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.
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.