Quote:
Originally Posted by Thasaidon
[...] As I have said elsewhere only if you get such information from a source you know you and can trust. Even then it can skew your perception due to confirmation bias.
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It seems to me that you are forgetting where you are, that perhaps you are trying to continue an argument from another thread. Here we are discussing
Around the World in Eighty Days and it is presumed the participants have already read it. So "confirmation bias" and or "skewed" perceptions are not really applicable. We've read the book, and now we're exploring our reactions. So this...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thasaidon
[...] I said about racism "If you look hard enough you will find it whether it exists or not." and that goes for many other things as well. [...]
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seems ungenerous. I might counter with, "If you fail to look at all then you will imagine prejudice does not exist whether it exists or not." But neither is a particularly useful generalisation.
Perhaps some people do take the search for offensive material too far, but at the other extreme are those who refuse to hear anything bad about a beloved work. However, most of us live somewhere in the vast middle ground, and it's not helpful to accuse us of offences we have not committed.
It would be more generous to suppose that someone might notice some prejudice, if it exists, just from casual reading, and that, should they look more closely, what they find might indeed be real and not imagined. And, if a person chooses, they might listen to others and learn new perspectives that on their own they would not have found. Certainly that is one of the reasons I am here. So I am not a fan of statements like the one quoted above, that seem intent on deriding input before it has even been offered.