[HN Gopher] Research on whether reading fiction makes you nicer
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Research on whether reading fiction makes you nicer
Author : ohjeez
Score : 37 points
Date : 2022-04-09 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Tl; Dr " Researchers David Dodell-Feder and Diana I. Tamir set
| out to check the validity of existing research on the topic. They
| ran a meta-analysis on fourteen studies to check whether fiction
| reading causally improves social cognition--and they discovered
| that reading fiction has a small, statistically significant
| impact on social-cognitive performance. In other words, reading
| fiction makes you a little nicer and more socially aware."
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I wish "according to science" should automatically be replaced
| with "according to this one study". Seriously. it builds this
| image of "science" as uniform United law-making body; and then
| when another study comes out, people see it as "science" failing,
| as opposed to working as designed.
|
| "It's official!" Prefix don't help none either...
| [deleted]
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Every time there's some result in physics that doesn't match
| with the standard model, say, there's a flood of breathless
| "scientists are wrong!" headlines that make it sound like
| they're all incompetent bumblers who get embarrassingly shown
| up as elitist chancers by the "university of life".
|
| In reality, the physicists themselves know the models are
| incomplete, have painstakingly devised an cutting-edge
| experiment to probe that uncertainty and are ecstatic that
| there is more to study and that they have a new clue to follow.
| Imagine how sad it would be to be a physicist on the day that
| the Grand Unified Theory is discovered and physics is complete.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Related to this, and tangentially connected to the topic of
| reading fiction, I'll take this as an opportunity to raise
| one of the many things that I disliked about Cixin Liu's
| _"The Three-Body Problem"_. I honestly don 't understand why
| it is held in such high regard, let alone sometimes described
| as "hard" science fiction. Spoilers evidently follow.
|
| One of the initial plot points in the novel is that many top
| scientists in fields close to theoretical physics are
| misteriously committing suicide. Eventually it is revealed
| that they're doing it because an alien civilisation is
| surreptitiously using advanced technology to secretly
| interfere with human research at the subatomic level or
| something of the sort, to the point that the affected
| scientists are coming across such contradictory,
| counterfactual and inconsistent results that they finally
| commit suicide out of despair, shame, or loss of faith in
| science.
|
| The idea that scientists, when faced with sudden nonsensical
| results which they cannot explain, would feel compelled not
| only to keep this fact to themselves but also to take their
| own lives is an unbelievably ignorant take on the workings of
| science as a field and a community.
|
| If an evil power were to somehow alter reality to start
| breaking the expected rules of the Universe scientists would
| be absolutely _excited_ about it, not suicidal! And even if
| they were to eventually despair out of the meticulously
| planned inconsistency caused by the evil manipulators, such
| that nothing could ever be predicted again, the despair would
| happen long after years and years of scientific conventions
| making the whole situation _very_ public!
| teawrecks wrote:
| What if the author thinks that "according to science..." means
| "a statistically significant number of studies on this subject
| have come to the same conclusion that..."? Like when the media
| reported that the LHC had confirmed the existence of the higgs
| boson? It wasn't one study, it was a bunch of studies and
| experiments over many years that eventually crossed a
| confidence threshold.
| gigamick wrote:
| "Backed by science", "according to science" etc is the new
| marketing buzz-phrase and it's very annoying. I think it's a
| reaction to the world of conjecture, "alternate facts", and
| opinion that dominates us thanks to... well basically thanks to
| 6 years of Trump, I guess.
|
| However whenever I read now "according to science", or
| something similar I just baulk.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > It's official According to science ...
|
| I have trouble deciding how to interpret that phrasing.
|
| Taken at face value, it suggests the author has an implausibly
| bad understanding of science, logic, and thinking in general.
|
| Given the context, I wonder if it's somehow meant in jest.
| [deleted]
| KarlKemp wrote:
| It's a phrase, and everyone understands what it means.
| Wikipedia isn't the worst here, even though it mangles the
| grammar: In summary that has authenticity
| emanates from an authority.
|
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official#Adjective)
|
| The only problem here is people pretending not to know that
| language involves ambiguities, figures of speech, and so on.
|
| To expand: in this case, two things are happening
| simultaneously: first, the author appreciates literature, and
| is genuinely happy that their intuitive belief that it is
| something "good" is getting a bit of empirical evidence.
|
| Second, yes, I believe there is a hint of a smirk in the
| statement, that, if I were to dramatize it, is a comeback at
| all the STEM students in college that were dismissive of the
| author's enjoyment of non-non-fiction. It's all in good fun,
| however, because the article fundamentally rests on a believe
| in the scientific method, just not to the exclusion of other
| human endeavors.
| [deleted]
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