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When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

theguardian.com

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Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#111

Post by [deleted] »

lrem wrote: post #84
rossdavidh wrote: post #4

It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint", devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they di…

This review is obviously high effort. What's the incentive here? Is this what the community regularly does in Goodreads? Or are you somehow affiliated with the author and treat this as a favour?

[deleted]

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#112

Post by beachy »

gadf wrote: post #105
lrem wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This review is obviously high effort. What's the incentive here? Is this what the community regularly does in Goodreads? Or are you somehow affiliated with the author and treat this as a favour?

Anything to do with goodreads becomes toxic. I think that's because the types of people who read and opine about books to the extent they feel compelled to blog/review on gr, are also likely to be the types of people who brook no dissent to their opinions, neither of authors, books nor the things they make them mean. They're independent, self-trusting, artistic thinkers (in the manner of Nietzsche), and the act of en…

Magnificent rant, I will forward it to an editor of my acquaintance.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#113

Post by dalbasal »

licebmi__at__ wrote: post #44
rossdavidh wrote: post #4

It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint", devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they di…

Nice review. In a sense I find this something akin to the late David Graeber point on it’s column about bulling. How you can find data pointing towards the human society propensity for violence, and also data of human society propensity for cooperation and refusal to engage on violence even when confronted with losing their way of living, although he also raises the point when historically there has been more propens…

IDK if its a modern bias or a recurring one, but people are very drawn to the idea of a core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.

The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know about raising chickens, praying and stuff. lol As if a parentless, cultureless person is more human than the rest of us... more indicative of "true" human nature.

Once we set to answering a question, it seems very hard to question the question.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#114

Post by bllguo »

chriskanan wrote: post #5
Zamicol wrote: post #2

My high school's district required students to read The of Lord of the Flies. My freshmen English teacher hated the book so much he broke district requirements and told my class he was giving everyone A's on that assignment. He asked the class to read any substitute book in its place. To this day I still consider him to be a wise teacher.

I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.

well this is the key thing really. why are we so hung up on authorial intent? For example, Bradbury claimed that fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship - should we let that influence how we interpret and utilize his work? I think it is valuable to use fahrenheit 451 as a precautionary tale about censorship, regardless of what Bradbury originally intended.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#115

Post by FriedrichN »

stakkur wrote: post #21

This story is examined nicely in Rutger Bregman's book Humankind: A Hopeful History . TL:DR; It turns out that in the real world, nothing like the Lord of the Flies happened; in fact the opposite happened. Highly recommend Bregman's book, by the way, which shoots down many of the faulty foundations of what we take for granted as fact today about human nature. I believe this article is an excerpt from the book.

>Highly recommend Bregman's book

I second this. It challenged a lot of my beliefs and busted a lot of myths (Stanley Milgram, the Stanford prison experiment, etc.). I didn't agree with everything but I rarely ever do, nonetheless it was a great read. A very readable book as well, shouldn't take you longer than a week to read.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#116

Post by mattmanser »

beachy wrote: post #3

That's a wonderful story and and an uplifting rebuttal to Lord of the Flies. But to be fair, six Tongan boys were probably far hardier and well equipped than the typical British schoolboy of that time would have been. It seems they thought nothing of stealing a fishing boat and heading to sea, and they most likely had abundant life skills already - they basically relocated from life on one pacific island to another.…

I don't think that's true. So my Dad grew up in the 50s in Southend, UK, and I wouldn't have been surprised at all to hear a story about him stealing a boat with his brothers for a joy ride.

And the oldest was 16, almost an adult and easily far past the age children are often taught to sail in the UK even today.

A year younger than when their rescuer originally ran away to sea at 17.

And they were clearly still a bunch of idealistic, uninformed, woefully unprepared children, not even taking a map or a compass. And bringing only fruit as victuals.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#117

Post by db48x »

eric-hu wrote: post #99
db48x wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a lot of modern television shows have been serial works rather than episodic ones. Babylon 5 comes to mind as one of the earliest serialized television shows, if not the earliest. Well, I suppose soap operas existed before that, but as far as I can tell they rarely had proper narrative endings; they were designed to last as many years as possible.

I was wondering why you wrote Babylon 5 when I can think of earlier long running shows, I.e. the original Star Trek, but I guess those are more like soap operas? Hm.

It’s not about how long a show was on the air, it has more to do with how interconnected the episodes are and whether the work has a story arc that was planned in advance. In a purely episodic work, you can experience the episodes in any order and have the same enjoyment. In a purely serial work, the order of the episodes (or should we call them installments?) matters a lot.

Star Trek was episodic. No matter what happens in one episode, most things remained status quo for the next. There were some slow changes to the cast, but for the most part you could watch the episodes in any order.

TNG was book–ended by their dealings with Q, but that story had no closure and only took up about four or five episodes out of 7 years. There were some other stories like that as well, stories that were longer than an episode but much shorter than the show as a whole.

On the other hand, Deep Space Nine was closer to a single story with a beginning, middle, and end. There were still plenty of episodes that would still make sense if you moved them to a different season, but it was much less episodic than the previous shows.

Voyager was billed as a serial work, but was so badly written that most episodes could be moved around at will with no harm to the storyline.

Babylon 5, in contrast, gave every episode some link to the overarching plot, even if it was just hints. (Especially in the first season, when the main antagonists were still hidden and all we had were hints.)

It’s easy for episodic shows to be written at the same pace that they are filmed. With serial shows, you have to know in advance where the story is going to go even if you still write most of the dialog at the pace of filming. I didn’t watch much of Lost, but I got the impression that while it was a serial, the writers had no real plan from the start and that everything was made up as they went along. The result is that the story is incoherent. I’ve never watched any soap operas either, but I gather that they try to arrange for frequent cliffhangers and dramatic changes (making the story more serial), but that there is never a planned end to the story; they’re perpetually in the middle. The result is a work with constant churn and no resolution.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#118

Post by vkou »

garmaine wrote: post #68
DavidSJ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High school English class was like this for me too. It was usually obvious what my teacher wanted students to say but it just seemed all so contrived and I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the silliness. On my report card she once wrote, “stubbornly sticks to his opinions even when wrong”. One day, for fun, I tried out saying what I thought she wanted to hear. I got a lot of praise from her that day.

Blow up that report card and frame it on your wall. That's high praise.

Depends on the opinion. Being stubborn about insisting that water isn't wet makes you a fool, not an unappreciated genius.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#119

Post by filleduchaos »

anotherman554 wrote: post #32
filleduchaos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Distasteful" and "dumb" are far from the same thing, and the second world war happened for the former and not the latter.

It's a distinction without a difference- one could argue a less primitive species wouldn't have found itself caught in world wars. The man-children starting world wars are paralleled by the children-children killing each other on the island.

Reducing the historical and contemporary reasons why humans engage in war to people being "man-children" is a level of sticking-my-head-in-the-sand that I hope to never attain. I've never understood the urge to think of people and things one morally/politically disagrees with as simply stupid, braindead or immature - but there seem to be way too many people who seem incapable of contending with the idea that humans can be intelligent and highly amoral/immoral.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#120

Post by vkou »

mythrwy wrote: post #53
Syonyk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise. That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else. It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate boo…

I remember being stunned in high school that people would get degrees and an entire semester would be devoted to finding hidden symbolic meanings that authors in many cases obviously didn't intend. This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on the metaphorical river journey of overcoming raci…

> * “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”` *

Have you considered that Mark Twain, a master of satire, may have intended that passage to be just that?

I think the 'will be shot' gives it away.

I don't know much about metaphoric journeys on rivers from boyhood to manhood, but there was more of a point to that story than you seem to think.

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