Language allows you to refine your thoughts. Words stand for abstract concepts that you cannot picture otherwise. Let's use that as an example! How would you think of an "abstract concept" without using those words or any others?

So while instinctive thought can be "faster," it cannot be as detailed. And fast, simple thoughts are not going to be "efficient" when dealing with complex subjects.

[[Edit: Another example: It's easy to picture four things. Four apples. Four cars. Four fingers held up on one hand. It's very hard to picture fourteen million two hundred and four thousand six hundred and seventy five things. You need the precision of words to accurately track and plan around things you can't visualize, whether that's large numbers, complex actions and interactions, sequential events over long periods of time, or abstract ideas.]]

Everyone knows the "five" senses, but in reality, humans have a lot more than five.

One of those senses is called "proprioception," the ability to know how your body is positioned (and moving) without other inputs (like sight). Oversimplified, proprioception is essentially the brain's communication with the nerve endings that connect to your muscles (e.g., motor neurons).

But your senses are not fully developed at birth. Your brain has to work out the signals it sends and receives and build those up into a structured system. "When I receive these signals, my hand is here. Those signals, my hand is there. These other signals..." etc... The process of building that communication between your brain and your motor neurons is building "muscle memory."

Something that makes it a bit clearer is to think of hitting a growth spurt. Your sense of position, the interaction between your brain and body, is unchanged, but your body is now taller (or stronger, or missing a limb, or supplemented with a mechanical prosthetic...) so your brain's trained response doesn't match what you actually want your body to do, and you have to re-learn and adapt your brain's connections to your new body structure.

And to do that, you have to repeat a motion again and again and process the results, refining your movement to match your intent. Eventually, after enough repetitions, your movement will be more consistent. Perhaps even habitual. And that's muscle memory.

...what?

All I'm saying is that reading nonfiction doesn't mean you're sitting down and forcing yourself to digest complex information. Nonfiction can be just as fun as fiction, with its factual information presented in interesting and engaging ways.

It's got nothing to do with how you categorize things. Interesting stuff is interesting. Boring vs fun and fiction vs nonfiction are on separate axes. They're independent. Unrelated.

I'm much more of a fan of fiction, but I do enjoy some interesting nonfiction here and there.

What you have to understand is that "nonfiction" is a huge umbrella category. It's not "just feeding you knowledge." I mean, textbooks are technically nonfiction as well I guess, but there are plenty of plot-driven novels whose content is written to be as historically accurate as possible. If you go in without the attitude of "I'm here to learn about history," it'll be no different from any other novel. Except, at the end of the day, the things you read are real, and regardless of your intent, you learned something just by enjoying it. Killers of the Flower Moon is about to be a Scorsese film, and you wouldn't skip out on that just because the story is true, right? Why would you treat the book any differently? (Of course, I'm sure they'll take some liberties adapting it to the screen...)

And you can learn from fiction as well. Setting aside language skills, plenty of fiction will have asides—or even core plot points—exploring the very real history of things their characters interact with. Visiting a real place, getting excited talking about their hobbies, fighting a villain whose dastardly plot is built on actual science, or just hard sci-fi in general. And those tidbits within fiction aren't moments of boredom. They flesh out the story and make it more believable!

So some nonfiction books focus in on that, filling the every page with those interesting asides, organized around a central theme. You don't need a traditional plot linking them together; it's just a collection of interesting information. And you found it interesting when it interrupted the plot of a fictional story, so why would it be any less interesting when you read it in What If? Why would it change when those interesting facts are linked around a central theme, like in The Design of Everyday Things? Or when they follow a "plot" that doesn't focus on characters, like in Glock: The Rise of America's Gun?

It's also (often) not internally consistent. If you've got a sword & sorcery story where everyone has some sort of power, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for your female characters to be vulnerable damsels.

I know ASOIAF isn't really the best example as a whole, but the bits with the free folk beyond the wall hit the contradiction pretty well, since the women are warriors as well. There's a bit from Tormund, I think, saying that someone "can own a knife or a woman but not both." And fantasy forgets that all the time. Your characters have fucking superpowers, dude. An armed society might not always be a polite society, but the "impolite" people are gonna be short lived.

Not directly, no. Anyone invested in the stock market will lose alongside them, too.

As for whether we "gain" anything indirectly from having less-wealthy wealthy people, that's arguable. And even on the bits that are arguable, it's going to depend on why their wealth decreased and what, if anything, the government does in response.

But again, we don't directly gain anything from having less-wealthy wealthy people. And the hold the wealthy have on political action—"influence," whatever—means the sort of policies that would allow the general population to benefit from their loss are mostly nonstarters.

In the ideal version of capitalist competition, their losses would spur them to redouble their efforts to make their companies competitive, lowering prices, raising quality, hiring workers to improve overall production... etc... But that lowers the dividends their stocks will pay out, and in our current reality, that's also a nonstarter. The goal is to raise the value of the stock, not to build a stable company. (See, e.g., comparisons between Tesla's market cap and the combined market cap of Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, and the next five largest automakers.)

...not the point.

I mean, they're at least partly wrong. Only a few states in the US—five, I think?—ban passing on processing fees to the customer. But what's banned is not having different prices, it's charging a fee on top of the listed price.

It's basically a truth in advertising rule, though it's weird that we made it for credit cards and not for sales tax. Anyway, the idea is that credit card surcharges feel like a penalty and cash discounts feel like a reward, even if there's not practical difference between the two at checkout.

I think they already included a lesbian couple? So it's at least partway there.

Break up in high school because she realizes she's into women/ done with his stereotypical masculine presentation & behavior. He moves to the "big city" and drops all contact with everyone at home. Ten years later, someone's back in town, making an effort to reestablish connection with their family. They're still not 100% on board with their daughter's new presentation, but they're trying. The rest of the town isn't so cool with it.

The ex stands up for her, since she's dealt with something similar being gay. They reconnect as they try to change the minds of everybody in town. By the end of the movie, nobody's fully on board with it all, but they're moving in a positive direction. Small town girl leaves for the city with her ex-bf-now-gf, thinking maybe it won't be so bad to come back home next Christmas as well.

Also, "ladies" can be pretty status-neutral, but "Lords" isn't exactly ambiguous.

I find it hard to believe that you hiring titled nobility to dance for you comes that cheap. $1398 each? Since when did the aristocracy sell themselves for so little?