I love Ted Chiang, and "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" is maybe my favorite of his stories. Certainly the one I think about most often.

I generally like Chiang's work and its derivatives but that was... kind of terrible. It felt like you told a government PSA writer to do sci-fi, except it isn't really sci-fi. It's an essay which posits that parrots are sapient and our failure to recognize it means we won't recognize alien sapience, and also wiping out parrots is bad. It's an if/then statement that stops at the if.

The entire overarching genre is often called speculative fiction, so your description of it is sort of accurate. Writing would be in a sorry state if the only stuff that got put out had to answer its own questions.

But it's not speculative at all. There are only like three sentences of any substance in the whole thing. A parrot who is more an idea than a character speaks to the reader claiming that a parrot understanding shapes and colors means that parrots are sapient, and humans not recognizing that means we won't recognize sapient alien life, P.S. humans are killing all the parrots. There is no story. The essay being from the perspective of a parrot instead of a person talking about parrots has no consequences and doesn't change the work at all. The whole thing is incredibly facile.

We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them. Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out.

That's the only fictive part of the entire work.

It's just so lazy to change the premise of something without that change having any meaningful impact. What makes the statement by the parrot different from if it were from a human? Nothing whatsoever, and that's why this is a bad "story".