I have never run up against problems caused by people reading too widely.

I have frequently seen problems caused by people who didn't read enough.

I know what you mean by this but when I hear it leads me to be believe that written language is inefficient since a large number of people find reading, even subjects they’re somewhat interested in, boring.

Well, not all writers are able to clearly express their ideas. And going into a bookstore is an exercise in masochism, most of the books are so low quality that it is a shame for the trees that they were sacrificed for such garbage.

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.

Errr.. reading too widely is a well known problem called "analysis paralysis" or "procrastination" and there are several other labels. (Curious!) people who "don't read enough" are great to have around the ones who read too much, from my pov problems stem from these groups being unwilling to work together.

"analysis paralysis" isn't caused by reading too widely. It's a form of executive function disorder, either situational or ongoing, where making a choice is aborted by incomplete evaluation of the available options. Your mind assigns an infinite penalty and non-zero chance of failure, and that blocks consideration of actual chances of success.

One of the effective solutions is to construct a risk table, in which you list out:

- each option - the costs to perform the option - the likelihood of success of the option - the value of success via the option - the penalty of failure via the option - the cost to ameliorate failure of the option

And you never assign a 0 or infinite value to any of those factors; a range of .05 to .99 is usually appropriate.

For binary choices, this can sometimes be short-circuited by flipping a coin and asking yourself if this feels worse than the alternative.

Okay, that's a great suggestion, let me go read some more suggestions on how to do something other than research things /s

You wave away my association of "reading _too_ widely" and "analysis paralysis" by sharing your preferred definition of the latter ... but that isn't really an argument against the association of the two.

I didn't say that analysis paralysis causes reading too widely. I said that they are the same, so if you want to take your definition of analysis paralysis as a given then you could say analysis paralysis can cause reading too widely.

Anyway, all I wanted to communicate with my comment is that when you say that you can do "too little of X" but not "too much of X" then you are biased on X, there is always someone who takes X too far and you may not see it because you've associated those people with something totally different.

Personally I don't believe in "wasted time" or other subjective notions (in the abstract) so for me this whole discussion is lacking context (you can waste time if you have a context; some loss function, otherwise no).

Having personally read some of Rand’s fiction as a teen (from my high school library no less!) I think you’d be hard pressed to find a reason to “ban” them.

The narrative in Anthem, for example, is so hilariously over the top I’m not sure what the argument would be. It’s a Pol Pot “Year Zero” style civilization, and the randian superman subverts the established collectivist order by single handedly reinventing the lightbulb in a sewer.

Frankly anyone would be giving it more credibility than it deserves by saying it contains dangerous ideas.

I really had Atlas Shrugged in mind, which is convincing enough to regularly show up on Republican booklists (and AFAIR at least one Supreme Court judge) and has all sorts of (my opinion) problematic views on ethical egoism and the like.

> hilariously over the top

These days I'm not sure anything can be so over-the-top that no-one will take it seriously.

Well, I'm glad to have read Atlas Shrugged, although I didn't find it philosophically convincing. It would be very frustrating to not be able to read it and just be stuck wondering what the Republicans seem to cite as an important text for understanding their worldview.

I think even Rand was aware of its limitation, which is why the book has an essentially magical ending -- the heroine arrives in utopia by accident when her plane crashes there. But having to reveal the actual process of getting there is precisely the failure of utopian ideologies.

What? Her landing in "utopia" is not nearly close to the ending, nor is it magical: at all times the heroine has the option to voluntarily join this utopia and she consciously chooses to remain in the "outside world" to fight its demise.

And she doesn't magically crash there, the actual process of her getting there is narrated in what is probably a good 30 pages.

Using an analogy from a false representation of the plot to imply that the author intentionally recognizes flaws with her philosophy is definitely not the most objective review of this book, to put it nicely.

Have you even read the book?

Admittedly, I read it a long time ago, as a teenager, and it didn't resonate with anything in my own experience. I would certainly defer to your analysis.

Did I imagine the plane crash, or mix it up with some other book?

