In my own wild and reckless youth I read all sorts of stuff, including religious scriptures, occultism stuff, philosophers of all kinds. I don’t regret it, and I wouldn’t want to have not considered some idea because of having it already established as a “villain” idea. It was interesting and promising at the time, and now I have the experience of what it feels like to have (or at least be dabbling in) other worldviews than my current one.
To use Professor Quirrel’s words, if I could go back in time and remove the desire to do that from my younger self, my present self would not benefit from it.
The problem with the heroes and villains heuristic is that if you happened to initially choose your allegiance wrongly, you’d suffer that much stronger bad consequences; you’ll get stuck somewhere stupid. If your judgement were good enough to reliably choose well, you’d not need heroes and villains anyway, just use that judgement.
Heroes and villains happen automatically, anyway, it’s avoiding it that takes effort. Whenever a searching young person manages to do that, that’s a virtue, not a problem. The way I see it, the age of 16 is pretty much for exploring ideas. And I can’t imagine why we’d prefer a closedminded approach to an openminded one, at any age. Or why you’d think not having read things you disagree with is a boast.
I don’t know. Since when is bias good?
In my own wild and reckless youth I read all sorts of stuff, including religious scriptures, occultism stuff, philosophers of all kinds. I don’t regret it, and I wouldn’t want to have not considered some idea because of having it already established as a “villain” idea. It was interesting and promising at the time, and now I have the experience of what it feels like to have (or at least be dabbling in) other worldviews than my current one.
To use Professor Quirrel’s words, if I could go back in time and remove the desire to do that from my younger self, my present self would not benefit from it.
The problem with the heroes and villains heuristic is that if you happened to initially choose your allegiance wrongly, you’d suffer that much stronger bad consequences; you’ll get stuck somewhere stupid. If your judgement were good enough to reliably choose well, you’d not need heroes and villains anyway, just use that judgement.
Heroes and villains happen automatically, anyway, it’s avoiding it that takes effort. Whenever a searching young person manages to do that, that’s a virtue, not a problem. The way I see it, the age of 16 is pretty much for exploring ideas. And I can’t imagine why we’d prefer a closedminded approach to an openminded one, at any age. Or why you’d think not having read things you disagree with is a boast.