Social Media – Nibbles Ninja

Is Reading Fiction Important?

March 12, 2022 @ 10:22 amAlanNibbles1 Reply

I said, more than a few times, that I prefer non-fiction books over fiction ones. Why? Because with non-fiction, if you get 100 pages in and realize you don’t like it, you can just stop reading it and move on. Not so with fiction. If you are 100 pages in, even if the writing is horrible, you are committed. You want to know how it all plays out.

Maybe not for you, but it’s true for me, and I read relatively little fiction, because of it. (Although, I probably could be happy reading a mix of Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft over-and-over. :-))

Stolen Focus book cover — Image from Amazon.com

That’s why I had to take a step back when I read something about a beneficial effect fiction has (that non-fiction does not) in Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari. After writing this:

I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.

He continued…

But I wondered if I was getting carried away—these were just my hunches, after all—so later, I went to the University of Toronto to interview Raymond Mar, who is a professor of psychology there. Raymond is one of the social scientists who has done most in the world to study the effects that reading books has on our consciousness, and his research has helped to open up a distinctive way of thinking about this question.

This is where it gets tricky to elaborate on, without copying too much. 🙂 Basically, Mar and his mentor, Keith Oatley, wondered:

When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other people—which is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have.

(Emphasis mine.)

So they figured out a way to study it…and…

When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.

Hari then shares Mar’s explanation for why this is true, including:

Each of us can only ever experience a small sliver of what it’s like to be a human being alive today, Raymond told me, but as you read fiction, you see inside other people’s experiences. That doesn’t vanish when you put down the novel. When you later meet a person in the real world, you’ll be better able to imagine what it’s like to be them. Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgeable, but it doesn’t have this empathy-expanding effect.

Thoughts?

I’m convinced enough that I am going to purposely mix more fiction into my reading. You?

I would buy Stolen Focus and read it…even if you already imbibe plenty of fiction. Perhaps you’ve avoided the attention-ruining effects of modern Internet, social media, and smartphone apps, but I suspect not. Although I haven’t finished the entire book yet, it is helping me understand why it is such a battle for me to sit and read more than ten minutes, and will give me some tools to correct it.

Well, enough writing…time to prep for my next podcast!

(Cross-posted on my Data Guy (Me) blog.)

The Socratic Method

October 24, 2021 @ 9:58 pmOctober 24, 2021 @ 10:10 pmAlanNibbles

I just started a great new book, “The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook” by Ward Farnsworth. Here are my first four highlights:

The Socratic method means, among other things, asking and receiving questions fearlessly; it means saying what you think, and not getting hot when others say what they think; it means loving the truth and staying humble about whether you know it. In other words, it’s about all the good things that have been vanishing from our culture of discourse.

What the teachings do offer is wisdom, but this good thing is always bought at the price of some discomfort. The human appetite for wisdom, and its tolerance for discomfort, has never been great, in ancient times or ours.

The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome.

The Socratic method is a corrective. Before viewing it as a technique, consider it an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt—in other words, of every good attitude discouraged by social media and disappearing from our political and cultural life. It means asking hard questions without fear and receiving them without offense; indeed, it means treating challenge and refutation as acts of friendship. Socrates, as we shall see, sometimes likes to define an elusive concept by asking for the name of its opposite. That approach can help us here, too. If I were pressed for a one-word opposite of the Socratic method, a strong candidate would be Twitter.

That last sentence is an instance classic. “If I were pressed for a one-word opposite of the Socratic method, a strong candidate would be Twitter.”

Et tu LinkedIn?

July 3, 2021 @ 10:24 amJuly 7, 2021 @ 8:21 pmAlanNibbles1 Reply

Update: Kudos to LinkedIn for reinstating Dr. Malone’s account. Also, my son’s reaction to the second shot turned severe.

Original post:

I post this as my 13 year-old is dealing with, luckily, a relatively minor reaction to his second Pfizer shot yesterday:

Big Tech cracks down on Robert Malone, mRNA vaccine pioneer who warns about their risks

“To censor and silence scientists under such circumstances can lead to many unnecessary deaths,” says previously censored Harvard Med professor Martin Kulldorff.

LinkedIn zapped Dr. Malone’s personal account without explanation.

Since they have not explained, there is no way to know for sure, but it’s likely because he thinks that right now the risk/benefit ratio for children isn’t there and said so on the platform. What is ridiculous about the push-back he’s been getting is that he was the inventor of mRNA vaccines (or, at least, significantly involved in their invention).

There are real-world consequences to stifling the conversation.

“Open debate is especially important during a public health emergency when many important public health question[s] do not yet have a known answer,” [Harvard Medical School epidemiologist] Kulldorff wrote in an email. “To censor and silence scientists under such circumstances can lead to many unnecessary deaths,” which is why LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should “restore all suspended accounts.”

If you think Dr. Malone is wrong, prove it, but without falling to the argumentum ab auctoritate (appeal to authority) logical fallacy. (E.g. using “consensus” or “the CDC says” would be appeals to authority.)

Final note: My wife and I weighed the pros and cons of my son getting vaccinated, and felt it was worth it. Trying to prevent us, however, from having all the information available for that decision is, frankly, evil.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.