While I didn't start this with the inclination to ban Ayn Rand, I think your first paragraph has convinced me that her writings should be in a library. If you think that her worldview is ethically bankrupt (and, fwiw, so do I), how do you expect the next generation of scholars to rebut that worldview, without being intimately familiar with it? If you think that a work should be made unavailable just because it's popular with people you are politically opposed to (and fwiw, so am I) then I strongly disagree, state censorship on political grounds is utterly intolerable. It's also completely untenable. Forbidden fruit is a siren song, and the article is specifically about people providing online workarounds to brick and mortar censorshop.

Rand's novels contain realistic villains and unrealistic heroes.

All I remembered of Atlas Shrugged when I read it in high school was the sex, tbh. Had someone said subscribing to Libertarianism would get me screwed the way Rearden screwed Dagny I’d have signed up then and there.

How do you teach students critical thinking if the very works that require critical thinking are not available to these kids in the places where they have access to teachers?

To me if there are "dangerous ideas" that need contextualization, those are the very books that need to be in the school curriculum.

IMO - As a child or teenager you try out different personalities, ideas, etc, then look back, say "what was I thinking", and learn a bit about how your own mind works. Better then, when consequences are small for you and everyone else, than to delay it until adulthood.

Frankly? The best is when a child can read Ayn Rand and then be in a safe enough environment where they can discuss the ideas with adults who can greatly contextualize the discussion around that piece of literature.

I'm completely in agreement. I think I danced around this in my post. The main things that bother me, in general:

1. Undiscerning student (i.e. young, impressionable, hasn't been taught critical thinking, doesn't have sufficient experience to evaluate the validity of what they're learning).

2. Things taught non-critically. I think this even applies to the "obvious" stuff like algebra and heliocentrism. My experience with public schooling was that there was too much rote memorization and appeal to authority and not enough "learning."

If either of those are fixed (and I think they go hand-in-hand) I don't care if the curriculum/school library has Rand, an unannotated Mein Kampf, or $insert_book_promoting_an_agenda.

> Undiscerning student (i.e. young, impressionable, hasn't been taught critical thinking, doesn't have sufficient experience to evaluate the validity of what they're learning).

Ideally there would be an adult figure in all children's lives to fill this role. If nobody else, their parents or other adult figures (and yes, there are cases where there are no adults, but we can't make societal decisions on the norm based on the the edge cases).

I can't help that most the adults that complain about their children getting access to ideas they don't like are those adults that don't bother to talk to their children about their views and ideas and know to challenge them on ideas that are poorly thought out.

If you ignore your child's interests for years and then are surprised to find out they have completely opposite views from you that you disagree with, the problem is not the literature they read, it's your lack of involvement in the formation of their ideas.

If you (the general you) are involved and your child has views you disagree with but you can't provide compelling arguments to make them change their mind, at a minimum you should also be looking at your own views to see how well they stand up and not assume your own infallibility. Doesn't mean you're wrong, but don't expect that you're always right when you might be espousing the equivalent of 1+1=3 and rightly getting told to shove it.

We aren't factories pumping out clones, we're creating people, and people have their own views. The best you can do is try to help them avoid the pitfalls.

book burning is just one manifestation of restricting the freedom of thought and expression, and it sounds you aren't against that.

Fair point, and I don't have a good counter-argument.

I think my problem, if anything, isn't that there's an excess of freedom of thought and expression so much as there's not enough counter-thought and counter-expression.

So my shaky position is stuck somewhere between what I've identified as the two evils: Book burning, and the uncritical dissemination and condoning of problematic ideas. (I'm aware there's a further problem here because I'm the one deeming things "problematic").

I also think I picked the wrong place to have this conversation. After all, TFA isn't talking about Ayn Rand, it's talking about "opposition to LGBTQIA material, the history of racism, and material that may cause discomfort to readers." These aren't things I would typically label as "problematic."

It's the same situation, but you're fine with one case because you agree with it. That's the fundamental problem.