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Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

theguardian.com

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Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#51

Post by golemotron »

eicossa wrote: post #14

> perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?

> Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable?

IQ is heritable. There's over 50 years of psychometric research showing that.

> If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?

The same thing that stops the reality of weapons being a defense of murder.

The saddest things about education today is that it purposefully suppresses information because it might be seen as justification for racism or sexism. The result is a generation that is largely ignorant about psychometrics and various other fields.

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#52

Post by dorfsmay »

eicossa wrote: post #14

> perhaps they gained genes from their parents that prompt both collecting books and pursuing more lucrative occupations Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ?

Ask your cat!

Evolution is about the most adapted to an environment. Are we able to decide what this traits are? What about when the environment changes? Should we clean the gene pool of all traits we think are not useful?

Lords in the middle ages would have loved to remove curiosity and questioning from the peasants' gene pool!

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#53

Post by abalashov »

Who knew? Although, it goes without saying that this is a correlation, not causation.

If you stock culturally illiterate parents' house with books, it would--to borrow from a Soviet fable--be akin to giving a Rhesus macaque spectacles. (In the fable, the monkey tries everything possible with the glasses, including putting them on its tail. Everything except the intended application.)

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#54

Post by mgkimsal »

barry-cotter wrote: post #35
chongli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning books is not the hard part, it's reading them. Reading a novel takes a lot of time and is a singularly self-centered leisure activity. People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time. Heck, the image of a person lounging with a book has a very strong cultural link to (non-working class) status.

The average American watches three hours of TV a day. They are not lacking for free time to read books if they wanted to. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watch...

"leisure" was probably the wrong word, in context. The sort of 'leisure' (or pastime) of watching TV can be completely passive. One can 'watch' TV for 2-3 hours and literally not have to think about anything difficult. Reading a book is far more of an 'activity - requiring active thought processing - than TV watching. And for many people, reading a book is anything but pleasure.

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#55

Post by SeeDave »

abalashov wrote: post #53

Who knew? Although, it goes without saying that this is a correlation, not causation. If you stock culturally illiterate parents' house with books, it would--to borrow from a Soviet fable--be akin to giving a Rhesus macaque spectacles. (In the fable, the monkey tries everything possible with the glasses, including putting them on its tail. Everything except the intended application.)

Pearls before swine, cargo cult, etc.

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#56

Post by gambler »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #12

Honestly, I spent a lot of my childhood / teen years reading and engaging in other solitary activities and I sometimes feel like my time would have been better served trying to connect with my peers. I still read a lot these days, but I just do it with no expectation to derive future benefit from it. Mind you my reading these days is 70% non-fiction. I put reading in the same category of entertainment as TV and video…

Unpopular opinion time...

A lot of written fiction constitutes an intelligent person intently thinking about some subject, drawing upon their experienec and communicating their ideas. This kind of thing happens much more rarely on TV and in video games. And it almost never happens in casual communication.

Now, if you buy the increasingly popular notion that ideas and perspectives don't matter, than you're unlikely to derive anything worthwhile out of any medium. I know a lot of people who can't, and for them all the media does look like vacuous entertainment. They read Orwell's 1984 and simply don't get it. They start criticizing its technology or character development and simply don't see the underlying messages.

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#58

Post by userbinator »

yeahbutbut wrote: post #8
asuffield wrote: post #3

Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us: wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.

They could be a shelf full of $2 novels. Owning a few hundred books doesn't cost very much (thanks printing press), and only implies an interest in reading not in being of a high socioeconomic status.

This makes me wonder if ebooks have the same effect --- because these days, owning a few thousand of them or more, although perhaps maybe not completely legally, is nothing more than the price of an Internet connection.

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#59

Post by mercer »

qb45 wrote: post #24
Frozenlock wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you implying here that curiosity and intellectual abilities are genetically inheritable ? Intelligence as we can measure it (IQ) is highly related to genetics (so you can say inheritable). IQ is correlated to 0.86 in case of twins raised in the same family, or 0.76 in twins raised appart. > If so, what stops eugenics from being morally indefensible ? Nothing! I myself have spinal muscular atrophy and know that m…

> You could also have eugenics designed to increase the number of 'quality' people. Say, for example, giving money to people with an IQ higher than 150 to make more children. Or those with amazing athletics skills, or amazing beauty... And have a world full of Aspergers and Schizos (correlated with IQ) or some giant mutants unable to survive the next asteroid strike. I hope you get the point - we have no idea what we…

I don't know about Schizophrenia, but I think a world with more high-IQ people with Asperger's wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

I mean, I'm not a proponent of the (semi-serious?) thought that "aspies are the next step in human evolution", but since I was diagnosed myself recently, I've found myself imagining what such a world would be like every once in a while...

Anyways, I'm all in favor of some forms of 'eugenics' as our knowledge about the effects increase. We've been helping our own evolution along for quite a while now, so I don't see why tinkering with our genes should somehow be completely off-limits.

Re: Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’

#60

Post by mercer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #44
chongli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning books is not the hard part, it's reading them. Reading a novel takes a lot of time and is a singularly self-centered leisure activity. People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time. Heck, the image of a person lounging with a book has a very strong cultural link to (non-working class) status.

> People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time. Where did you get this idea? It's certainly not accurate in the US.

I'd very much appreciate it if both of you present some evidence, because I now realize my vague assumptions about this are not really based on anything...
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