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Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#51

Post by philipov »

xvector wrote: post #25
izzydata wrote: post #18

I 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.

I don’t think it makes sense to blame yourself. It is absolutely the job of parents to encourage their kids to read from a young age. To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they like - then they devour everything in sight. How much I miss the combination of childhood imagination and fantastic stories!

I believe that talent is best understood as arising from liking the thing you do, thus seeking it out from a young age, during the period when practice is most effective. It is the fact that one does not find most things boring that makes a person talented.

Having casual access to books at home is critical for cultivating a talent for reading, because it increases the likelihood of the child stumbling upon the books that will catch their attention.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#52

Post by jasode »

drb91 wrote: post #38
hackinthebochs wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

>The “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs.

Fyi... in the abstract of the actual paper that the article is based on, the authors used less hedging and suggested more of a cause & effect:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X1...

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#53

Post by algo646464 »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #16

I 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.

How about: "Kids who grow up in households full of gym/sports equipments, grow up to be muscular/athletic".

The quality of this research may indeed be poor, but the "tall pants" analogy seems disingenuous.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#54

Post by iopuy »

izzydata wrote: post #18

I 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.

I read an average amount as a child and frankly I found books such as "The Count of Monte Cristo", "The Red Badge of Courage", "Great Expectations", etc to be absolutely mind-numbingly boring and would have to force myself to finish them. As a young adult I actually picked up some books I found interesting (i.e. nonfiction) and became a voracious reader. It was like an entire new world had opened up that wasn't constrained by the boundaries of some form of supervision. Admittedly, most of my reading as a youngster came in school and you were either reading fiction, or nonfiction that had to do with the holocaust or WWII. My advice to young people struggling with books is to find a genre that interests you, and dive in.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#56

Post by bluGill »

geebee wrote: post #40

This 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…

Books are cheap. I'd get 500 books from a used bookstore and put them in a hut in some primitive village. Note that books would not be in the native language, and nobody in the village can read anyway. My hypothesis is that books will make no difference.

An interesting and useful experiment would be to place books in the homes of poor people who can read but don't. Turns out cities all over the US are doing this experiment on a large scale right now (often paid for by United Way). While the experiment isn't completely controlled anyone who cares to can collect data and analyse it.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#57

Post by philipov »

Koshkin wrote: post #29
jondubois wrote: post #19

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.

One good thing about fiction is that the main character does not die in the middle of the story.

Some of the best fiction I've read involves the main character dying in the middle of the story, and is written in the first person, where the reveal that the author is not actually who he says he was is the climactic moment of the story.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#58

Post by izzydata »

xvector wrote: post #25
izzydata wrote: post #18

I 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.

I don’t think it makes sense to blame yourself. It is absolutely the job of parents to encourage their kids to read from a young age. To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they like - then they devour everything in sight. How much I miss the combination of childhood imagination and fantastic stories!

I had mostly infinite access to all kinds of media so would always turn to video games and TV. These things are now so affordable that I imagine that is the norm for kids today.

I am curious if there is a big difference between immersing yourself in video game worlds compared to a books. Books would require more imagination, but early video games were pretty sparse and often required a large amount of imagination as well.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#59

Post by hackinthebochs »

drb91 wrote: post #38
hackinthebochs wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

You're right that the headline is cautious enough not to misrepresent the content of the study. I think controlling for parent and child educational attainment, which likely subsumes much of the possible confounders, is sufficient to claim a plausible causative effect of the presence of books.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#60

Post by Alex3917 »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #16

I 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.

> Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses.

This study was done in response to the Scarborough and Dobrich paper that found that how much parents read to their children (generally) isn't correlated with children's future reading ability, but how many books are in their household is a positive predictor of future reading ability.

It's one of the most famous and surprising findings in all of social science.

I'd suggest rather than the authors not "understanding science" or whatever, perhaps it's more likely that their target audience wasn't people on HN who would complain without knowing anything about the field.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027322978...

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