On Juvenile Fiction

I recently re-read, and once again fell in love with, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth.

The book is a funny, exciting, thoroughly enjoyable adventure story about the value of intellectual curiosity, and the vital importance of clear thinking.

Seriously.

One of my favorite setpieces is the moment when, driving along the coast, Milo and his two traveling companions each make an unsupported statement -- "nothing can possibly go wrong now," "we'll have plenty of time," "it couldn't be a nicer day". As each one speaks, he is ejected from the car, and lands (safely) on an island just off the shore, which we learn is called Conclusions -- you get there by jumping.

The Humbug attempts simply to jump back, but lands in the sand a few feet away -- the return trip is not so easy.

Milo and friends swim through the Sea of Knowledge to get back to their car, upon which Milo states "from now on I'm going to have a very good reason before I make up my mind about anything. You can lose too much time jumping to Conclusions".

I think there is a tremendous opportunity for a skilled and experienced fiction writer who is very well versed (or who wants to become very well versed) with OB/LW topics to write children's fiction for infants and up that is strongly informed by OB/LW topics.

It would require incredible skill to be able to sneak those topics in unobtrusively and make the stories as fun and interesting as the ones we had read to us as children, to have the underlying lessons be learned without ever being explicitly discussed, but the payoff would be huge in terms of the effect on developing minds.

Imagine a world in which 8-year olds grok things like confirmation bias and the base-rate fallacy on an intuitive level because they are reminded of their favorite childhood stories and the lessons they internalized after having the story read to them again and again. What a wonderful foundation to build upon.

I seem to be way too late for anyone to be interested, but I just wanted to put something out there when it comes to good fiction for kids. Most people here seem to be talking about books, so I wanted to mention a TV show - Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's not perfectly rational (they play the "everything is connected" card a couple of times) but it's really good about passing down smart morals. It both encourages altruism and discourages stupid ways of trying to be altruistic - characters like Sokka emphasize the importance of having a plan and being smart about your strategies. The most important thing, though, is that people learn from their mistakes in that show. Not in the sense of most cartoons, where they declare something like "In this episode, I learned that it is wrong to steal!" and then promptly forget about it the next episode, but in the sense of really questioning deeply held beliefs and prejudices. Plus it's action-packed, fun, and interesting, and remains interesting even for adults.

My recommendations (in no particular preference order):

1.) "Momo", by Michael Ende. Like another commenter, I wish I'd read this one younger.

2.) "The Neverending Story", also by Michael Ende. The novel (which was originally written in German, but the English translation I have seems decent enough) is far more complex and interesting than the movie, and I suspect a fair number of people on here would find the "world-building" sequences quite compelling. There's a lot in the novel (again, which doesn't translate through to the movie) that goes deeply into questions of what it actually means to be happy, how one might actually make others happy, and what the consequences (both positive and negative) can be of enacting wishes.

3.) The "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Yet another one I wish I'd read when younger (I actually only read these recently).

4.) "A Wrinkle in Time" (along with "A Wind In The Door" and "A Swiftly Tilting Planet"), by Madeleine L'Engle. These I did read as a youngster, and while they do occasionally invoke a certain amount of Christian imagery, it's not nearly as heavy-handedly done as it is in, say, C.S. Lewis' works.

"Wrinkle" was especially dear to me growing up as the main character a socially awkward female math nerd (which is highly unusual for a book written in the 1960s).

And some of the other books, notably "A Swiftly Tilting Planet", did actually help me in terms of being able to seriously question religious dogma, as there's a plot-thread involving a villainous pastor and at the time I read that (around age 12) I was kind of shocked by it initially but then started realizing how a lot of evil in the real world probably stemmed from indiscriminate application of dogma.

I also liked that the books portrayed, in general, the science and math folks as being the good guys, and indicated that trying to understand reality was not a bad thing and did not make people cold or evil.

4.) "The Dark is Rising Sequence", by Susan Cooper. Major thing absorbed from this series: sometimes even "good guys" do things that sound and appear awful. This doesn't mean one has to blindly agree with them, but it does mean that sometimes when there are two major opposing forces, you can't always just figure that throwing in your lot with one of them is going to preserve all your dearest values.

The World of Null-A by Van Vogt may or may not have played a role in setting up the meme in my mind, "Rationalists ought to have superpowers, damn it!"

Also Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy.

Scooby-Doo seems like it theoretically ought to help. Every single episode, the supernaturalists are idiots, there's a rational explanation. But it's not something I remember as having had any influence on me.

I wonder what happens if an eleven-year-old watches Death Note. It's not a children's story, but if you want the battle of the dueling supergeniuses...

Pippi Longstocking. It's about a little girl who lives by herself and doesn't go to school and tells all the authority figures to shove it. I've managed to get through 90% of life, both as a child and an adult, basically living by these principles.

A kid's natural reaction to a parent hiding texts is to find them and read them and pay special attention. I don't think hiding the texts more carefully, or telling the kid straight out "You may not read these books until you're older." achieves substantively different results.

f there are "dangerous books", you should read them with the kid. Make your own emotional reactions and counterarguments visible. If you've acquired some immunity to these texts, the right thing to do is attempt to communicate the immunity, not to introduce some kind of censorship.

