Frayn's 'The Tin Men'

Michael Frayn has written a funny and, according to P. G. Woodhouse, 'brilliant' book about the absurd workings of the modern university, where academia and administration are merged into a strange mutant. The Tin Men is a competent, workmanlike novel...Now, enough of this. What was it really like to read The Tin Men?

The book is short and witty, a good easy reading for long and tiring periods. Frayn's humor is great, but the novel becomes at some points monotonous. The plot doesn't propel itself forward, rather it is noticeably driven by the need to make more puns.

Some of the scenes would probably work better on film, being shorter and quicker and aided by mimicry and gestures from a good author. This is surely true of the ending of the novel, which is mostly filled with the running around of high-profile people, who are act like lunatics. Maybe in a movie one would be inclined to laugh all the way through, but during the slower experience of reading through the pages at some point one cannot resists asking the question: is this still funny? I mean, these aren't confused people, these are madman.

The lack of satisfaction I felt after finishing the book might have been caused by too high expectations on my part. I read Frayn's 'Copenhagen' with great pleasure, and that's much more the sort of work I prefer. I thought a book by him, that picks up the topics of ethics and artificial intelligence, would contain a much more sophisticated treatment of some of the main problems in these fields, even if only at the level of mentioning them in jokes.

Some of the passages where Frayn makes fun of the wannabe-writer Rowe are hilarious: Rowe begins by writing the reviews that will appear about his work first, and then goes on to write the novel itself, and subsequently commits all the mistakes typical of ambitious amateurs.

Altogether I would recommend the book, but it's not the sort of classic in humor that Douglas Adams is, nor the vivid painter of still human absurd like Joseph Heller, nor the genius of short grotesque like Istvan Orkeny, or the intellectually very fine-tuned works of Thomas Bernhard.

The Istvan Lovas scandal - should they eat shit?

Good ol' Hungary is at it again. Or at least Istvan Lovas is, one of the Brussels correspondents of the daily paper Magyar Nemzet (translating into Hungarian Nation), which is heavily leaning towards the current Fidesz-KDNP Government.

The story in a nutshell: Lovas wrote an e-mail to the journalists responsible for covering Hungarian events on international level, complaining that whereas they vividly depict the 'supposed' wrongdoings of the governing party, they don't inform the rest of the EU about any of the scandals the former governing party MSZP gets involved in. He ends his short rant by recommending the aforementioned media workers to eat shit.

You can see a Hungarian article on the scandal here:

http://atlatszo.blog.hu/2013/10/29/egyetek_szart_seggfejek_lovas_istvan_a_kulfoldi_tudositoknak

The page also contains Lovas's e-mail in English.

Truth be told: Lovas is right that the MSZP's affairs don't get much publicity nowadays aboard. But I think he is wrong about the reasons for this. Lovas implies that the Hungarian correspondents prefer MSZP and other parties in contrast to Fidesz-KDNP. That's bollocks. When MSZP was the ruling party international media was quick to deliver news about their wrongdoings. This happened both when the police reacted in a brutal way to some of the anti-government protests that sprung up after the 1956 ceremonies. Same thing applies to the case of ex-president Gyurcsany when someone got a recording of him beginning a speech addressed to his fellow MSZP members at a party meeting beginning thus: "We fucked up. We were lying in the morning, at noon, and in the evening."

There are two reasons why no one writes about MSZP but there is some coverage of the work of Fidesz-KDNP. First, Hungary is a small, quite insignificant country. Not too many care about news about the shady activities and mistakes of one of the opposition parties. Second, whereas MSZP's activity mainly harms Hungarians, the current Fidesz-KDNP government openly engages in anti-EU populist propaganda, took on board a very risky economic strategy to ease the debt situation of the country (we still don't see whether it will work or not), and they introduced modifications in the constitution and media law which can be used to the advantages of the governing party. These four things both go against much of mainstream EU thinking and values, and also openly engage with many of the EU's leading thinkers and politicians in a hostile way. Thus, they are more interesting as news material, more controversial and get more attention.

Lovas's character has often come under attack during the last few years. I think he is one of those people who openly engage in party rhetoric and do not even take the trouble of trying to appear balanced or impartial. In fact, this attitude gains him much popularity among far-right readers and the xenophobes. I think what makes his case really bad is that he knows the rules of the game very well, but pretends not to, pretends to be honest.

People like him are no use for Hungary, and not even for his party. He is a great example of those who - instead of trying to work at developing the country, gaining new opportunities, opening up and winning over territories in economic fields - are just satisfied with barking as loud as they can around the quarters of their masters, securing whatever personal gain they can, not caring for the consequences.

