The primary difference is that in a library or bookshop there are competing ideas right there in the same room. A curious mind will develop critical thinking skills. There are also curators who care about something other than making money - they're playing a long game, so will apply quality/safety filters.
This is opposite to the algorithms, which in the name of monetization needs to pull you down into a rabbit hole, an echo chamber void of contradiction, a spell of indoctrination and affirmation of your own Worldview.
Fiction, in particular, is a useful abstraction to grow emotional intelligence in hand with critical thinking. It allows - no, it demands - you develop a sense of empathy and live a life in someone else's shoes. You can then bring that experience back to your own idea of self and your place in the World.
There's a lot of money in putting ads next to content teaching a kid who feels sad that they should kill themselves. I have absolutely no doubt that the World would be a better place if people were inclined to read books instead of hang out on social media, even if those books did contain dangerous ideologies.
So, maybe it's time to revise your stance.
Control we got.
Parenting time is up 20-fold (few hours/week->24/7adulting) from my parents generation (silent gen).
Consequently, compared to my parents, I (gen x) had 20x the control over my what my kids were exposed to.
Parenting was exhausting for me. My kids spent their entire childhood in adult-populated, adult-curated boxes. They were denied the regular hours of adult-free, free-range time, where I developed my most of my life skills.
But as a parent, I had pretty exclusive control over what my 5 sons were exposed to.
> A curious mind will develop critical thinking skills.
This is the linchpin of the debate.
What if the first book you read at a critical age insists that it alone is true, and that other books should be distrusted at risk of harms to yourself? Say, the Christian Bible.
It is absolutely possible -- unlikely, given the subjects of most books, but possible -- to have harmful information encoded in a book.
The question is then how to blunt those negative outcomes, at scale, democratically, without opening the door to arbitrary political interference of the day.
Diversity of opinion for me increased after I left school, and that's when I became more critical of the beliefs I held as a child. It's for that reason I think libraries are better than social media - social media is not just the equivalent of a religious tract that insists it is true, it actively prevents you from finding and considering contrary views all by yourself.
On what basis can they do this? No human is born with a magical algorithm in their brain that can sort good ideas from bad. The only scalpels we have are those which we collect. Critical thinking must be bootstrapped. Mind viruses must be inoculated against. Just because you (eventually!) threw off your case of memetic measles, doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people die of it.
A bit off topic, but I find it interesting that the Christian Bible is always the example of a "bad" book, when there are other, very popular, religions whose books literally tell them that non-adherents are worthy only of a grisly death.
If it were a Venn Diagram, the circle of the people subject to the other 'big' religious books would have very little intersection with the set of the people who frequent this forum. It follows then that they would get far less criticism, since there's so much less exposure.
Because it's a work of fiction and since it's missionary, it is exactly the kind of work which aims to suppress critical thinking in order to lock the reader into a particular world view for the rest of their lives.
> aims to suppress critical thinking in order to lock the reader into a particular world view for the rest of their lives.
There are a myriad of books that present their POV as absolute truth. Some of them aren't even in the dreaded fiction section! Most books don't end every statement with, "I could be wrong though, do your own research."
I also did not find it prevented me from changing my World view as I grew up. I am not a practicing christian today, but I do think that many christian parables have helped make me a more rounded, generous and thoughtful human being. I am certainly quite likely more empathetic and loving than many others around me.
Read it as a work of fiction and don't be afraid of it "converting you" into a a robot remotely controlled by the pope. You might be surprised.
We can quibble about whether or not dogmatic interpretations are in the original work or were layered on top by the organized church, but at the root of both is the idea that some things must be believed without questioning.
Up and down this thread there are notes about people who were raised in a religious tradition and then branched out -- that's great, but you all are also the exceptions.
There are far more people who believe what they're told, as a consequence of religious indoctrination, until the day they die.
And because of that, on the whole, the Bible (as used in modern Christianity) is anti- free thought.
Step 1 of teaching people to uncritically accept crappy ideas is to remove all references to anything that contradicts them. Maybe it's time to revise your stance?
