[padobson]

Fiction is a petri dish for all of those ideas you're consuming in non-fiction books.

Have you ever had an idea that you thought could change the world? Write a short story about it. When you are really forced to create different viewpoints in your head, put those viewpoints into characters, and then have those characters come into conflict with one another, you're subjecting your idea to scrutiny that costs nothing more than a few bytes in word processor and a few hours of time.

In that way, I think a lot of non-fiction is time wasted. I think more non-fiction writers should be fiction writers.

[b_emery]

You're making a compelling argument for writing fiction - but not for reading it.

[toufka]

Reading is the 10 hour version of the above multi-year exercise - as all books are. Instead of deriving Newton's laws, you read what Newton spent a lifetime to come up with. Instead of deriving the implications of a situation where sentient alien races can communicate between stars, read about the solution arrived at when they spent years thinking about. Sure, it's not as technically difficult (nor probably rewarding) as synthesizing the ideas themselves, but still valuable to ingest - especially given the investment/reward ratio.

As a scientist, authors like William Gibson, Borges, Bradbury, Ramez Naam, Asimov, Clarke, Richard Morgan, etc. have provided me with rapid access to very real and useful perspectives inaccessible in non-fiction form. Such stories are long-form versions of Einstein's 'gedanken' [1] - thought experiments such as those he relied on to conceive of relativity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment

[TeMPOraL]

There's a caveat though: through just reading, it's easy to fall into the illusion that you learned anything. Maybe for some this is enough, but I'd wager that for vast majority of people (myself included), to internalize some idea even on the most basic level, you have to do something along the lines of:

- rehearse it after a time, or

- try to derive it by yourself (applies to e.g. math and physics), or

- explain in your own words (whether by teaching someone, or just writing a blog post), or

- code a working demo of it

Basically, you have to apply the idea somehow to actually learn it.

[padobson]

I agree, but I don't think there's a difference whether the initial idea is consumed as fiction or non-fiction.

And it's certainly true that writers of hard-to-grasp ideas often use both - fictional examples in non-fiction books, historical examples and exposition in fiction books.