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gjm comments on Fiction Considered Harmful - Less Wrong Discussion
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Fiction is counterfeit learning or counterfeit human relationships. Admiring nature is a side-effect of preferences that evolved to help us find good places to live or stay. Casual sex is a counterfeit of not-so-casual sex, which helps to make families (in at least two ways). Music is counterfeit pattern-spotting. Ice cream is basically sugar and fat, neither of which is very good for your health when consumed in large quantities.
Something along those lines, anyway.
(Full disclosure: I read fiction, admire nature, have not-so-casual sex because I'm married, spend an appreciable fraction of my life on music, and make my own ice cream.)
That's a fine just-so story, but if this (13 minute video of nature's beauty, in the form of uninhabited and mostly uninhabitable places) isn't a counterexample, it's not clear what could be.
They're all just-so stories. Any of them might turn out to be wrong.
(But I don't think there's any contradiction between "some very beautiful places are utterly uninhabitable" and "the tastes that make us find some places more beautiful than others evolved to help us find good places to live". There can be natural as well as artificial superstimuli.)