maybe being surrounded with 350+ books correlates with rich parents. And rich parents have an opportunity to pay for higher education for their children.
Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
41–50 of 163 posts
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#42I never enjoyed reading fiction. Fiction trains your mind to look for fictitious narratives in real life; it distorts your perception of life and makes the world a worse place for others who don't follow those narratives.
I would say that your mind already looks for fictitious narratives naturally. Cause is not so correlated with effect in reality, but we still attempt to apply myth and storylines (this especially applies with histories as they are usually told).
I also find that there is deeper meaning in analyzing fiction as to how its mythologies can be applied to personal growth and the journey towards it. I recommend reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces to help engender this critical view of thought when thinking about the templating of fiction.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suggesting that genetics could be the causative factor isn't pseudoscience. It's pointing out that this study cannot disambiguate between the two, and so claiming causation is false.
The “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs. I am really tired of people talking about correlation and causation and completely ignoring carefully hedged phrases. Can we save them for when articles actually make concrete claims about causal links? There’s still interesting stuff here to discuss, and you can even soapbox your favorite theory. But there’s lit…
[deleted]
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#44I never enjoyed reading fiction. Fiction trains your mind to look for fictitious narratives in real life; it distorts your perception of life and makes the world a worse place for others who don't follow those narratives.
A lot of philosophical texts were written in the form of fiction.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#45I liked how Matt Yglesias summarized the quality of this research: "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tall as adults." Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses.
> "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tall as adults." Parenting is rife with cargo cult activity. Even (or perhaps especially) in places like Palo Alto where you'd think parents would have some understanding of statistics and causality.
I think that there's an uncanny valley for statistics: Some people don't care about statistics and prefer to operate on philosophy, some people know about statistics but generally choose not to act on them because they know they don't understand, but a lot of people are aware enough of statistics to use them, and not skilled enough with them to know what conclusions they can draw.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#46I never enjoyed reading fiction. Fiction trains your mind to look for fictitious narratives in real life; it distorts your perception of life and makes the world a worse place for others who don't follow those narratives.
Fiction certainly can have that downside.
But good fiction is also one of the most effective ways--apart from deep listening--of training empathy because it lets you step into someone's inner life. Rarely do we get a chance to see the world through someone else's eyes for long stretches.
If you're not an immigrant, you can vicariously live the life of one through fiction and see what they have to deal with.
If you're not a news reporter or a cop or a tycoon during the Great Depression, you can tag along with one through fiction.
The point of reading fiction isn't about content, but how they change you as a person.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#47I grew up in a house that had a library with 1000+ books. Unfortunately I didn't read much of any of them. Nobody ever tried to get me to read them. However, I blame myself for not reading much as a kid. My point being that the mere presence of books is not enough.
Fair, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, tv was a weekend only activity, and internet was pretty strictly regulated. As a result I read a lot.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#48Halfway through the article, when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home. If kids in the 90th percentile for their country (for number of books in their home) have less similar outcomes than kids with the same number of books (from different countries), this would be indicative that the books that actually matter." If that point is in the article, though, it's sure not in Smithsonian's article, and since it's Elsevier I can't look at the original. :(
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#49I grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with fun.
I think that last part is especially true. Due to school and forced reading assingments, reading gets associated too often with work or boring assignments.
That's true. I was reading a lot as a kid but I barely read anything we had to read for school. Reading assignments took the fun out of reading because now you had the pressure to be able to report on the reading.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs. I am really tired of people talking about correlation and causation and completely ignoring carefully hedged phrases. Can we save them for when articles actually make concrete claims about causal links? There’s still interesting stuff here to discuss, and you can even soapbox your favorite theory. But there’s lit…
[deleted]
[deleted]