somebody, and I have subject matter expertise based on actual lived experience, and as the conversation goes on I discover that all of my conversation partner's thinking about the subject was done in the context of a fictional world which misses key elements of the real world that lead to very different conclusions and outcomes.

This is not to totally discard fiction as a way of reasoning. With regard to hypotheticals beyond our current reach it is often the only way to reason. So it's valuable, but we have to keep in mind that a story is just a story. Hard experience trumps fictional logic any day. And I can't assume that the same events in real life will lead to the same outcomes from a story.

The point is that a fictional story is just one of a host of possibilities, so you can't base decisions off what happens in it rather than the other n-1 possibilities.

> sometimes its fun, but mostly it's serious.

Sometimes its fun, but mostly it's stupid.

Fiction is a story that an author wants to tell, for whatever reason. It doesn't necessarily follow rational rules, it follows the rules of story telling. Fictional people do things because it makes the story more interesting, not because they have some internal logic to their actions.

Agree, fiction and narrative is a fundamental method of human reasoning, one of the first and oldest.

I think a lot of people are reacting to this are missing some of the point - fictions may not literally model reality, but what makes certain fiction memorable is it shines light on some under-expressed aspect of reality, which sticks with us when we encounter a similar pattern in our lives. Whether its also serving entertainment purposes or the author's pet peeves is beside the point, because that is not the part of the fiction to be taken seriously.

We have all sorts of relevant quotes about this:

> all models are wrong, some are useful

> truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations

> We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. - Picasso

Aside from the obvious perception-is-reality aspect of fiction, it's especially important to take fiction seriously these days because the tech world is eyeing the many gray areas between fiction and reality as the next frontier for expansion. These avatars are a perfect example of this attempt to acquire more of the territory of human experience; not just the material reality but the many possible directions our hearts and drives may take us. If we dismiss fiction as something to take less seriously than 'reality', rather than something to be understood in a different way than rational analysis (and with its own skill tree), then we cede this territory to those that know how to wield it against us.

>for the people who get it

Yea I love fiction. I certainly get it.

You should think this way about a particular thing because this one movie portrayed it that way, and if you don't it's because you forgot that this movie portrayed it that way according to its creators will, thoughts, ideas, motivated reasoning, worldview, whatever...is not compelling.

It's pretty obvious to me that the creative choices and ideas of certain people do not imply any demonstrative truth about reality just because they exist because there is not a direct connection between the two; someone can write or film or render whatever they want, even completely contradictory versions of the same topic. What if for example someone did watch that or any other thing and simply disagreed? Think the creators got it wrong?

> public discourse about possibilities. to me seeing it as arbitrary

It's not arbitrary. It can certainly be self-serving, it can be propaganda, it can be a good guess or a well-meaning statement about reality, or speculative fiction but also wrong. It's just the emphatic certainty in how you presented this media creation as proof of something inherently connected to truth about a complex future debatable quality of reality, as even a fictional account about history or the present day or politics suffers from obvious fundamental disconnects from being regarded as "truth", proof or evidence of anything. Again, different people can make multiple contradictory or competing portrayals of a certain concept or topic. This is no different than someone telling you what they believe about a thing; it's not "therefore true" as such, especially in the form of a prediction about the future.

you've found a way to use dinosaur DNA in eggs to genetically engineer a medium sized dinosaur back into existence. you've got a bunch of samples in your apparatus, and you go away and come back to find out they've hatched and disappearared.

someone says to you, at least the fences will keep them in. and you say, "what fences?" and when they say, "didn't you see jurrasic park?" your answer is, "why would I see that, it's fiction, and who cares it's just a 90's kids movie"

that's how dumb I'm saying this release was.

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