Interesting Links for 24-11-2017

[andrewducker]

Tesla completes world's largest lithium ion battery in Australia

(tags: australia batteries power )

How to read reviews

(tags: reviews games )

The Conservatives are the party of high UK borrowing and low debt repayment

(tags: conservatives money fail )

It’s called effective altruism – but is it really the best way to do good?

(tags: altruism effectiveness charity )

SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased against SF you will read SF stupidly.

(tags: scifi reading psychology )

The Financial Realities of Going Viral

(tags: money Fame viral )

"My Apology to Naomi Wu and the Make Community"

Good Lord. An _actual_ apology!
(tags: apology sexism Technology china usa )

Why the UK will not be speaking Arabic in a decade.

(tags: language uk arabic immigration )

A History of Music, through the medium of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky"

(tags: music history )

'I'm not going to listen to you any more' - Confronting an avatar on a computer screen helped patients hearing voices to cope better with schizophrenic hallucinations

(tags: schizophrenia avatars hallucinations )

What's going on in Saudi Arabia (an interview with the crown prince)

(tags: saudiarabia )

Call of Duty: WW2's takes a huge step in rendering faces

(tags: faces graphics games )

Medical Marijuana users reduce their opioid consumption dramatically

(tags: marijuana drugs pain )

Observations of an ex pat: The Middle East explained

(tags: middle_east )

Chess, memory training and music just make you better at chess, memory training and music

(tags: games memory music psychology learning )

Why I wish Kez Dugdale well for her jungle stint

(tags: labour tv scotland )

Comments

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[aldabra]

I'm not convinced that it's "stupid" to read SF stupidly. I think putting the same story in an unfamiliar context increases the amount of work it takes to understand it, and so decreases the expected net reward from reading it. It's rational to put less effort into tasks with lower expected reward, and in this case the study participants are right because the alien setting has no material effect on the story; it's gratuitous unfamiliarity with no telos.

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[jack]

I think that's true, and I should have qualified that in my answer. I don't think that was the right way to describe the effect (although if they've read some of the thinkpieces about how scifi is shit because it's not litfic, I understand why they were primed to be unfair).

But it's not necessarily the case that a book is less valuable if it's harder; only if the extras are not valuable. I'm not sure how much someone who's never been exposed to scifi would benefit from being exposed to those concepts: I guess being exposed to the concept of a space station or an android is really good in its own right, but absorbing the genre conventions that don't necessarily have anything in common with what's possible, but just happen to be what anglophone scifi has somewhat converged on, isn't.

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[aldabra]

Yes; I love the scope SF gives for warping time and space and consciousness. I think you can do a lot with that which you can't do with litfic, and those are the kinds of ideas I'm interested in. (But I've actively backed off from the space opera and tech-progress porn, because it annoys me too much.)

On the other hand, I'm quite sure that if someone gave me cat detective fiction, or Elizabethan court intrigue fiction, to read I would read it "stupidly", and I'm not convinced that's a bad strategy *even if it's intrinsically as well-written as anything else I read*. Whereas with my current genre of choice, which is deindustrial SF, I probably read it *less* stupidly than it objectively deserves, because those are the settings and counterfactual possibilities I'm most interested in.

I think having genre-preferences is inevitable, under the current proliferation of books such that you can't possibly read everything you might want to even within a genre, and I can see how one might decide sensibly that aliens aren't one's priority. (Though it's harder to see how one decides sensibly that cat detectives are...)

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[naath]

ebut cats! I think I read most things equally stupidly, I'm not interested in doing litcrit, I just want to have fun.

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[aldabra]

Ha, yes, it was exactly you I was expecting to call me out on dissing cats and Elizabethan court intrigue 8-)

I've read the odd self-published thing which switches genre midway through, in a way which no self-respecting publisher would allow. It certainly wakes you up. (Unfortunately they have a tendency also to misuse punctuation in a way which no self-respecting publisher would allow, and I'm irredeemably twitchy about that.)