6 ms·

My parents were quite irresponsible, and let me waste my time playing video games and reading escapist fiction, instead of doing valuable effortful practice. Wh

My parents were quite irresponsible, and let me waste my time playing video games and reading escapist fiction, instead of doing valuable effortful practice. When I went to MIT, I found that many of my classmates had been neglected in the same manner.

swombat 17y ago
Reading "escapist fiction", as you call it, is probably one of the most valuable things you can do with your young mind.
- cia_plant 17y ago
  Any discussion of education seems to bring up a whole raft of ideas about what does and does not effect the young mind, and in which direction. Plato, who was rather more observant and intelligent than you or I, felt that young people would be best served by learning only valorous stories, which showed just and good men triumphing and so on. He felt that the basic components of education ought to be music and gymnastic; and that an overemphasis on music would produce an overly intellectual and sentimental adult (an overemphasis on gymnastic would produce a brute). Views seem to have completely shifted, to the point that Plato's program strikes one as absurd. However, I am not aware of any breakthrough in our understanding of the nature of education: our modern ideas are based, like those of Plato, on an observation of society, and of children, and of education, all colored by our assumptions about what is and is not valuable. When I tell people that I played video games and read novels, they are no doubt inclined to think that I must have become smart and capable thanks to the novels and despite the video games. Why do we think that way, and not in the opposite way - that I became smart by playing video games, and despite reading lots of books? When I solve a hard problem, it feels more like the feeling I have in Quake, when I'm holding the entire playing field in my head and keeping track of where my opponents could be, than like the feeling I have while reading a book.
  - swombat 17y ago
    Plato was certainly smarter than both of us put together, but he also lived in a very different cultural landscape than we do. What books were available to young people then? Not many, I'd wager. The lack of suitable mass publication mechanisms certainly reduced the importance of literature. And the vast majority of the authors that I would think of as "great" had not been born yet. It is debatable whether a landscape devoid of mass publication means would still produce a healthy supply of great literature. Since the printing press, we've had an explosion of amazing literature produced and distributed throughout the world. Many of the greatest thinkers of the last three centuries left their thoughts behind for us to build on. As an added bonus, many of them left those thoughts in highly entertaining forms that entertain and delight as much as they instruct. It would really be looking the gift horse in the mouth to the extreme, to demand that impractical scientific studies be conducted to "prove" that humanity's great books make your life better. Of course, we may have a difference of definition here. By "escapist fiction" I assume you included most fictional works, including such masters as Gabriel Garcia Marques, Herman Hesse and Jorge Luis Borghes, who definitely have the ability to transport one outside of the real world into that of imagination.
  - trevelyan 17y ago
    Plato's (Socrates?) position derived from his belief that cultivating a moral republic meant eliminating fiction. See The Republic. I don't know if we're really supposed to take it seriously as prescriptive advice, but it's quite different than most other approaches.
- zavulon 17y ago
  Why do you think so? From my personal experience only, it was one of the most harmful things I've done to myself.
  - swombat 17y ago
    Very simply, it develops your imagination, which is required for various somewhat useful activities such as creative and lateral thinking or, in fact, most forms of problem solving. Why do you feel it was harmful? Also, what kind of fiction do you read? Would you be willing to give it another try if I suggested something that's actually good?
    - zavulon 17y ago
      That is certainly true - but on the other side, if you do it too much (and kids/teenagers tend to overindulge in everything they find good), it can lead to under-development of important social skills, losing focus on actual studies/work, and in more extreme cases, complete disengagement from the real world. I've read tons of great 'escapist' books when I was a teenager (it all started with Lord of the Rings consumed ecstatically in 3 days of almost non-stop reading when I was 13). However, before I started doing that, I was really into technology/hacking/programming, and at the same time sports/social interactions. Then after a while, it was books/D&D/Magic the Gathering and almost nothing else. Of course, everything is good in moderation and harmful if you overindulge, but by its nature, escapist fiction is incredibly easy to get into and hard to get out.
      - swombat 17y ago
        I think if you have a choice between getting addicted to Russian Literature versus getting addicted to World of Warcraft, one will be a lot more beneficial to you than the other... "I spent every waking hour of my years 12-14 reading all of Dostoievsky, Tolstoi and Chekhov back to back over and over again" vs "I spent every waking hour of my years 12-14 playing World of Warcraft."
adamhowell 17y ago
Honest question because I can't tell. Sarcasm?
- dalore 17y ago
  You can tell because he went to MIT.
tokenadult 17y ago
Preliminary note to onlookers, which I don't think is necessary for the author of the parent comment: nothing I write below will be sarcastic. I will try my best to write a friendly reply to an interesting post. Thanks for joining issue with me so specifically. Because I happened to be reading Stumbling on Happiness (recommended to HN by another participant recently) last evening, I thought first of all about what kind of evidence we are talking about here. Many parents (I am one of them) are curious about the issue of what the independent variable of how young people spend their free time does to the dependent variable of which colleges admit which college applicants. I was reminded by my reading last night that to draw a statistically sound conclusion about whether this or that pattern of spending time at high school improves admission chances we would have to look at: 1) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college, 2) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college, 3) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college, 4) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college. I express no opinion on what is most expedient for admission to MIT, as a general rule. I also don't know whether or not there have been any recent changes in MIT admission policy under the current admissions dean. As an anecdote, I know several of the recent admitted students to my town from the last few years, and my observation is that their parents "actively and persistently encourage their children in valuable habits (e.g., reading, drawing, outdoor exercise, music practice, etc.)," as I wrote in the grandparent post. But I acknowledge that I haven't done the statistical work outlined in this comment to show that that is the most expedient admission path for any college. I did a quick look at your previous posts and get the impression--please correct me if I'm wrong--that you may already have completed your undergraduate studies. Do you mind saying in some kind of general way what else may have appeared on the face of your application form that would tend to look like a good fit to MIT, as contrasted with the various applicants in your application year who were not admitted to MIT? Whether admission to MIT is the sole best criterion for how a young person spends the teenage years I'll leave open as an issue that this comment is not about. I acknowledge that admission to MIT is a worthy goal because it opens up opportunities to be in some great learning environments while an undergraduate student. (Anecdote: one of the local students I know who was admitted to MIT a couple of years ago disappointed her dad terribly by enrolling at Harvard rather than MIT. I have no opinion about whether Harvard or MIT is a better place to major in physics, but her dad evidently does. The dad is a great local physics teacher, which is one of the capacities in which I know his family.) When I did my quick look at your previous posts I saw a couple comments on education http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021238 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021238 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602439 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602439 that I find interesting. (I remember lurking in the discussion of the new introductory CS course at MIT, which was interesting all around.) Education policy has long been an interest of mine, so I'm always eager to hear points of view on that subject. (The essays on pg's website about education are what drew me to Hacker News.)

