I Question The Causality
Lifted from the comments, a teacher tells us things:
Oh, honey. No. https://t.co/cPpIjk02Rv
— Overeducated Gibbon (@MostlyMonkey) June 11, 2025
A thread ensues, from which:
Is it enough to just own the books? Researchers aren’t yet sure.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Er what?
People once again failing to see the difference between correlation and causation…
Well, indeed. It seems a little more plausible that the advantage lies in having parents who own, and indeed read, a lot of books, and who [whispers] pass on their genes. Not just the proximity of the books. Or whether the quantity of nearby books lies between 200 and 350.
But it’s interesting how the cultivated habit of avoiding obvious realities – say, with regard to educational performance – can be quite entrenched.
She’s a teacher, you know.
Also this.
not sure if this is the original, but worth a visit in the same vein
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/discover
It also occurs to me that a child’s educational attainment might have something to do with whether their teachers make the kind of assumptions noted above, with the worldview that implies.
Or pass on the meme. Kids see their parents and seek to emulate them. Parents with a propensity to read around their kids, planting the idea that reading is something worthwhile and enjoyable to do, tend to have more books…
Not just the proximity of the books. Or whether the quantity of nearby books lies between 200 and 350.
Also, the quality of books. If most or all the books are rubbish like Das Kapital, Anti Racist Baby, or anything by John Maynard Keynes, the child is more likely to become an ignorant, embittered blue haired harpy and/or a “journalist”, than a kid raised with Sowell, Churchill, and VDH.
Speaking of ignorant journalists (BIRM) and Levantine goings-on one asks, “How dare you?!”
“Almost certain.” “The depravity.”
“The depravity.”
Well yeah, a cheap seat next to the loos, the bastards.
Humanitarians would have respected her views and put her in a small boat that could either be rowed or mount a crude sail. Worked for Bligh, after all.
[ Starts compiling Friday’s Ephemera. ]
[ Muffled chuckling. ]
It’s the “see the problem?”
Is today’s word ‘irony’?
Cargo cult.
Academia has become a cargo cult.
Termites everywhere.
Depravity? Seriously? Did they put her in coach?
Oh, wait, Muldoon says that’s just what happened. Surrounded by peasants. Packed in like the poor. The indignity. The shame.
I onli has 187 buks nad it mek me no do gud at skewl.
An AI meme circulating in Israel/Jewish circles shows poor Grrreta stuck in Economy class between a bearded hassidic couple and their many wailing children.
When books and reading to your kids are brought up, progs claim that the poor cannot afford books. Well, when my kids were little their appetite for us reading to them was prodigious, so every week we brought home a stack of books from the library. You know, that place full of books that you can borrow for free. We have also found tons of children’s books at garage sales and Goodwill stores for like 10 cents each.
And yes, causation backwards. Just like the mayor of LA saying that all Trump has to do to stop the riots is call off ICE. By the way, she openly met with the NGOs that organized the ongoing riots to help them get organized (e.g., by staging pallets of cement blocks, by organizing spotters to find ICE in the process of doing raids). Since these rioters have tried to kill cops by dropping cement blocks on their cars from overpasses (etc), isn’t this a conspiracy by Bass to commit assault and murder?
I grew up in a house with no bookcases or indeed books. I do, however, remember many hours of trudging to and from the library.
No wait, that’s not quite true. There was, I discovered, as a wee seedling, and while exploring an old, neglected sideboard, a tiny pocket dictionary, seemingly unused, and a book on erotic yoga.
Whether that had ever been used is a question I’ve tried not to ponder.
See also, “poverty causes crime,” “my child is trans,” and “my dog is vegan.”
According to the left, certain inanimate objects, like guns, have the innate ability to do good or mischief without human contact. Add books to the list.
If the poor can’t figure out how to get ID to vote how do you expect them to get a library card? /sarc
My mother was a Library Technician. We had hundreds of books in our house. She would bring home books that had been discarded by the library that still had the index number on the spine. If there had been book police they’d have been awfully suspicious based on what was in our closets.
