Details Avoid Bias
Long ago I noted:
Most [empirical] studies have an agenda associated with their focal factor; the authors, funders, and referees have answers they expect and want to see. Authors can manipulate the statistics to get the answer they want, and funders and referees can refuse to publish unwanted answers. So I tell students to focus more on the control variables when deciding what to believe. For example, you can better trust the control variable estimates of the effect of alcohol, than the estimates from studies where alcohol was the main focus. (more)
Today I just want to note that a similar thing applies to literature. The main character and plot structures of novels are chosen to meet the needs of storytelling, supporting the expectations and morals that readers want to hear. Look at those if you want to learn how to tell compelling stories.
But if you want to learn about real humans, the genius of the greatest authors lies mostly in their details, what they say about very particular behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. This is true of Middlemarch, which I’m now reading, and also of Tolstoy, in my mind the very best.
This came to my mind today, while I was writing a review of Jane Austen's Persuasion, which I finished yesterday. In a way, literature is always a form of flattery: it might try to be didactic, but it has to catch the reader's attention. Sometimes it pays to (partially) antagonize them, or subvert their expectations, though.
I'd say one of the virtues of reading classics that Humanists used to get right (not that most of the people working in those areas care about that stuff anymore, though) is that reading cultivates empathy, as it implicitly forces you to see things through the eyes (and through the values) of different times and places, including ones that you as a reader *do not* share.
One sees this with levels of summary, from "news headline" to full detail at the highest resolution and granularity. Levels of summary obey the market of consumer demand for that level of attention.
They don't summarize so much as provide a summary heavily distorted to satisfy the biases of the filter of a self-selecting audience that is going to both trust the summarization, be too ignorant to catch distortions, and talk to each other about the subject at that level without motivation from expertise, skepticism, or curiosity to invest more time and effort to drill deeper to learn more.
In coverage of science research, as one moves from headline to overview paragraph to full journalism article to study abstract to full article to supplemental materials to intimate familiarity with criticisms and references and the state of replicability in the particular field, one notices decreasing opportunity for big distortions and also decreasing attempts to make big distortions and probably also decreasing 'demand' for it from readers of that level. It's like a quest or tournament where only a tiny few will ever have what it takes to make it to the end.
Imagine a different kind of distorting bias for levels of literature summary. Maybe the customers paying for summaries are students looking for the lowest effort way to get a target grade. They don't do much want an accurate summary as one which is the most likely to help them please the teacher, and if the typical teacher of a work of literature doesn't give As for accuracy but for essays placing exaggerated emphasis on analysis of dynamics of social position, then the most popular summaries will mirror that distortion, and summaries of summaries will get progressively more distorted, like copying hand notes distilling the commercial summary from a student who used them to write an essay which received an A, or just copying the essay itself.
The kind of person who reads every word in a book by Tolstoy because they want to because they enjoy the experience and appreciate the detailed realism and insight into the human condition isn't looking for bias confirmation or the filtering out of everything not strictly necessarily to accomplish some alternative purpose. They want the truth, they are willing to work for it, and from him, they get it.