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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)

#161

Post by grecy »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #75
Andrex wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they did not. The fact that it's a coin flip is the key aspect of the message Golding wanted to impart. It's chilling, and unsurprising, that reality bears it out.

The coin flip in the book is that they had two potential leaders, one of the responsible and the other one pretty sociopathic but charismatic - the nascent society followed the sociopathic, charismatic one. At any rate there were quite a few more kids than 6 in the book, so pointing at this incident and saying 'see, it would work out' is just silly.

... sounds a lot like many democracies choosing a sociopathic but charismatic leader.

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

#162

Post by gwbas1c »

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…

> The attempt to infuse sociology with biological facts (e.g. genes matter, evolution still impacts humans, etc.) has been controversial (even today the term "sociobiology" is radioactive to some).

My immediate reaction to your post was that maybe we could learn something about what causes societies to collapse, and learn something?

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

#164

Post by mythrwy »

xorcist wrote: post #154
mythrwy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While satire clearly can go above a young boy's head, it is important to keep an open mind about literature. Symbolism doesn't necessarily need to have a purpose. We can also learn a lot about the environment in which a writer operated, just by learning from which symbols was used to convey a message. This is one of the central points, but also perhaps the most misunderstood, of modern (and post modern) literary crit…

Symbolism doesn't also necessarily need to exist.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

My complaint was (and still is 30 years later) is that an entire cottage industry seems to have arisen around finding hidden meanings.

Would we do that to television today? Does the cartoon "King of the Hill" contain hidden significance and deep moral lessons? Maybe. Or maybe it's just wit mostly designed to entertain.

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

#165

Post by lebuffon »

gwbas1c wrote: post #162
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…

> The attempt to infuse sociology with biological facts (e.g. genes matter, evolution still impacts humans, etc.) has been controversial (even today the term "sociobiology" is radioactive to some). My immediate reaction to your post was that maybe we could learn something about what causes societies to collapse, and learn something?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition, Diamond

Interesting overview

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

#166

Post by goatlover »

souprock wrote: post #52
chriskanan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We now have proof that it really is "going far beyond the author's intention". Texas licensed a poem for a standardized test. The poem's author was still alive, and was unable to "correctly" answer test questions about the meaning of the poem. So yes, the English teachers really are spouting nonsense, and we have proof.

Depends on whether you subscribe to the "death of the author" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A) or not. Does the author's intent in writing something trump everyone else's interpretation? What if we don't have the original author around to ask? A good example of this is all the interpretations of various passages in the Bible different groups have had throughout history.

Instead of privileging the author's intent, one can treat literature, or even religious text as akin to art. The reader participates in the meaning of the piece. Or you can think about how people argue over and critique movies and television shows.

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

#167

Post by ricardobayes »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #124
dalbasal wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

There is an idea that after the bombs fall we all turn into raping and pillaging marauders. I have no idea why people find this idea comforting. In reality villages will be built, laws written and religions made up.

probably the fallout games paint an accurate picture.

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

#168

Post by fighterpilot »

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…

Did they find any variables that could explain whether or not the group turned on each other? e.g. resource abundance, gender makeup, age of people, N people, N days stranded, etc?

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

#169

Post by wizzwizz4 »

finnthehuman wrote: post #159
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds overly racist to me. Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist. It's your traditional Victorian English capitalist, top hat and monocle, making children work with heavy machinery and turning the sky grey. Your colonialist, beating children for speaking the language of their parents and expecting them to be grateful for it. Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesi…

>Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist. No, describing a group of people based on their race instead of a more accurate descriptor for the category you're looking to talk about is just plain old racism. Being more specific might also be, but this is guaranteed to be. And your statement just sounds like the contemporary-palatable version of grandpa explaining that when he talks abo…

Fair enough. There are still people I wouldn't begrudge for using “whiteness” like that, but I probably shouldn't assume good faith straight off the bat. You're right that this kind of thing is important to stamp out.

That being said, we don't really have a good word for “originally-European (but kinda American too now) take-everything attitudes”. How would you describe this succinctly?

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