Oh my, feeling my age … icon of my youth, Brian Wilson, has passed.
[ Pours Darleen a large one, fetches ashtray of oddly dusty boiled sweets. ]
Do the Reader’s Digest condensed book sets my parents bought count?
Wilson was a buddy of Charles Manson at one point, apparently.
Or the World Book Encyclopedia. I know a lot about everything but only up to the letter P.
Oh my, feeling my age … icon of my youth, Brian Wilson, has passed.
I thought he was already dead, TBH.
Martha’s Vineyard residents are unhappy with the Trump administration deporting illegal immigrants from their liberal enclave, The Washington Post reported this week.
“The hydrangeas need their Ph balanced and the kids picked up from dance class! Who’s going to do that now?!?!”
My Amazon package is four stops away.
Just sayin’.
Drain cleaner and fridge deodorisers, since you ask.
Stay tuned for updates.
What kind of delivery service tells you how many stops away they are?
All I ever see in package tracking is “out for delivery”.
[ Strokes Amazon app. ]
Yes, but only half the normal credit.
Double credit for the Folger Shakespeare editions.
One stop.
The app gives more tracking information than the Amazon website?
There’s a map and a moving blob.
At Christmas, the moving blob is a jolly Santa sleigh.
[ Unpacks fridge deodorisers, attempts to suppress biohazard cheeses. ]
2 years ago, a team of Yale econ professors hacked a forum to deanonymize thousands of users they disagreed with. The Trump administration has assigned a Special Agent to investigate — and has launched a federal probe.
This is good news.
Wouldn’t it be sweet if such investigations ended up sending thousands of “liberal” university professors to prison?
If it’s an Amazon delivery truck, you get that information. If Amazon is using other shippers (UPS or USPS) you only get whatever info those delivery sites give you.
If would be just if they were sent to prison. It would be sweet if their available media was limited to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams.
And all they can listen to are compilations of the best of Rush Limbaugh.
A generalization. My particular case, while my parents encouraged reading, they themselves didn’t read much. Readers’ Digest, newspapers, etc. but I cannot recall ever seeing my mother or father reading a novel unless Mom was reading Johnathan Livingston Seagull to my sister. And pretty much that was it. We never had anywhere near 200 books in the house. Not sure where we would have put them. We had reference books, dictionary (unabridged and weighed a ton), encyclopedia, etc. maybe, maaaaybe 50-75, if that…counting each World Book Encyclopedia volume individually. I read a lot of paperback novels, spy novels mostly, but also a good bit of C.S. Lewis, Twain, Jack London, Dickens, Jack Kerouac, etc. In later years deeper and older stuff, a little Tolstoy, some philosophy, etc. My father retired and read a lot almost exclusively non-fiction. I suspect that he was more inspired by me to read. Though I suspect he had a lingering curiosity about American history and some Christianity that he was too busy raising a couple of stupid kids to allow himself to pursue until retirement. As I have now retired, I rarely read much of anything anymore because our libraries are shit. I have decided to start (re-)building my own library of somewhat classic literature. Recently acquired a collection of Dostoyevsky’s short stories, I scour the antique stores in the mountains here searching for books worth reading. Which sadly, isn’t much.
While inclined to agree, there are worse books. Much worse. They are the BS novels and such whose authors have digested the Marx and Keynes etc. and spit them back out as The Pelican Brief, Sexus/Nexus/Plexus, etc. and especially the stupid, stupid movies of at least the last quarter century. At least Marx and Keynes present themselves as the shallow thinkers that they themselves are. Less glitz and glory of their own anyway. Well, a little less.
I think that was just his brother Dennis. The one who couldn’t swim…drunk anyway. Dennis was way messed up but I think Brian did get involved with trying to help Dennis. It’s all long ago mythology but I think I have the basics correct.
Before we got our WBE, my mother would order every free encyclopedia where they would give you the first volume free. I know an inordinate amount about things beginning with the letter A.
A fair question.
Eriksen’s Rule of Label Symmetry