[xerox13ster]

> So we’re left with one answer: information. But what kind of information are you trying to learn from a fiction book? The book is literally labelled FALSE on the cover.

I learned so many things from fictional works.

Authors don’t just make up lies and say whatever they want. Fiction does not mean everything is nonsense. The worlds that you read about have to be believable and for that to be possible, things have to at least be partially consistent with what we understand of the world.

So many authors do real research when they write a fiction novel so that the world that they’re building can be convincing.

For instance:

* I learned how to drive a stick shift from a Young Bond novel. The author didn’t make anything up, they actually described the way that the clutch mechanism works, and how the character was controlling it with the pedals.

* I learned about Navajo code talkers from a fictional book about World War II.

* I learned about cowpox being used as a smallpox vaccine from a fictional book about a new smallpox outbreak in New York City.

* I learned that Gatorade was developed in Florida from Taken by Edward Bloor.

* I learned a lot about the reformation and the Quakers and early colonial America from the Baroque Cycle, because Neal Stephenson did real research to write that book.

Is everything that happened in the book real? No, because obviously Daniel Waterhouse didn’t exist, didn’t found MIT, and didn’t have some mechanical LLM in the 1600s.

Did some of the things in the book actually happen in real life in order for the author to set that book in the time period? Yes. Like IOUs from goldsmiths acting as paper money, and the standardization of coinage by Isaac Newton.

There is so much factual information encoded into the pages of fictional works that this is the stupidest thing I have ever read on any platform in any circumstance ever.

Pure anti-intellectualism of the highest order. An attempt to undo The Enlightenment.