Zubon, not every variation on a story counts as bias-reversed – the point is to reverse the main sympathy the audience is supposed to feel. Thousands of stories may be variations on Romeo and Juliet, but how many of those take the side of the kids’ parents?

Well, the source material for starters – Romeo and Juliet was a cautionary tale to wayward teens before Shakespeare got a hold of it.

I’ve become aware of a lot of my own prejudices while watching fiction. Escapism brings you away from yourself – if you cling to the often standard endings, and reassure yourself that “our good and our bad are shared everywhere”, then it’s a waste.

But if instead you take advantage of the trip to question your assumptions and wonder how many of them depend on your current situation, then it’s worth it.

I would argue the opposite, that blatant fiction is far better for you than documentaries (non-fiction) of dubious quality. Who facts checks? Very few people. Fiction at its worst gives you a license to consider morally inconceivable alternatives — this may be a good thing, because it affords explicit opportunities to test and refine ones thoughts on a given subject.

A “bad” documentary might actually take the truth from you and replace it with a convenient, white lie. Believing in an un-truth can be lethal.

In fiction you bring the bias; with documentaries the author does. Fiction requires a suspension of disbelief to be effective – you know its false going in. For the fictive narrative to be effective, the audience must explicitly participate by allowing the author to establish false premises. On the other hand, except in regard to them most cynical amongst us, documentaries benefit from implicit trust; why would you watch a documentary authored by someone you didn’t trust?

There are plenty of valid scientific studies concerning the ease with which humans are manipulated by those they perceive to be in authority; humans are biased to trust individuals who provide the proper credentials, wearing the right cloths, and speak the proper language.

Where are the biases in Jabberwocky, or in this poem by Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

As I said above, I think something like Waiting for Godot is similar. And there are many more examples. Of course, the authors of these works have all manner of cognitive biases. But all mathematicians are replete with cognitive biases, and yet I don’t think it makes much sense to talk of biases inherent in all math papers.

More pertinently, there are many philosophy papers in which the main argument can be seen as resulting mainly from some cognitive bias. Yet since the argument is laid out explicitly in a paper, you can scrutinize its steps and decide for yourself whether it is cogent. In some cases, an argument that can be seen as resulting from a cognitive bias will turn out to be correct. For instance, someone might initially construct an argument in ethics or political philosophy with the motivation of status quo bias. But sometimes such arguments will be correct.

The problem with fiction, as I see it, is quite different from the general problem that most people we communicate with are biased. The problem is as follows. In our evolutionary past, basic inductive reasoning from observation was very useful. If every observation of a snake was followed by a dangerous snake-attack, then it was an advantage to expect attacks after future observations of snakes. But in our evolutionary past, there were no realistic, life-like movies. Hence, we probably don’t have a strong ability to intuitively discount observations we make when watching movies or TV.

For instance, I grew up outside the US, but watched US teen sitcoms on cable (Saved by The Bell, Hang Time, etc.). In these sitcoms, the group of friends, which was mostly pretty white people would always include a black or hispanic person. When I came to the US at quite a young age (before I became more critical in my thought) I expected to find whites and blacks to be socially integrated, and for race to not be much of an issue anymore. Sadly this was false: there is significant social segregation in the US even among the most affluent and wealthy classes. And I had no good reason to believe otherwise, for all my evidence was drawn from fictional TV shows (with PC production teams). If I had read in an article about the amazing racial integration in the US, then I think I would have been more critical about it. But I acted as if I had *seen* the social integration, when I had only seen it on TV.

Science fiction movies and comics are also bad. You *see* Cyclops shoot energy from his eyes without there being any recoil (contra Newtonian mechanics). You see Superman lifting up buildings (old comics) without the buildings falling apart (again, contra basic physics). In all sorts of movies, you see people fighting on after numerous bullet wounds from very powerful guns.

The problem with these movies is that they lead us to subconscious inferences from ‘observations’ of things that didn’t even happen. This is what makes them really pernicious. There are forms of literature which are about linguistic virtuosity, or about putting across some philosophical idea. These forms are more like math or philosophy papers. But movies (and some fiction) function more like the people who do spoon-bending or the quack doctors who claim to do surgery without any needles and pretend to pull bits of body tissue out of their patients.

To do better, read reliable history books, and try to make the events in them as available as your own memory – fiction trains us to discount stories of strange people and distant lands, but history books are not like novels, they are retellings of events that really happened to people as real as you. And if histories are not always retold accurately, well, neither is your own memory.

Bias-reversed novels abound on my bookshelves; it’s one of the main thematic sources of modern speculative literature. What would happen if the Antichrist were raised as an ordinary boy? (Good Omens.) What if Prince Charming behaved like any other hormone-charged teenager when confronted with a scantily clad wicked stepmother? (Slay and Rescue.) Etc. etc.