The main point of this article, Put Down That Game Controller: Researcher Suggests Video Games May Not Boost Cognition, is that we should pay attention to the ways in which social scientists recruit participants in their study. The argument is that earlier researchers claiming to find improvements in such attributes as hand-eye coordination from frequent playing of video games had biased their results by recruiting ads which disproportionately drew test subjects already highly skilled in video games. This would be akin to recruiting NFL players for a study of the effects of frequent and intense exercise and practice at athletic skills and then concluding that such exercise and practice will raise you, the ordinary Joe, to a high level as an athlete. Chances are that guy from the Redskins was born a better athlete than you. His exercise and practice will help him compete with other talented athletes while yours would be a waste of time above what is needed for your desired level of fitness.
Sometimes a researcher has to accept certain biases in his study population or unusual conditions in the setting of the research. This should be considered by way of strong and properly worded qualifications in any summaries of results. And sometimes biased results provide good and important scientific information. Interviews with men coming out of intense combat can help in the development of programs to reduce chances of various psychological problems, but it should be taken only as an indication of the state of a human being in extreme circumstances. Moreover, the psychological conditions of such men might vary according not only to personal attributes but also to upbringing and to the general attitudes of their culture and age. The river rats of the valleys of New England and the Highlanders of Scotland both considered it a simple matter of course that they had to strip naked from the waist down to pass through rivers in cold weather — wet clothes during a New England winter or much of the year in the Highlands could kill. Fathers in some cultures, such as the Roman Republic, raise their sons to a harsh and demanding code, teaching them not to compromise no matter the suffering or even the chances of death. Fathers of the modern West have tended to step back and let their sons be shaped by public schools and the entertainment industry.
My current lines of thought lead me to think there are two problem areas in studying human beings:
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Even when a study is properly qualified, we should read about it under the understanding that human beings are of a very diverse sort within the general constraints of human nature. This is very, very likely the result of an evolutionary history during which exuberant and optimistic human animals were often able to take hold of opportunities but depressed and pessimistic human animals were right often enough that the genes for those traits also remained in family lines.
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A human being has a certain rough shape from his genes and other preconditions, but he will be shaped in responses to our environments — the shaping process goes much better with active and even exploratory responses. In many of the specifics of our general human characteristics, we who grew up in the 20th century are more than a little different from the human beings of ancient Greece and from those of New Guinea in the 1400s. That’s not all bad though it’s likely we’ve adopted some of the gentler virtues while giving up on some of those necessary for the hard times which are coming.
We need to continue gathering factual information on human nature with the goal of creating true knowledge, that is, a wider and deeper vision, of that factual information. That wider and deeper vision can come only from when the knowledge from scientific studies is merged with the knowledge of history, including the knowledge of literature and of philosophical thought through time. Right now, I’m working on the goal of providing richer and more complex tools for understanding human nature, individual and communal. Those tools may come from various sources, but I’m starting with the goal of enriching our geometric talk about paths through life and about our various sorts of abstract relationships. I don’t think Euclidean relationships come close to describing the relationships of our modern complex, rich lives and communities.
My arguments for the unity of knowledge aren’t just some sort of blue-sky vision. I’m not looking at the clouds and ignoring the hazards on the ground in front of me. Rather am I claiming that we can’t even truly understand the knowledge gained in particular realms unless we have that wider and deeper knowledge which can mature into a greater understanding of our world or even all of Creation.