= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
entirelyuseless comments on Fiction Considered Harmful - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (80)
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.