What concerns me is that I think we should be striving for something better, not justifying the status quo.
That's begging the question: what's better and why?
It's not begging that particular question... the implicit assumption is that the current state of affairs is far from optimal, not that my particular definition of optimal is correct. In fact part of the point is to explore what values we might hold (and still hold after reflection on those values) that would value fiction. I feel this is a valuable exercise largely because when I do reflect on it, arguments to the effect that fiction is something I reflectively value are rather difficult to make. If I were to discover that I don't in fact value fiction on reflection, that would be good news: easy life improvement by no longer acting as if I value fiction.
Many good things are best consumed in moderation. [...] The very name binge-watching labels it as an injurious behavior akin to binge drinking.
True. The point I was trying to make is that when I talk to people about this, they tend to give rather high-minded justifications of the value of fiction (usually as a means to other ends, not as an end in itself). While these high-minded justifications may in fact be correct, they seem very different from the motivation which actually causes people to consume fiction. The result of this difference is that the kind of fiction which is readily available on the market is more often "potato chip fiction" as opposed to "baked potato fiction": still food, but awfully greasy.
This point may not be that relevant to the overall set of questions.
That seems like a fully general argument against any solitary activity
I feel like this remark ignores the part before the text you quote ("there's an actual person") which is very much not a fully general argument, but rather an argument against solitary activities which are misleading superstimulus telling system 1 it's achieving things it's not.
There's also a big difference between creative activities (spending solitary time writing a book, say) and consumptive activities. It's certainly possible to spend alone time without the activity being "isolated" in the sense that I mean.
It's also possible for someone to be entirely creative and not engage in fiction at all while still being "isolated" in the sense I mean. When I imagine a version of me or someone else toiling away at something they love with plans to totally burn it without showing anyone before they die, I feel like something is lost in this sense; not interconnected with the web of life.
Perhaps that's just a bad intuition I have about my values, and/or perhaps it's not a thing many other people value. I don't know.
Beyond that, I think the difference I'm pointing to is that fiction feels disproportionately like a good thing (because it's designed to). If there is any distinction to be made between what feels immediately valuable and what I'd find valuable on reflection, fiction will tend to optimize for the first. (This is also true of other types of information I might consume, but fiction has particularly large freedom to optimize these differences.)
I think people (not just me) generally develop a kind of "memetic immune system" defense against the types of superstimulus which are present in abundance in their culture. We have a much higher bar for humor on television than in real life, because funny things happen with much greater frequency on television. No matter how much more attractive the people on television are, we adjust our expectations (somewhat, at least) and are able to find the people we meet in person relatively attractive. And so on. This generally gives us the ability to not waste too much time on the superstimulus. (It also means that they may not have similar defenses against superstimulus available in other places; an example is people over-doing recreational drugs when they visit places where more things are legal. The native population of those places is not prone to the same excess.)
the implicit assumption is that the current state of affairs is far from optimal, not that my particular definition of optimal is correct. In fact part of the point is to explore what values we might hold (and still hold after reflection on those values) that would value fiction.
Again, this doesn't feel like it relies on any attribute specific to fiction. You could say about almost any aspect of the world or our activities that it's unlikely to be optimal (whatever your goals may be), and so it's useful to question things - I agree with that. But the r...
Epistemic status: playing devil's advocate.
I wrote the following a couple of weeks back for a meet-up post, and Gunnar_Zarncke suggested I should turn it into a discussion post:
Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth. It absorbs time and energy which could be spent on fact. Although we make a conscious distinction between fictional worlds and reality, we will often use fictional examples when evaluating real-life situations. It has been argued that we should learn to take joy in the world we actually live in. Why should we allow fiction to warp our view of reality?
Perhaps fiction offers a fun, relaxing break. I can understand this claim in two different ways. The first version is that reading fiction gives us a rest from serious thinking, restoring us in some way. So, is this really true? Often when we feel tired of thinking, we're really tired of thinking about some particular thing. We gain new mental energy when we switch to something else. We think this means we're unable to do productive work, and need to take a break; but often, we could continue to be productive on a sufficiently different task, which gave us the same variety as a "break" would. (This is anecdotal. I recall seeing a discussion of this in a lesswrong post, but didn't figure out which one.) Alternatively, if we really are exhausted, reading fiction might not be restoring our energy as much as taking a nap or perhaps meditating. In either case, the pro-fiction argument seems murky. Answering this question is difficult, because it's far from obvious why certain types of thinking seem to take "mental effort" and leave us feeling drained. (It seems it might be a mechanism for sensing high opportunity cost, or it might be due to depleting a physical resource in the brain.)
A second way to interpret this is that consuming fiction is closer to being an end, rather than a means. The joy which fiction creates, or the rich inner experience, may be a good in and of itself. Whether it's useful for restorative purposes or not, it's good that society keeps churning the fiction mill, because it's one of the things which makes lifeworthwhile. Some people will readily agree with this, while others will feel it's very close to advocating wireheading. At a recent LW meetup here in LA, one person argued that if you're going to enjoy living in some universe, it might as well be the real one. I suppose the idea is that we should seek to make the enjoyable aspects of fiction into a reality, rather than exercising shallow escapism. I'm not sure this view can be defended, however. If you've got something like a computational theory of mind, and believe that uploading yourself into a virtual world is OK, how do you draw a firm line between "reality" and "fiction" to say which kinds of experiences are really valuable and in which you're just fooling yourself? Is it a matter of a sufficiently detailed simulation, which includes other conscious beings rather than puppets, and so on?
Maybe...
Robin Hanson discusses the social value of stories: those who read fiction are more empathetic toward others, seemingly fooled by story logic into acting as if good behavior is always rewarded and bad behavior punished. Although clearly valuable, this gives me the uneasy sense that stories are manipulative control directives. I mayenjoy the story, but does that make me comfortable accepting control directives from this particular author? Or should we examine the moral character of the author, before reading?
To make our arguments stick, we've got to compare fiction to relevant alternatives. It seems to me that we can havealmost as much fun reading biographies, memoirs, and (entertainingly written) history as we can reading fiction... and all with the advantage of being real facts about the real world, which seems at least a little useful.