| > wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative? There's an interesting quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is best known for writing the fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. "Nonfiction conveys knowledge and fiction conveys experience. If you want to understand a proof of Bayes’s Rule, I can use diagrams. If I want you to feel what it is to use Bayesian reasoning, I have to write a story in which some character is doing that." https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-e... It's interesting to note that he wrote HPMoR with a specific purpose in mind, namely to teach the specific skills of "rational" thinking he wrote about on the LessWrong site. In his case it seems he saw fiction as something complementary to his essays, a means of conveying "experience", a simulation of living through situations in which the concepts could be used. This is, of course, far from the only use of fiction, but I think it at least provides a specific example of a way in which fiction can be used to convey something in a way that cannot be (easily) done using dry prose (even if you are considering it purely from a practical standpoint without any reference to artistic merit). |