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".
The universe punishes you for using the wrong ritual of cognition, but not in the same way. In real life, it goes like:
Wrong ritual of cognition --> false belief --> bad decision --> bad outcome
In the Phantom tollbooth:
Wrong ritual of cognition --> ejected from car
This bothers me, because I don't want to teach people that certain modes of thinking are Good or Bad for intrinsic reasons, but rather for their instrumental value in making decisions.
It's being used as a teaching device to signal that there might be something wrong with that cognitive process.
If a child insists that leaping to conclusions is wrong because of The Phantom Tollbooth, then I'd agree that something is wrong. But it's a metaphor for the reality (it's harder to get out of a conclusion than to reach it, and jumping to it tends to retard your progress and keep you from your goals).
Metaphors are dangerous but incredibly valuable.
But there's something about being whisked off to the Island of Conclusions that might fix the idea in your mind.
Of course, this reflects the observation that both Hanson and I make of fiction - that it amounts to trusting the author to pick the right things to emphasize. But The Phantom Tollbooth did. And c'mon, these are children's books we're talking about.
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...
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...
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 ...
Goodkind is NOT for kids, unless you want them to have nightmares about Mord-Sith until three years after puberty.
Terry Pratchett works, though. I can't really see a kid ever getting religion after that.
My parents also read Pratchett. My little brother did too. You'd just have to get the Pratchett books before you got religion, and then, I think, it would act as a pretty powerful vaccine. At least it seems like it ought to...
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.
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.
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 s...
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 -...
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)
Follow-up To: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists
Related on OB: Formative Youth
Eliezer suspects he may have chosen an altruistic life because of Thundercats.
Nominull thinks his path to truth-seeking might have been lit by Asimov's Robot stories.
PhilGoetz suggests that Ender's Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people.
For good or ill, we seem to agree that fiction strongly influences the way we grow up, and the people we come to be.
So for those of us with the tremendous task of bringing new sentience into the world, it seems sensible to spend some time thinking about what fictions our charges will be exposed to.
The natural counter-part to this question is, of course, are there any particular fictions, or types of fiction, to which we should avoid exposing our children?
Again, this is a pattern we see more commonly in the religious community -- and the rest of us tend to look on and laugh at the prudery on display. Still, the general idea doesn't seem to be something we can reject out of hand. So far as we can tell, all (currently existing) minds are vulnerable to being hacked, young minds more than others. If we determine that a particular piece of fiction, or a particular kind of fiction, tends to reliably and destructively hack vulnerable minds, that seems a disproportionate consequence for pulling the wrong book off the shelf.
So, what books, what films, what stories would you say affected your childhood for the better? What stories do you wish you had encountered earlier? If there are any members of the Bardic Conspiracy present, what sorts of stories should we start telling? Finally, what stories (if any) should young minds not encounter until they have developed some additional robustness?
ETA: If there are particular stories which you think the (adult) members of the community would benefit from, please feel free to share these as well.
ETA2: My wildly optimistic best-case scenario for this post would be someone actually writing a rationalist children's story in the comments thread.
ETA3: On second thought, this edit has become its own post.