Dave5

One of my big cargo-cult beefs is the endless consumption of “non-fiction” management books. It was so bad at my last job that I laid into my boss… “we keep reading histories written by winners, but we have not idea how they struggled to WIN and we have no idea about the losers”. It’s a behaviour that creates dangerous blind spots. It also perpetuates biases that cause people to focus on the wrong ideas. The CEO would bang on about how “CEOs I’ve talked too always say they regret not working on their culture earlier.” So we had to consume all these half-assed management books. All the books ignored the hard grind of shipping a product that sold. The running joke amongst the VPs was “yeah, they didn’t focus on culture because they were concentrating on shipping a product that hit Product Market Fit”.

I’ll stick to my fiction, thanks.

The second meta-analysis, which included 114 studies and more than 30,000 participants, found an even more substantial positive correlation between reading fiction and cognitive abilities, especially when it came to verbal skills, reasoning, abstract thinking, and problem-solving. Like with the first analysis, the researchers found a general trend towards better emotional cognitive abilities like empathizing, though that correlation wasn’t as pronounced.

Overall, Wimmer said, both meta-analyses demonstrated similar trends: “That people who read a lot of fiction have better cognitive skills than people who read little or no fiction.”

https://futurism.com/neoscope/reading-fiction-brain-cognitive-abilities