Fiction certainly can have that downside.

But good fiction is also one of the most effective ways--apart from deep listening--of training empathy because it lets you step into someone's inner life. Rarely do we get a chance to see the world through someone else's eyes for long stretches.

If you're not an immigrant, you can vicariously live the life of one through fiction and see what they have to deal with.

If you're not a news reporter or a cop or a tycoon during the Great Depression, you can tag along with one through fiction.

The point of reading fiction isn't about content, but how they change you as a person.

Absolutely on the money! You can't walk a mile in someone else's shoes, but with the right book, you can imagine it - which can make you do a complete 180 change in how you see a situation. I've had this happen many times and I attribute a lot of that to fiction!

I might think that of biography, or autobiography. But fiction writers often don't know what it's like to be that sort of person, they just make it up.

This is kind of analogous to photorealism versus cartooning. A history or biography would attempt to adapt events and experiences directly to the page: "this happened, and then this happened, and it felt like that". Fictional work transforms those same elements into exaggerated characters and scenarios. Both kinds of works require some creativity to build up a coherent story, but fiction has a freer hand to manipulate elements and choose its focus.

Just making it up without adapting from anything real usually isn't something that good fiction is built up from, though. That path goes directly to cliche, and it's easy to find cliched fiction.

I don't read much fiction, but usually when I do, I feel as if I ought to read more, because it seems to engage creative imaginative thinking in a way that non-fiction doesn't.

Anecdotally, of course.

Do you not watch TV, movies, or plays or play video games? I'm just curious, avoiding fiction us a really interesting worldview and I'm curious whether it extends to every medium.

That's cheesy fiction.

Good fiction trains your mind to understand different world-views and other peoples' narratives of themselves and the world (as opposed to satisfying yourself with your own narrative as the "objective truth").

I would say that your mind already looks for fictitious narratives naturally. Cause is not so correlated with effect in reality, but we still attempt to apply myth and storylines (this especially applies with histories as they are usually told).

I also find that there is deeper meaning in analyzing fiction as to how its mythologies can be applied to personal growth and the journey towards it. I recommend reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces to help engender this critical view of thought when thinking about the templating of fiction.

That's quite the story you spun there...

(see what I did?)

What is fiction? How is it different from philosophy? What about soft sciences like sociology or psychology that rely heavily on trying to interpret human behavior (presumably based on their warped, distorted brains). What about theology? How about art as a whole? Or music?

Are you trying to propose that ENTIRE world would be better if there were no fictional creations?

IDK my dude, this seems like a pretty extreme and indefensible position...

One good thing about fiction is that the main character does not die in the middle of the story.

Some of the best fiction I've read involves the main character dying in the middle of the story, and is written in the first person, where the reveal that the author is not actually who he says he was is the climactic moment of the story.

That rule has been broken several times in fiction.

Got anything to back up your wild... dare I say fictitious... claims?

A lot of philosophical texts were written in the form of fiction.

YOU don't think that fictional narratives and tropes do not effect real life? Ever heard a good public speaker use rhetoric to effect?