Learning from Experience

Under the heading Big Fish Eat Little Fish, Dave Snowden posts a series of photos, telling a visual story with a dramatic conclusion. (Go on, look at the story, I can wait here until you come back.)

An obvious lesson to draw from this story is one about learning from experience.

However, there is a further twist: the final photo in the series turns out to be faked. (There is further explanation of this on Snopes.)

In addition to learning from experience, another lesson we could draw from this story is to be a little wary of situations whose narrative structure is too good. (When there are forces within a story that make us so want it to be true, maybe that's the time to switch logical levels.)

But of course, even if the story is part-fiction, that doesn't stop us learning from it. We do need to learn from experience, and experience includes fiction. The story is therefore True (at some level) because it is Relevant and Meaningful.