I wish I had read Momo by Michael Ende as a child instead of at age twenty. I think it has good messages about listening and quality of life.

However, I think the winning strategy - if you can devote enough time to it or are willing to trust your kids enough to let them do it themselves - is to just saturate children with stories of every kind from every source. Almost any story has things you really wouldn't want to take to heart and most of them have at least a few good things to be taken from them (even if it's "look, the author wants to promote X, but he does a terrible job at it because even when an author who likes X can control all the variables in a scenario, X still looks really dumb!").

This is more or less what happened to me growing up - my parents made a modest effort to steer me away from books that were just plain badly written (Animorphs and similar), but otherwise, I read everything that came within arm's reach and was still interesting after a fair shake of twenty pages or so. This has been a boon not only to my factual knowledge (I know more about history and science, in particular, from fiction than I do from my official education) but also to what I take to be a well-roundedness and openmindedness in my outlook. Although in isolated instances, you get stories that can pull off deep falsehoods without sacrificing highly obvious artistic quality, if you are exposed to enough stories they'll start to stick out as anomalous.

I think it would also help the saturation method if there were less prejudice towards certain broad types of media. I know a lot of people have blind spots towards, say, comics or video games what have you - for my parents, it was television. I was fond of TV in my younger years and would watch just about anything that was on, but instead of using this proclivity to expose me to well-done TV, they arbitrarily limited my access to the point where I went several years without watching any at all and only now have come to appreciate such informative and provocative shows as House, Babylon 5, the works of Joss Whedon, etc. There is at least some good work being done in any medium.

Cimorene is a rationalist protagonist. The Enchanted Forest Chronicles is good for kids.

I loved Sherlock Holmes stories from about the age of seven, and liked Jonathon Creek when I was a teenager. These days I like House. The idea of super-rationalists solving problems no normal human can solve is fun and I guess, vaguely inspiring. It's also entertaining to try to guess the solution before the end, and criticise that solution when it comes.

Hmmm...

I've read a lot, so it's hard to say specifically what fiction had a lasting impact. I will point to Ultima IV, though; I played through the NES version with the help of Nintendo Power magazine. It's a very unusual game compared to the standard RPG plot. Instead of there being some world-threatening crisis with some BigBad to defeat, the game's goal is to become a moral person and serve as an example for others to follow.

I learned about work from Dilbert, which, as everyone knows, is not a satire, but a documentary.

The first two, and only the first two, books of Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series have some useful lessons that I took to heart. Unfortunately, Goodkind followed them up with a big pile of toxic waste, eventually turning the series's moral basis completely on its head, with the hero coming to embody everything he was warned against becoming. http://m-mcgregor.livejournal.com/116180.html

I'd also recommend Terry Pratchett's Discworld series to everyone under the sun. (Start with Mort.)

I'll also cast my vote for most hard sci-fi. My exceptionally fundamentalist parents tried to keep me from reading fiction of any sort, particularly sci-fi and fantasy. Once I managed to get my own library card it was all over pretty quickly. In particular I recall being impressed by Heinlein's protagonist's stubborn individualism and resistance to dogma.

The early works of Diane Duane are excellent; most especially, the first two volumes of her Young Wizards series, and to a lesser degree the third.

They're all about dealing with pain without letting it warp or twist your spirit. (Yes, I know that's a vague encomium, but I don't know how to explain it any better.)

The later books 'wimp out' in my opinion, written mostly because the author needed to make money, and so the inherent message is changed from a challenging to a comforting one.

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Non-fiction but the book that I wish I had read earlier is Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. The most optimistic account of the future I have ever read. If you are ever feeling down, seriously down, you should read that book before doing anything drastic.

I was read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a bedtime story, I suspect that affected me fairly profoundly. Later I read Animorphs obsessively, not sure what affect that had

Short Story: "Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson, along with most of the other Van Rijn / Falkayn stories (also liked "The Man who Counts"). I read them at age 14 or so, but good at any age. Fun, space adventure, puzzle/mystery. Heroes use logic and economic reasoning instead of brute force to solve "standard" space adventure problems. A great deal of humor also.

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Good idea. You go first.

In high school, I really liked "The Bridge over the River Kwai" by Pierre Boulle because there were no good guys or bad guys. One-sided stories (Heinlein) are kind of sickening in comparison.

"Les fourmis" of Bernard Werber was my first book, and one that got me thinking. Lots of philosophical ideas exposed in it, though just as well as a lot of mysticism.

But nevertheless, that was the first time someone got me to think about such things as the simulation argument, by making his characters observe a simulated universe, and then wonder if they themselves were simulated, or even the characters of a story ... which they were. I mean, I'd usually not really think about such an idea, I'd just dismiss it offhand without even a second thought or noticing that I had. This hooked me.

