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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

“We only have so many hours a day to consume stories, so if we spend another hour on a particular story, that leaves fewer hours for other stories. So if individual stories are substitutes, it seems plausible that so are categories of stories.”

By this definition, literally everything is a substitute for everything else. Eating is a substitute for drinking because you only have so many hours in a day, and all the time you spend drinking, you can't spend eating. In reality, both kinds of stories can and do complement each other. Black panther, for instance, is clearly a fictional story, but it serves to reinforce a progressive ideology and worldview. Walter Scott’s novels, by contrast, served to reinforce a romantic, nationalistic view of the real world.

When we consume fiction, we don’t decouple completely, throwing everything that happens into a mental dustbin labelled “fiction,” which doesn’t interact with anything else. “Fake” stories shape our view of the real world. This has been happening since we were hunter-gatherers. Michelle Sugiyama has done great work on how hunter-gatherers use fictional storytelling to shape what people believe about the real world and how they act in it.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Do you count sport as 'real stories'?

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