swombat 17y ago

Reading "escapist fiction", as you call it, is probably one of the most valuable things you can do with your young mind.

cia_plant 17y ago
Any discussion of education seems to bring up a whole raft of ideas about what does and does not effect the young mind, and in which direction. Plato, who was rather more observant and intelligent than you or I, felt that young people would be best served by learning only valorous stories, which showed just and good men triumphing and so on. He felt that the basic components of education ought to be music and gymnastic; and that an overemphasis on music would produce an overly intellectual and sentimental adult (an overemphasis on gymnastic would produce a brute). Views seem to have completely shifted, to the point that Plato's program strikes one as absurd. However, I am not aware of any breakthrough in our understanding of the nature of education: our modern ideas are based, like those of Plato, on an observation of society, and of children, and of education, all colored by our assumptions about what is and is not valuable. When I tell people that I played video games and read novels, they are no doubt inclined to think that I must have become smart and capable thanks to the novels and despite the video games. Why do we think that way, and not in the opposite way - that I became smart by playing video games, and despite reading lots of books? When I solve a hard problem, it feels more like the feeling I have in Quake, when I'm holding the entire playing field in my head and keeping track of where my opponents could be, than like the feeling I have while reading a book.
- swombat 17y ago
  Plato was certainly smarter than both of us put together, but he also lived in a very different cultural landscape than we do. What books were available to young people then? Not many, I'd wager. The lack of suitable mass publication mechanisms certainly reduced the importance of literature. And the vast majority of the authors that I would think of as "great" had not been born yet. It is debatable whether a landscape devoid of mass publication means would still produce a healthy supply of great literature. Since the printing press, we've had an explosion of amazing literature produced and distributed throughout the world. Many of the greatest thinkers of the last three centuries left their thoughts behind for us to build on. As an added bonus, many of them left those thoughts in highly entertaining forms that entertain and delight as much as they instruct. It would really be looking the gift horse in the mouth to the extreme, to demand that impractical scientific studies be conducted to "prove" that humanity's great books make your life better. Of course, we may have a difference of definition here. By "escapist fiction" I assume you included most fictional works, including such masters as Gabriel Garcia Marques, Herman Hesse and Jorge Luis Borghes, who definitely have the ability to transport one outside of the real world into that of imagination.
- trevelyan 17y ago
  Plato's (Socrates?) position derived from his belief that cultivating a moral republic meant eliminating fiction. See The Republic. I don't know if we're really supposed to take it seriously as prescriptive advice, but it's quite different than most other approaches.
zavulon 17y ago
Why do you think so? From my personal experience only, it was one of the most harmful things I've done to myself.
- swombat 17y ago
  Very simply, it develops your imagination, which is required for various somewhat useful activities such as creative and lateral thinking or, in fact, most forms of problem solving. Why do you feel it was harmful? Also, what kind of fiction do you read? Would you be willing to give it another try if I suggested something that's actually good?
  - zavulon 17y ago
    That is certainly true - but on the other side, if you do it too much (and kids/teenagers tend to overindulge in everything they find good), it can lead to under-development of important social skills, losing focus on actual studies/work, and in more extreme cases, complete disengagement from the real world. I've read tons of great 'escapist' books when I was a teenager (it all started with Lord of the Rings consumed ecstatically in 3 days of almost non-stop reading when I was 13). However, before I started doing that, I was really into technology/hacking/programming, and at the same time sports/social interactions. Then after a while, it was books/D&D/Magic the Gathering and almost nothing else. Of course, everything is good in moderation and harmful if you overindulge, but by its nature, escapist fiction is incredibly easy to get into and hard to get out.
    - swombat 17y ago
      I think if you have a choice between getting addicted to Russian Literature versus getting addicted to World of Warcraft, one will be a lot more beneficial to you than the other... "I spent every waking hour of my years 12-14 reading all of Dostoievsky, Tolstoi and Chekhov back to back over and over again" vs "I spent every waking hour of my years 12-14 playing World of Warcraft."

