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Books: Making People Stupider

by:Pox

2013/05/05

If you're online for any amount of time, you'll eventually come across images like these:

The message is always roughly the same: People who read books have great imaginations, are smarter and totally know everything about the world! Wow! Isn't that great? Invariably, those pictures are posted by people who read NOTHING BUT FICTION. Ask them what their favourite books are and behold, it's all bullshit Twilight and Harry Potter. I can't imagine how much smarter you've become since you read those! Please stay away from the physics lab or else no one will ever be able to get a Nobel prize ever again if they have to compete with YOUR super massive expanded mind!

Just out of curiosity, what DO people read?

Yep, not only are the best-selling books mostly fiction, which won't make you any smarter than watching Spongebob, but some of them will MAKE YOU STUPIDER. "Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus" is plain old bullshit pandering to angry women and "The Secret" was so famously stupid that it got its own Family Guy episode to mock it.

THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE ARE READING!

Oh it gets better!

Those are the top downloaded / pirated audiobooks on ThePirateBay.com. That's right, this is what the most savvy internet users are reading. You can notice a hearty dose of books on self-esteem or how to pick up women, all of which can be boiled down to one single sentence: Stop being a pussy and go talk to people.

There is literally not one single book on that list that will make you smarter or improve your life. In fact, again, some of them are pure bullshit:

What the hell is wrong with you people???

I love this one ( especially given the irony that people get this AS AN AUDIOBOOK):

Here's how you double your reading speed in 0 minutes:

Yeah guess what, I can get through Lord of the Rings a lot quicker by watching the movies than you can by reading it, no matter how many god-awful poems and songs you skip. Comics are also the most efficient form of communication ever. Did you ever read a comic? It takes about 5 minutes for what translates to a 20 minutes tv show. Comics aren't burdened by time, you can visually understand a scene without actually having to sit through it, it's so damn awesome. In a book you have to read not only about what's happening but also what people are saying, thinking, doing and what everything looks like. In a comic, you get all the visual information in an instant and you can read the text faster than actors can say it.

But who's telling you to read comics to become smarter? If you compare the best-selling comics, which are ALL fiction, with the best-selling books, which are like 50% total lies and bullshit, on average you will be much smarter reading comics instead of books. Not because you read comics but because you don't read wish-thinking garbage.

YOU SUCK AT IMAGINATION

People say that books develop the imagination. For starters, I have no idea how you measure that or how that would be useful for your daily life as a secretary or a janitor. You think reading Lord of the Rings is going to make you an awesome lateral-thinking chemist? Even though IQ and intelligence are largely genetic and achievements are predicted almost entirely by hard work?

Watch movies.

Better than your imagination.

Why? Because they are made by people who are better at imagination than you. Sure, it's fun to cook from time to time, but if you could have most of your meals delivered to you by a team of chefs and nutritionists for free every day, why the fuck wouldn't you? Who'd turn that down?

That's what movies are when compared to books. Yeah books are a little more effort and you get to read it your own way, but you can't do it better than the pros. You're not creative. Your job isn't to be creative. What you will come up with will be worse than what people who are paid to do it will come up with. Have you any idea how much work goes into developing the visuals for a movie? There's dozens of people who rack their brains day-in day-out for months just to come up with the smallest details so it all looks perfect. Why do you rely on a professional for writing but you shun them when it comes time to make music, dialogue, costumes, sets, sound effects etc.?

TV vs Books

You just got stupider by reading that comic strip! Woo!

Pictures that espouse the greatness of books while denigrating television just shit on an entire industry of actually creative and imaginative people. What are people even watching on TV?

Most watched shows on Tv.com

1.Grey's Anatomy
2. Game of Thrones
3. NCIS
4. The Big Bang Theory
5. How I Met Your Mother
6. Supernatural
7. The Vampire Diaries
8. Criminal Minds
9. Arrow
10. The Following
11. Bones
12. The Mentalist
13. Castle
14. Person of Interest
15. Revenge
16. Grimm
17. Once Upon a Time
18. Doctor Who
19. The Good Wife
20. Family Guy

Once again, all fiction. So that's BETTER than the books since at least these tv shows won't make you dumber.

WHAT YOU SHOULD READ

There's endless amazing books out there, but people aren't reading them.

This book should be mandatory reading in every school but instead we waste our kid's precious time with Shakespeare. Wow really? Fucking Shakespeare? Romeo and Juliet? How does reading that not make a kid stupider? And why read "To Kill a Mockingbird" when there's a movie of it that's much more memorable? In the time you waste reading the book you could have watched 12 Angry Men, Schindler's List, Spartacus and Paths of Glory, all movies with just as much value and important life lessons. Everyone always complains about the school system but why doesn't this ever come up? In fact they want EVEN MORE reading of nonsensical old timey bullshit that has no relevance to anything. Why not just listen to Ted Talks instead?

READING IS A BAD WAY TO LEARN

To top it all off, reading is one of the worst way to learn anything.

http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/art-retain-learning/
90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.
75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.
50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.
30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration.
20% of what they learn from audio-visual.
10% of what they learn when they�ve learned from reading.
5% of what they learn when they�ve learned from lecture.

Got that? Reading is twice as shitty for learning than just watching a movie.

I have owned books so hard. Well not literally because owning a book is a huge waste of space. What are you supposed to do with it once you're done? I know some people with big collections of books that just take up an entire wall. It's garbage, throw it out, there's tablets now, it's all digital. Have you ever tried getting rid of unwanted books? It's a nightmare, no one wants them. You'll be lucky to get a buck for a book you paid 20$ for.

Anyway, next time you see someone extoll the virtues of reading books, ask them what they're reading and then make fun of them because it'll probably be fantasy or science-fiction anyway. If it's a book about hypnosis then just slowly walk away and delete the person from Facebook.

Look I have nothing against reading or books. Read books all you like but don't pretend like you're some erudite cultured genius because you read Harry Potter 3 times before watching the movies. Books are entertainment, but on a level bellow almost every other forms of entertainment today so really, shut the fuck up already with your books, you're not fooling anyone. <3

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