MichaelVassar comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) - Less Wrong

42 Post author: orthonormal 12 August 2010 01:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (796)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DanR 12 August 2010 07:50:14AM 0 points [-]

Oh I'm not saying that Campbell was well-regarded by his peers in academia - I'm not a scholar in that field by any means and don't know anything about that. I was just saying that it woke me up to see that a developing mind can learn useful values and ideals from any kind of epic story. IOW a religion isn't necessary for our morals to take shape.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 12 August 2010 04:10:09PM 1 point [-]

I'm pretty sure I understand what Campbell was doing, and given that it was something totally cool and fundamentally opposed to what academia is about, this just shows that they could identify what he was. Ditto Tolkein and Lewis.

Basically, these are people who are intentionally creating a misleading conception of history in order to shape the identities of children who encounter it towards identifying with mankind as a whole rather than with some smaller group, NOT people who are trying to explain how things are to their readers, framed neutrally.