I 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.
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Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
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Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#32I 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.
That's cheesy fiction.
Good fiction trains your mind to understand different world-views and other peoples' narratives of themselves and the world (as opposed to satisfying yourself with your own narrative as the "objective truth").
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#33I 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.
Suggesting genetics is responsible instead (as opposed to any other variable) is no less pseudoscience. If only we could find some smart parents and get them to deny their kids books, we’d know for sure!
Or lock a child in a room full of books for several hours each day as Liebnitz's father's will required to be done to Liebnitz (this may be an apocryphal story).
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#34I 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.
In elementary school we would have assigned reading periods, during which we were supposed to read one chapter of the book we were on. Turns out that if you read five chapters instead you just fail all the quizzes because you don't have a fucking clue what happened in chapter 12, given you read that weeks ago and can't really tie chapters to events anyway.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#35I 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.
One good thing about fiction is that the main character does not die in the middle of the story.
That rule has been broken several times in fiction.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#36I 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.
Suggesting genetics is responsible instead (as opposed to any other variable) is no less pseudoscience. If only we could find some smart parents and get them to deny their kids books, we’d know for sure!
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Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#37I am unable to read the actual study (paywall) and this article doesn't really talk about the methodology, but did they account for socioeconomic factors? I would assume on average that the more books your family could afford, the more money they have.
Here's the paper: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003
Great, thanks! It looks like they didn't account for family wealth unless I'm mistaken.
In the omitted variables section:
> However, prior research using longitudinal data from Australia with corrections for measurement error showed that a substantial impact of home library size on adult education existed net of the effects of academic ability (IQ) of adults or their father’s scholarly habitus (i.e. employment in occupations where use of books is common) as well as family income or wealth (Evans, et al., 2010).
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suggesting genetics is responsible instead (as opposed to any other variable) is no less pseudoscience. If only we could find some smart parents and get them to deny their kids books, we’d know for sure!
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 little to gain from actually discussing the (obvious) lack of causal link here.
Unless you can point out how you’d improve the study—it’s not entirely obvious to me what the next step would be as I’m not a scientist.
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#39How would growing up in a household with only ebooks, or a household with only physical books make a difference? (Assuming an equal number of both)
At an early age it is important to have contact with physical objects. (And no, an iPad wouldn't cut it.)
Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
#40This particular instance of correlation and causation has always been fascinating to me.
Is it possible to have a non causal correlation that is impossible to bring about without increasing (causing) the effect.
For instance suppose you tried an experiment of getting 500 books into a household with a new infant and zero books. Let’s say you did this with no special attempt to produce the cause, but made no attempt to ensure the process of getting 500 books over there had no influence either.
How would you go about this? Ask for donations? Collect books? How would you find donors, how would you find families to donate to?
My guess, which I make purely on a hunch, is that you would have to make dramatic (perhaps unconscionable) efforts to ensure that this process would not bring about the effect of higher literacy on average.
Not sure by how much but I think (just a thesis) that it would be meaningfully measurable