adamhowell 17y ago

Honest question because I can't tell. Sarcasm?

dalore 17y ago
You can tell because he went to MIT.

tokenadult 17y ago

Preliminary note to onlookers, which I don't think is necessary for the author of the parent comment: nothing I write below will be sarcastic. I will try my best to write a friendly reply to an interesting post. Thanks for joining issue with me so specifically. Because I happened to be reading Stumbling on Happiness (recommended to HN by another participant recently) last evening, I thought first of all about what kind of evidence we are talking about here. Many parents (I am one of them) are curious about the issue of what the independent variable of how young people spend their free time does to the dependent variable of which colleges admit which college applicants. I was reminded by my reading last night that to draw a statistically sound conclusion about whether this or that pattern of spending time at high school improves admission chances we would have to look at: 1) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college, 2) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were admitted to their favorite college, 3) students who spend their time according to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college, 4) students who spent their time contrary to plan A, and were NOT admitted to their favorite college. I express no opinion on what is most expedient for admission to MIT, as a general rule. I also don't know whether or not there have been any recent changes in MIT admission policy under the current admissions dean. As an anecdote, I know several of the recent admitted students to my town from the last few years, and my observation is that their parents "actively and persistently encourage their children in valuable habits (e.g., reading, drawing, outdoor exercise, music practice, etc.)," as I wrote in the grandparent post. But I acknowledge that I haven't done the statistical work outlined in this comment to show that that is the most expedient admission path for any college. I did a quick look at your previous posts and get the impression--please correct me if I'm wrong--that you may already have completed your undergraduate studies. Do you mind saying in some kind of general way what else may have appeared on the face of your application form that would tend to look like a good fit to MIT, as contrasted with the various applicants in your application year who were not admitted to MIT? Whether admission to MIT is the sole best criterion for how a young person spends the teenage years I'll leave open as an issue that this comment is not about. I acknowledge that admission to MIT is a worthy goal because it opens up opportunities to be in some great learning environments while an undergraduate student. (Anecdote: one of the local students I know who was admitted to MIT a couple of years ago disappointed her dad terribly by enrolling at Harvard rather than MIT. I have no opinion about whether Harvard or MIT is a better place to major in physics, but her dad evidently does. The dad is a great local physics teacher, which is one of the capacities in which I know his family.) When I did my quick look at your previous posts I saw a couple comments on education http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021238 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021238 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602439 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602439 that I find interesting. (I remember lurking in the discussion of the new introductory CS course at MIT, which was interesting all around.) Education policy has long been an interest of mine, so I'm always eager to hear points of view on that subject. (The essays on pg's website about education are what drew me to Hacker News.)