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SaberDance
Federated Suns
Colonel
Joined: 07-May-2004 00:00
Posts: 837
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 Posted: 08-Sep-2005 01:23 Post subject: Everything Bad Is Good For You |
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How today's pop couluter is actually making us smarter.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573223077/qid=1126156182/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6182509-5813664?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
A book review:
Read this book today. Literally. Took about two hours. It's a great light read.
Basic thesis: the complexity of modern life and pop culture is such that it requires more work of a person's mind, and as such raises the IQ of people in places with such media.
Video games increase our problem solving skills, TV dramas stretch our ability to connect disparate bits of data, and the internet gives us a million avenues to think and work (often on the pop culture in front of us).
He theorizes the existence of a "Sleeper Curve" (a reference to the Woody Allen movie usually remembered for the "sex" scene in the orgasmatron). The Sleeper curve basically posits that the over-all quality of pop culture has improved to the point that it makes us smarter to watch it. Even our crap (Survivor, Quake II) is magnitudes better than the crap of yesteryear, and our good stuff is really good stuff.
He makes some good arguments, and I tend to be sympathetic to the idea (hey, we're gamers here after all). The book, however, is tantalizingly slim. At only about 200 pages, it's a brisk read, and I wish he had further developed what was a throw away line abour 4/5 in:
The raising of IQ is only in the middle portion.
Basically, he posits a rightward shift of the bell curve because the pop culture work-out isn't that strenuous, so the 150 IQ people aren't affected by it (kind of like an athlete doesn't get fit by playing golf), and the left side of the bell curve can't follow it, but the middle of the bell curve gets better, shifting a huge portion of the curve to the right.
That is actually more than is in the book right there. I wish he'd developed this idea more.
Light read, but something most of us might appreciate (and use to justify ourselves to bewildered friends, co-workers. girlfriends...)
3.5 of 5 stars.
_________________
"Politics is the Art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, misdiagnosing the problem, and applying the wrong solution."
-Groucho Marx
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