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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. Movies, tv, books if you're lucky, and now social media all warp the least experienced people's sense of reality. If you watch the old clip shows of home videos, one recurring theme is that people got their intuition about physics from tv or movies. They'd make ramps for their bikes that were laughable and then take a header. They'd jump off roofs onto yoga balls and break their backs.

I think we're seeing a much greater extension of that as people increasingly engage with the world through the lens of media and stories we tell, rather than... you know... doing things.

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I’m not normally one for doom and gloom, everything is getting worse kind of thinking. However, one observation from the past few years in particular is exactly that thing, a specific kind of faulty media literacy.

Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.

>An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it.

A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.

> You could put your hand around this tree

To be fair, that's entirely reasonable to cut down with a machete. There's a bit of a technique to it and it'll take more than one swing but if you don't have a chainsaw handy a good machete will do the job.

>it'll take more than one swing

That’s the crux of this story. There is an expectation that, if you can chop something down in several swings, then one really big swing will do it, right? No. They don’t make machetes and swords like that, and also you are drastically underestimating the force required, or overestimating your strength, or both.

And don't forget that those fictional sources are typically commissioned by oligarchs with their own vested interest in herding the voting masses

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