Charles McNicholls, Crazy Weather. A great novel. About cultural clashes and cultural identity. Depicts some southwest native American cultures in a way that is sympathetic, yet upfront about the centrality of violence to those cultures. Provides a counter-intuitive lesson on the dangers to an individual of multiculturalism: The main character's problem is that he understands two different cultures too well to fit in to either of them.

(Guesswork based on feelings and handwaving; discount appropriately.) I am more worried by the unstated or mostly-unstated assumptions of children's stories than I am by what they say clearly and explicitly. I have three reasons (or rationalizations) for this. (1) If something's explicit, then it's easier to talk about it, to say "this is probably wrong", etc. (2) Fiction is usually more explicit about differences from the real world, presumably partly for reasons of parsimony, so readers are used to assuming background stuff as fact. (3) When something is stated explicitly, you are more likely to notice its odd features than if it's just left fuzzily in the background.

Borderline case here (mostly because of tone), but in some ways Puella Magi Madoka Magica would be great. PMMM isn't a world where you can win just by being hopeful, or having friends, or being dedicated, or what-have-you - things don't work out unless they would really work. And not asking the right questions - or allowing yourself to be led to false conclusions - has very, very nasty consequences.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure I would show that to anyone under the age of 12, and I'd want to be careful about how I dealt with Kyubey's morality afterwards...

Welcome to the Ark has a little bit of a "genius kids" plot device that has the potential to turn porny, but it has a really nuanced treatment of what genius kids should do in the world. At least, compared to other literature targeted at this age group, who are usually just fighting an evil bad guy.

I also have fuzzy but weirdly fond memories of The Chocolate War. Mostly, I remember thinking it was complicated and having to reread it a few years later.

Just stumbled across this post from 2009, and since then I think the Hunger Games series needs to be added to the list.

Well, for my own experiences and memories...

The first series of book, which had a deep and fundamental effect on me as a young child (when I was like 8 years old) is a series of scifi/fantasy books written by a Belgian writer (no idea if they are translated to English) called Philippe Ebly. Not his books contain any really deep message, it's just groups of teenagers having adventures, but those books deeply affected me because they are those which made me a book-eater. It's the first time I spent a whole Sunday devouring books.

Then I started much more of science-fiction, mostly from French writers like Christian Grenier, Jules Vernes and René Barjavel. I think that latest are the ones who influenced me the most at that time - Jules Vernes for his focus on science and the "miracles" of science, his heroes being engineers or scientists, more than anything else. And Barjavel for the ethical implication of technology and the sheer horror of war (especially in La Nuit des Temps ).

Later on, as a teenager, I also got very deeply impressed by Isaac Asimov, the Robots and the Foundation cycle. The scientific, rational approach of human societies that constitutes Psychohistory had a great call to me (even if I'm aware it's scifi and not fully realistic), into the power of reason, and the fact it can be used for anything, including improving the social structure of the society. And the way the Zeroth Law is devised by the robots in "Robots of Dawn" and "Robots and Empire" really struck me as a great analogy to how humans can, from selfish and stupid evolution, build an ethical system. The last sentence of "Robots and Empire" (hrm, I've only the French version with me, but re-translated from French to English it would be something like « And he was alone... alone to protect a whole galaxy. »), read as a teenager, played a very significant role in giving me something to protect. That, and LOTR message that « even the smallest person can change the course of the future ». Of course, those were teenage dreams, I'm aware things are not that easy in real life. And that many who tried to change the future did, but not in the way they excepted at first. But still, this teenage message is the foundation of what I've to protect.

But, more than any specific book (even if those books did play a huge role) I think that it's the huge number of books I devoured that shaped me. Each book forces you to identify and empathize with very different characters - a robot there, an alien here, a young slave there, a young prince here, a normal person who unwillingly become an hero there, a normal person who just ends up being convinced of a crime he didn't commit here, a really guilty criminal who still his a person with feelings, love and suffering there, ... That really did a lot to my ability to empathize with real-life humans, to not be too quick to label someone "evil", to try to understand people's real motives and ways of thinking before judging them, which is a fundamental thing if you want to be able to steer the future without completely botching it.

Oh, dangit, you meant that kind of sentience!

I thought you were talking about AGI and downmodded you for not having read http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/detached-lever.html

In the neither here nor there range, Much as I have fallen 'out of love' with Ender's game, in part having read some of Card's political rants, his definition of 'porn' as he applies it to Card's writing in that essay would qualify any work I can think of as 'porn', if the reviewer didn't like it. "I don't like the message" is sufficient, even "I think it's intellectually dishonest" and why - certainly I feel that way about every Ayn Rand novel I have subjected myself to. But his essay seems more about rationalization than rationality - .

That said - for myself, probably the first thought of ethics as logic came from Asimov's "Three Laws", as a set of rules that allowed for logical consideration of when it was fair to help pr hinder yourself or others, although I was probably primed to look for a logical basis for ethics by Mr. Spock.

Jonnan

point your kids at science fiction and let nature take its course. situations like ender's game are resolved simply by being exposed to actual quality sci-fi. Just like the Harry potter situation can be solved by exposing people to quality fantasy (a bit harder admittedly)