Slashdot Mirror
Read Better Books To Be a Better Person
00_NOP writes "Researchers from the New School for Social Research in New York have demonstrated that if you read quality literary fiction you become a better person, in the sense that you are more likely to empathize with others [paper abstract]. Presumably we can all think of books that have changed the way we feel about the world — so this is, in a sense, a scientific confirmation of something fairly intuitive."
It's a deeply flawed study. Basically, it's cherry-picking with a vengeance. There's a good discussion at Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715
Read the article, it was a randomized study in which people were assigned to read specified books selected beforehand by the experimenters.
Need I say more?
Three Squirrels
Now I want to kill all the Bugs and blow up their planet...
Junk tabloids are always more popular. In the UK, it's the Sun and the Mail and the Mirror and the Sport, etc.
The same way that the most popular shows on TV don't have much in the way of thinking involved - celeb shows and "reality" TV.
The barrier to entry is lower, so more people consume them. Unfortunately, it's pretty much a one-way downhill run from there.
You have to wonder what we're teaching our kids, especially in the celebrity areas. Let's all consume trivial information about people who got rich by not being able to sing but they can wiggle their ass suggestively.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford
I actually read *Twilight* to see what all the fuss was about. And if you read with a sufficiently open mind, you can see what the fuss is all about. Meyer is a gifted writer. What she is *not* is a technically proficient writer -- at least in her debut novel. She offers little that will lure you in if you aren't square in the novel's target demographic, and plenty that will put you off if you aren't immediately swept up in the spell. Her handling of dialogue is particularly painful for the non-fan.
Yes, you can boil the attraction of Twilight down to a simple formula, but if you think that's all there is to it, then go write your own 118 thousand word novel with the formula and watch the millions of dollars roll in. It's not that simple. It takes a special talent to make the formula work.
Overall, reading *Twilight* made me sad, because the book could have been so much better. It needed the services of developmental editor, and a tough one at that. If they'd invested a few thousand more dollars up front they might have widened the market for the book. Instead they got a massive anti-*Twilight* backlash. A strong editor would have made a lot of those *Twilight* haters into fans.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Going out on a limb, the idea of defaulting to second class citizens promotable only through military service?
Except in the book civilians really aren't second class. In fact, the book only mentions 2 distinctions between citizens and civilians: some reserved jobs such as police officer for veterans, and the ability (or responsibility, as the book tells it) to vote. The doctor that examined Rico was a civilian. Rico's father was a civilian and owned his own manufacturing company and their family appeared to be one of the wealthiest in the Phillipines. Civilians can go to college (and can do so before citizens can). And as for voting? Many people don't vote now, and those who do tend to vote on party lines, sound bites, what the candidate looks like, or any of countless other heuristics; vary rarely do they consider the consequences of their vote, or truly examine the issues. Heinlein wasn't creating a two-tiered civilization. He was essentially arguing that the only way to get people to care about the state and it's preservation is to make them personally invested in the state. By risking their lives in the protection of the state (and remember, the book explicitly states that most citizens are made through non-military, auxiliary service) they learn the value of the state and will exercise the power of the vote responsibly, so as to not lessen or make irrelevant their own contributions to the state. They are also taught that in mandatory classes in school. While going through OCS, Rico comes to the realization that voting never really mattered to him all that much, and that he and every other cap trooper "voted" every time they made a drop, because they were saying that the protection of the state and therefore society was worth their lives. It is not about patriotism; rather, it is, to misquote the book, that the part realizes it is part of a whole and that it should willingly risk it's own existence to ensure the continuation of the whole. The whole is scalable too: it applies to the family, to the group, the town, the city, society, the state, the world. That is what separates it from patriotism. Patriotism stops at the state; in Starship Troopers it went all the way to the human race.
I would gladly take Heinlein's system over what we currently have in the US. We wouldn't have a government shutdown, we wouldn't be worried about the debt ceiling, because the politicians (who would have to be citizens) would put the good of the state ahead of their own attempts at holding/gaining power and grandstanding. I also wouldn't mind the idea of things like mandatory capital sentences for things like murder, kidnapping, etc. But that's a whole other issue.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil