Letters to the Editor
-
I have yet to meet a gamer...
...that does anything but sit on his fat ass and play games.
So this guy writes a book justifying sitting on his ass playing games and all the gamers think he's a god. Big fucking deal. This is just the electronic equivalent of bread and circuses.
-
Everything Bad
Children are spending over 4 hours per day watching TV. The science has been conclusive that this is not a good thing. The more a child watches TV, the more likely he/she is to fail in school, be obese, and be aggressive. This is based on over 40 years of research, so when Steven Johnson's book "Everything Bad Is Good for You" came out I was very curious.
His book got almost universal good reviews, so I was very interested to know what scientific studies he was basing his assertion on (that TV makes you smarter). As it turns out, he references a number of studies showing that video games improve certain brain skills, even intelligence, but he references absolutely none for TV. Presumably he looked, and was unable to find any studies to support his stunning assertion. But was this enough to get him to rethink his position? Or even enough to decide that perhaps it would be irresponsible to make such an fact-free argument to a huge audience of parents and future parents?
Apparently not.
"Everything Bad Is Good for You" has been widely read and read about. Who knows the number of parents who have decided to stop feeling guilty about the amount of TV their kids watch, and instead to encourage them to watch even more (to make them smarter). Steven Johnson should be ashamed.
-
I love the logic in the first post.
It's my favorite thing about the Internet.
"This is my tiny little personal experience and I therefore generalize it to everyone. And if you don't agree with me you're stupid." Except "you're" is usually spelled "your."
I'm an avid gamer. I also work professionally in linguistics and education and am getting a master's degree in teaching. Oh, and I'm female. And over 30. And I hit the gym twice a week. And my friends are over 30, with lives and significant others and...they're gamers. Oh NOES!!!1!!!one!!
I can guarantee the anonymous "person of merit" below will claim I'm lying.
Anyway, blueskies' point is better made and better taken. Interesting take on Johnson's book, which I haven't read yet. It would be nice if people read it with as critical an eye as you did.
-
Bottom-up vs top-down
A pretty minor quibble about this otherwise interesting article:
The development that Steven's father's talking about was planned. This has nothing at all to do with "bottom-up" or "top-down". There was a plan to build a road precisely where they drove. There was a plan to allow (and encourage) that kind of development of strip malls. It probably was not a very well thought out plan, but it was a plan.
Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) is an excellent read and goes into this in more detail and more eloquantly than I could.
What she would say is that the atrocity that is often called suburban sprawl has been guided by design policies that favor the car for the past 70+ years. Simply put, remove the road and there would be no strip malls. Of course it's not that simple---we need roads to move goods and people. But, the plans must bubble from bottom up, be sifted through and implemented top down.
-
The letter writer
equates watching television with playing video games...?
Thats like the difference between supporting the troops vs going to Iraq with your vest and weapon...no relation whatsoever.
human eats, human runs, human masterbates, human gets cancer, runing, eating, and masterbating cause cancer, no, yes, ? life causes cancer...
what was my point...
I am therefore I don't need one.
-
New York as Green model?
I'll start by saying that I greatly appreciate Mr. Johnson's books. I think it is important that more of us participate in solving our problems. However, more consideration needs to be given to the idea that New York or other similar cities are somehow models of a green ideal.
New York couldn't survive without New Jersey, much of which has been laid to waste by NY's appetites. I have never seen evidence of any food being grown in NYC, with the exception of a few small community gardens. All of the massive quantities of consumables used by New Yorkers are brought in from the outside and it doesn't come via mass transit. Ditto for the garbage exported daily. More than 4 million tons of it is produced each year and trucked out to landfills up to 400 miles away. And, as great as the subway system is, it still cannot put a dent in the number of carbon based vehicles above ground.
I love this city and agree that it is a modern marvel. I just don't think it's current iteration should be viewed as a model for the future. We can do much better.
-
superstition vs science
Dan Umanoff, M.D.
National Association for the Advancement and Advocacy of Addicts, Inc.
The cholera epidemic in London could have been solved earlier had the work of Ignaz Semmelweis been known to Londoners. However, to the detriment of the public the medical establishment put their superstitious beliefs (miasma) and pride ahead of their prime objective, to help people. This has been called the Semmelweis reflex where authority has more power than valid science.
Is this happening today? Yes. The field of addictionology is a prime example where a strongly believed though thoroughly disproven superstitious paradigm (theory), the hijacked brain hypothesis, rules the field and all associated policies (prevention, treatment, public policy-drug war) despite the impotence of these policies. Because of this the addiction epidemic continues to grow unabated. This is all discussed scientifically in my web paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , and book, Hypoic's Handbook, two works that have been ignored and censored by the addictionology establishment and the media since it was first elaborated in 1992. The reaction to this work and results of its censorship have been essentially the same as that of similarly ignored correct science-based paradigms, disaster on a grand scale. We haven't come too far from 1850's London I'm afraid. This will turn out to be the most egregious medical scandal of all time when it's finally known.
"Love is an action not a feeling.
Integrity is an action not a thought.
Anything less is too little." ---
Dan F. Umanoff, M.D.
Author of Hypoic's Handbook - The Hypoism Paradigm of Addiction.
http://www.hypoism.com
President and founder of The National Association for the Advancement and Advocacy of Addicts, Inc. (N4A), a not-for-profit 501 (c) (3) organization of addicts for addicts offering free educational and legal services to discriminated against and abused addicts of all varieties, "substances" and "behavioral," and their families.
http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thenationalassociationfortheadvancementandadvocacyofaddicts/
8779 Misty Creek Dr.
Sarasota, FL 34241
941-929-0893