Even without reading them, the books on my parents' shelves had an affect on me due to the wacky titles. They stuck in my mind and to this day, I can still remember them: "Blind Ambition" or "The Winds of War" or "The Greening of America" - seeing these as a kid caused me to ask lots of questions, i.e. who is John Dean and why is America turning green? :)
Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
101–110 of 163 posts
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#102I 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.
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
It's embarrassing to see HN users reflexively posting (and upvoting) five-second internet tropes to swipe something away. We need to avoid that if we're to have substantive conversation. Criticism is fine, but when criticizing, you owe it both to the material and to the community to engage specifically with specific content.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#103I 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.
Correlation does not equal causation but it must exist for causation to occur. I wouldn't dismiss a correlation on those grounds.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#104I 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.
We all can't be high brow, at times the VCR manual does the job.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#105I 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.
Kids are not supposed to make the right choice on their own. Someone should have nudged you a bit into reading.
Growing up, we had very few books in my house. My grand parents on the other hand had a library, full encyclopedia, and hundreds of National Geographic back issues. Combined with nothing else to do at their house, I would often just sit and read from random articles. At the time, I found fiction boring. It was not until much later that I began to appreciate fiction.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#106The study this summary refers to studied books as an indicator of a “culture of scholasticism.” It didn’t even really try to disentangle socioeconomic effects, because it was looking to use books as a proxy for them. It did not say “books in the home make you smarter.” It was arguing “books are a reasonable cross-cultural proxy for orientation towards scholasticism in the home.” This summary, to my reading of the act…
Their confusion goes beyond using books as a proxy for scholasticism.
No doubt its just a proxy for IQ itself (higher IQ people tend to read more books, thus own more books, thus score better on scholastic measures).
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To be fair, interpretation and writing are just as important as reading.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#108I 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.
>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house, I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading comprehension. As far as I'm…
I read constantly when I was younger, mostly fiction. The first time I took one of those reading comprehension tests in grade 4 or something it said I was reading around a grade 12 level. I've also got a fairly high reading speed and retention level for fiction.
Non-fiction is different. I read slower and usually end up rereading sections a few times to fully understand them especially if I speed up and start skimming or something.
The thing is, I don't really read much fiction anymore. I find the stories all get kind of samey and findy self leaning towards technical books and non-fiction when I read now.
I do feel like comprehending fiction and non-fiction require two different skill sets in the brain. I've definitely been improving my comprehension of non-fiction stuff but I still don't feel like it's up there with fiction comprehension.
Poetry and stuff like that is something altogether different...i've never really been able to appreciate most poetry. I don't know why. I understand why it's impressive to be able to convey ideas through rythmic or patternised wording...I just don't really care that much.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#109[deleted]
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#110I 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.
>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house, I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading comprehension. As far as I'm…
I can offer these two data points: CA High SChool Exit Exam percentile: Reading: 99%, Spelling: 12%.
10 years later Im still of the opinion that if you deduced my intent, how i spelt everything really doesn't matter all that much.