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ChristianKl comments on Fiction Considered Harmful - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's easy to tell a misleading narrative by adding real facts about history together. It's quite possible for a good science fiction novel to contain more information than than a history book where every fact is true but the narrative is misleading.
If I understand your argument, you're saying that given a sufficiently bad history book, some fiction will be better. The answer to that isn't "read fiction to understand history", it's "find a really good history book whose narrative isn't misleading".
(Not that I agree with OP's point, but I think your rebuttal doesn't work.)
The problem is that if you read a history book or a newspaper you are more likely to think that the narrative is true than when you read a fiction novel.
A lot of people quite uncritically accept narratives when the news tells them the SAP rose today because XYZ when those kind of statements quite often lack good causal evidence.
It is also extremely common that the news will simply make a factual claim which is outright false.
Yes, but that's not the only person.
A lot of people think that crime increased in the last year because newspaper reports of individual crimes increased. Most of those newspaper reports contain mostly true facts but the overall narrative is still false. Crime did decrease.
Hans Rosling frequently makes the point that the knowledge of the average person about Africa is worse than that of a chimp (https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world). That's not due to wrong facts reported in the media but due to misleading narratives.
For people who consume a lot of fiction, it can also create or reinforce narratives.
The average person consumes much more fiction (books and movies) about e.g. Ancient Rome than they read history books about it, and gathers a lot of wrong facts and misleading narratives through them.
History books can have false narratives, but fiction books are much more likely to simply have false facts.
Exactly. The mindset that says twisting the truth is a basically bad thing doesn't then conclude that fiction is OK because it's sometimes less twisty than (well-manipulated) fact.