Hey /lit/
I read everyday. However, I rarely read fiction. When I read fiction, I have this feeling that I am wasting my time. I know, that is probably not a good feeling, but I can not help myself.
Help me out. How do I get over this weird self-inflicted psychological problem? I tried having some introspection on the issue, but I can not locate where this impatience, and lack of desire for fiction comes from.
What I do read everyday:
Investment reports
Sociological and Economical theories.
Sociological data.
Historical manuscripts.
Science books (mostly Biology, Astronomy, and Pedology [study of soil]).
Fiction gives you heuristics and mental models to draw from in ways that don't become obvious until they're strongly and broadly sedimented in your mind. It's not an issue of being able to vulgarly model a douchebag you meet as some villain you read about, it's more like adding subtlety to your mind, to its storehouse and networks of ideas, its fundamental categories, etc.
When I think about perfectly scientific astronomy stuff, or the metaphysics of science, or far future human scenarios, I'm unconsciously turning inward and tapping into an aggregate of science fiction I read throughout my life. I don't go "this is like that time in Rendezvous with Rama!", I have just subtly put meat on the bones of a million concepts, gelled together and fleshed out ideas from more technical research without even realising it, made it all more supple and open, made the connections between ideas more elastic. Your experiences web together, and your mind expands to account for it.
Same thing goes for your personality. I could never really fundamentally understand Marxists or care about what they cared about until I met one who betrayed his interior "picture" of capitalism and capitalist processes in terms of art and literature he had read throughout his long life. I realised he fundamentally pictured these vivid images of factories, factory scenes, famous paintings of the industrial revolution, books by Dickens and so on, he could SMELL something of the factory floor when he was reading dry-ass economic articles. I felt like I had interacted with him on a deeper level than normal, I felt that something of him with lifeblood in it had passed into me as it had passed into him from a thousand sources, and it made me understand Marxists more, be more sympathetic to them. His self-individuation made me individuate myself. I didn't become a Marxist, but I feel like whatever makes us human comes closer to the surface when I talk to them now.
Lots of little things like that.
fiction gives you dope aesthetic highs, no joking, that's about it
when you're reading something real good it falls over your life like a kind of haze and everything you see is through the lens of that book
and then when you finish it stays with you forever and you can recall and rejoice in the experience of reading something you read 10 years ago
when i'm feeling down i switch on ulysses mode and see the world thru a new light
>>7863696
This, well said.
Also, helping you cultivate your own personality/charisma/ability to connect with other people. Obviously, characters in fiction can mirror characters in your life and depending on how insightful the author is, studying the characters allows you to handle real people better, imo.
>>7863696
>heuristics mental models
dear lord do there exist more meaningless buzzwords than these? heuristics? do you mean propositional knowledge (this is all that "heuristics" really mean)? mental model? what the hell is a mental model? is it your ability to register and form analogies and metaphors for some object o and property P onto some other, possibly the same, object o' and property P'?
can we please stop pretending that reading some pop-scientific treatise of Polya or Kahnemann licenses us to assume by default that all participants in a discourse in which you namedrop "mental model" are supposed to interpret it unambiguously without any accompanying definition whatsoever?
>>7863721
>can we please stop pretending that reading some pop-scientific treatise of Polya or Kahnemann licenses us to assume by default that all participants in a discourse in which you namedrop "mental model" are supposed to interpret it unambiguously without any accompanying definition whatsoever?
You've gotten to the bottom of it: people peruse fiction (among other things) so they can live in a fuzzy world and effortlessly feel like they aren't alone through ad hoc assumptions instead of boring themselves with rigorous thought
ignore these pseuds, op
reading is fun, like fishing and skiing
that's all
more like neil old amirite
>>7863797
My Neil is Diamond.
>>7863721
did you just feel like posting or something
>what the hell is a mental model?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_model
>heuristic
A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrJstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσkω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.
Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping, profiling, or common sense.
"Heuristic device" is used when an entity X exists to enable understanding of, or knowledge concerning, some other entity Y. A good example is a model that, as it is never identical with what it models, is a heuristic device to enable understanding of what it models. Stories, metaphors, etc., can also be termed heuristic in that sense. A classic example is the notion of utopia as described in Plato's best-known work, The Republic.
Philosophers of science have emphasized the importance of heuristics in creative thought and constructing scientific theories.
>>7863797
he is young in comparison to the earth
>>7864570
did you just feel li-...shut the hell up.
good job missing the point and dodging the problem by <<<<<literally>>>>> namedropping a further sequence of buzzwords. your godawful grade-school etymology analysis doesn't help, either. please, for the love of JESUS CHRIST, learn what the unit of knowledge is, why it is a proposition, and consider the fact why your "rules of thumb", "educated guesses", "intuitive judgements" and so on aren't just disguised, and substantially more vague notions than, propositional knowledge. "heuristic" is a notion that's borderline meaningless and provides no insight into anything whatsoever.
>Philosophers of science have emphasized the importance of heuristics in creative thought and constructing scientific theories.
ooooooooooooooh reaaaaaleeeeyy???? liek l-like Woaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
shut
UP
>>7864755
>these words you're using are made up
>Here are some large, fleshed-out articles on a popular online encyclopaedia whose entire criterion of article creation is "sufficient notability of article topic"
>THEY GOT BUZZWORDS IN THEM THO! I HATE BUZZWORDS
Even if you were right, it has nothing to do with the fact that your original complaint was badly informed and you are dumb as fuck IRL with no dick.
If you have issues with how lots of people apparently use these terms, take it up with the people, not with me.
>>7863670
>Sociological and Economical theories.
>Sociological data.
You are wasting your time anyway. And the science books? Useless trivia, unless you actively implement the ideas into your worldview.
Its hard to balance fiction and non fiction.
But they are plenty of books that make great combinations of both. Seek historical novels.personally, I would stop reading sociology altogether
Understanding narrative, stories and the inner mind of others is vital to understanding most of the world around you. Simply because reading fiction provides less tangible and obvious gains like saying I learnt about a particular thing that happened today does not mean it is a waste. Fiction often provides the best way of truly understanding the impact of historical situations, for instance I have read plenty of history and facts about the Spanish civil war, but fiction lead me to gain a much deeper understanding of its meaning.
>>7865691
There's nothing wrong with good sociology and social science in general. Just ignore pop social science books.
>>7863670
You err not in thinking that fiction is pointless but in judging non-fiction to be worthwhile. Everything is a waste of time, but it's yours to waste.
>>7863772
>don't use ur brain haha :p life is fun
>>7863772
>>7865659
>you are dumb as fuck IRL with no dick
this desu