I agree that it's hard to see your own ideological commitments without seeing alternatives. Yet allowing any and all ideologies the same opportunities to compete for public attention is clearly problematic. You don't want to wait until flat-earth theories and holocaust denial go fully mainstream to start to nuance your no-standards policy.
In that case, how do you know the rational ones won out in you?
It's always other people getting brainwashed we worry about, right?
That said, we shouldn't then count all our present knowledge as worthless and any and all kinds of information as equally valid and worthy of dissemination.
I do get your fear - censorship is a dangerous tool that is not always used responsibly. Yet abandoning any kind of social self-regulation in what information circulates publicly sounds a lot more dangerous.
That's not what I said.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.What's the difference between Alex Jones preaching antivaxism on his internet podcast that you listen to, or in a book that you read?
Or that your average authoritarian Christian (or Muslim!) has read their holy books?
Fanatics may pretend, but rarely actually read. After all, it may conflict with their fanaticism.
They are happy to control what everyone else is able to read though.
Con: ostracized
You’re not the only one.
Whenever we dismiss bad ideas out of hand rather than showing how they are bad we miss one chance to prove our stance, and we ever so slightly feed the notion that maybe they aren't bad, just called bad.
They don’t get updated with the latest emotional hot button issues so they just can’t stomp on emotional triggers as well. It’s much easier to digest arguments and see the errors when you can reread them. They don’t take long to read so they don’t clog up access to other sources.
Rebuttals are targeting a specific argument so you can’t just keep throwing up intellectual chaff.
I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen, and developed some pretty horrible notions about society and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!
Don't get me wrong, books-as-propaganda isn't necessarily bad. Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird... These are brilliant but are also such effective forms of propaganda that even mentioning their titles is a form of propaganda in itself.
I think that shows their weaknesses. Propaganda seems to work best when reinforced over long periods. People read a book and get really into something for a while, X is now the one true diet! However, I rarely see longer term shifts without something else reinforcing the ideas.
By comparison the US military has been subsidizing media who want access to military hardware for decades as long as they follow a few guidelines. It’s a subtle drip of propaganda but across America and much of the globe people’s perception has very much been influenced in an enduring fashion. No single episode of talk radio or Fox News is particularly effective but listen for years and you get a meaningful effect.
I would be more worried about you developing a terrible sense of narrative and character development. I would kill for a well written ancap paradise book (there are plenty of Ancom options) but it honestly just sucks as a piece of writing I cant get into it.
In my experience, consumers of propaganda respond to emotional and social cues. They rarely ever review the information provided without social and emotional context. Its always a video or a rally or something.
If the only book in your library is Mein Kampf, you are likely to empathise with young Mr. Hitler. If you have access to alternative viewpoints, you'll be forced to compare and contrast, and you just might develop your own understanding of the world.
But note that you'll always be comparing to the actual circumstances in your proximity: at school, neighbourhood, work...
Considering Nazi propaganda, it used newspapers, radio and TV to a great effect. Mein Kampf alone did not turn Germans - a country of poets and scientist - to totalitarians.
I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world but I'd say in the UK there's a clear consensus that people shouldn't be able to incite violence - and that covers books.
Suicide and self-harm is a bit more tricky, there are books that deal with those topics that might be important to include in a curation depending on the context - e.g. the readers age and how vulnerable they are.
Feel like specifically defining these dangerous ideologies and explaining why you or anyone in a position of non-parental authority should be the people who get to decide if youth and kids are "exposed" (as if we were talking about some poisonous substance) to them and to what degree?
Same goes for self harm and suicide. Maybe these subjects should be added to a list of other things that young people's fragile little minds should be morally kept away from? Lot's of room for defining all kinds of literature, text and ideas as supposedly promoting self harm, or suicide. Better we keep things forcefully childish for young minds instead?
This shitty, tired story is very old and remains as stupid as it ever was. The dogmas and censorship fixations may vary but the people promoting them always pull out their tedious little "protecting children from harmful ideas" card as justification to then repress whatever doesn't suit their pet ideological obsessions.
If anyone should carefully consider their stance it's closet censors who can't stop thinking as you seem to.
I literally hung a lantern on this.
How are people meant to study propaganda and develop tactics to counter it if they cant go and read it.
Maybe its time to revise your stance?