Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
I think the problem with this is the line where updating becomes censoring; this is a good example of the decision point fallacy.
The fallacy is assuming that since no definitive point can be drawn when the edits become censorship; then either all edits are censorship or none are. Thus since we can all agree that continuing to edit a book until there are no words left, is clearly censorship, therefore all edits are censorship.
This is difficult because my personal view is that editing becomes censoring when the authors intent is changed or the edits remove the style of the authors voice. e.g. in the Roald Dhal case, the intent of the author (my interpretation) is to entertain children and teach vocabulary, the edits are not changing that intent and his style is maintained; thus they are not censorship.
There is a lot more to say on this also, when does updating become “white washing the past”? When does updating change the meaning of a word, and thus a sentence and how that relates to the text around it?
This is similar to the issues when translating between languages, how do you deal with translating a word in one language to another when there is no word that fits and it is context dependent? This I think also comes down to intent.
Oh and there is only one version of the Willy Wonka movie. There is also Captain Jack Sparrow in a industrial chocolate facility.
Yeah I think the Roald Dahl example is probably the easiest. Change it because it’s just a fun story.
When you get into nonfiction works, or fiction works that address societal problems, it becomes harder to say whether to edit them.
Agreed, in the case of nonfiction, the intent test should be very stringent. As for fiction, it would very much depend on the themes covered.
Yeah I have an issue with the heap paradox. It’s not that there are two states, heap and not heap. There are three. Heap, not heap, and an in between murky state where you could consider it a heap or not a heap and each interpretation could be valid. The fact you cannot identify whether it’s a heap or not does not change that if you start with something that is very clearly a heap then remove one grain, it’s still clearly a heap.
If you change a couple of words in a book that at the time were not considered an issue but now they are, I think that’s clearly not censorship. There’s a grey area one you start pulling out more, but I think we still have a “clearly not censorship” state.
That is the point of the paradox, it is to highlight the fallacy. The fallacy is to assume a binary when there is a continuum.
Just because there are two states at the end, doesn’t mean that there are two states from a continuous observation point of view. There is a difference between showing a million people one picture each of a bunch of pictures (taken 10 minutes apart) and asking “stubble or beard?” And asking one person every 10 minutes “is it a beard yet?”