User:RD/9k/ Bad books are instructive (Q29,80)

Prototype notes

There is a lot to learn from bad books as long as you have a sufficient foundation in what's correct -> quite honestly, this is the reason that things like MrEnter's cartoon videos (or book, any of the things not about topics like horrible COVID opinions) still don't entirely bother me. learning from low-quality things is absolutely not a bad decision; you'd be doing it a lot on your own work just during the process of writing and first producing bad things and then producing better things.
the hidden nuance to this in light of meta-Marxism: bad books aren't inherently valuable purely because they "disagree" with something, they're valuable because they show the consequences of being wrong as they apply directly to yourself or others and shock you into no longer siding with contrarians just because they're contrarian. you don't truly know how bad it is to be a "conservative" or a rust-colored "centrist" until you either have a rust-tinted relative or read Dinesh D'Souza's awful book or especially if you do both. it's much more challenging for an ordinary person to turn away from Trotsky or Kropotkin, but the same basic process applies there too, you read them and take them totally seriously until you realize what they're saying is awful, and if you successfully come to that realization and it matches reality then you have improved your understanding of the world.
Bad books are instructive