Can fiction improve you? I placed a link to a podcast with the interesting writer Gwern the other day. There he said:

You could definitely spend the rest of your life reading fiction and not benefit whatsoever from it other than having memorized a lot of trivia about things that people made up. I tend to be pretty cynical about the benefits of fiction.

It’s a reference to his work critiquing the fiction improves theory of mind stuff. But as this writer points out:

That’s why we have a canon. That’s why serious readers pay more attention to the best works. And that’s why fiction’s uses are so hard to discern. Poetry offers us more ways of seeing into ourselves than logic ever can, but they must be used together, discerningly.

Are we convinced we’re measuring the right thing?