Does the untold speak? - How important is the unwritten in literature?

Sometimes it is hard to pin down what a book tells you. There are very straightforward books. Such are the ones where the writer tells you what his or her characters think, feel, want, and then also what happens to them, what they perceive, and maybe also tells you the author's/narrator's personal opinion.

But even with such pieces of writing it might happen that the structure also communicates something. You have to pay attention to what is said, in what order it is said.

Now, the most difficult thing is to understand that what is untold. Why certain things are left out. Or don't make sense. Or seem absurd.

An easy read is Joseph Heller's Catch 22. The narrator is also a character. We get an outer point of view of his actions, but can also, as it were, peak behind the curtains and see into his thoughts, etc. Also, we are given pointers to what unifies the narrative. The absurdity of the situation in which the soldiers live from they to day is often stressed. The lack of good planning and care for them as human beings is made fun of in the form of characters (Scheisskopf, the generals), and said explicitly.

But what about novels where much is left unsaid and leaving it unsaid if meaningful? I often asked this question since reading many post-1950 books. John Barth, in his Lost in the Funhouse, makes fun of making the narrative painstakingly explicit and self-reflexive. The story is not bad either, the fun made of the writing style is great too, and there is also a third, extra layer, delicious to lovers of literature, where the story (the little boy gets lost in the funhouse) interacts with the readers' being lost in the text which makes use of all the tools available to a writer of a prosaic short story.

Then again there are minimalists on the other end. In Brat Easton Ellis's books we often get a first person view of the world surrounding the protagonist. The descriptions of the world by these characters are usually very quick, very superficial, oriented toward looks, status symbols, media labels - the anchors of their fleeting attention, the lighthouses of their shallow but dangerous worlds. By making his characters so hostile to any deeper penetration into their inner Ellis creates a convincing illusion of both of having to do with such a person, and makes us feel a bit sorry for them. The people in his stories do not think or feel certain things, because they are not even able to. They don't have the conceptual skills, the mental sophistication, the psychological health and stability, the support from friends and family. What Ellis never writes about tells us a lot about the sadness of the lives of his characters.

It is noteworthy how certain important layers of life are absent from his characters's views (for example in The Informers, Less than Zero, Luna Park). The only novel where the political and the international aspects of the world manage to get a hold on the protagonist is Glamorama. Even in this case, due to the characters lack of any experience in the above mentioned domains, he is wholly unable to handle his life as it is suddenly flooded by life and death questions in the realms of politics. One might almost think that Ellis points out how easy it is to manipulate people in questions of international politics, how easy it is to make them back up terrible ideas.

György Dragomán's book The White King is also an interesting specimen. The book tells the story of a little boy growing up in the 1950's-1960's of Russian occupied Communist Hungary. The stories are first touching, interesting, but certain scenes become more and more absurd. By the end of the book it is clear that the narrator couldn't have grasped things in the way and on the level he did - there is too much knowledge about politics, everyday reality pervading the story. At the same time it also becomes evident that the child's accounts of violence that he encounters (getting beaten by the football trainer, being attacked by knife-yielding neighbor kids, etc.) cannot be true. One might at this point get frustrated and after finishing the book discard it as a bad one. But if one gives it a second thought it becomes obvious that the title does not just refer to the narrator's absent father. It also refer's to Lewis Carroll's White Queen. The whole story is a dream, made up of the memories of the now grown up writer from his childhood, made more radical and terrible by his childhood fears, and mixed with his present knowledge about the tyrannical system. Dragomán never tells us this explicitly. The way we can understand is by considering the narrative, the events and their likelihood.

In the above mentioned cases this kind of 'read-it-out-somehow-without-being-told' method works well. But a really popular and recently read book puzzles me. The piece is Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds. The book is a nice one. Not very powerful, not as grasping as some others telling of terrible things. The reason why it isn't? Because we never really understand why Bartle and Sterling dropped Murph's body into the river. We never get told what moved Bartle to write the letter to the dead soldiers mother. We never get told what he got the prison sentence for.

First these instances didn't bother me. The book has enough content to carry you on without getting stuck. Some parts are so sad and expressive that they almost hurt. But then, at the end one asks some questions inevitably. Like 'How does this all add up?'

I read a review where the author thought that they do not. And that is a weakness of the novel. I admit, that was my first thought too. But then again, might it not be that Powers does not want to be one of the all-knowing narrators filling out the gaps in the consciousness and memory of his own characters to enlighten us of their inner working. It very well might. After all I can imagine Bartle as being shocked, tired, frightened. As being not that sophisticated. As not being in an environment that fosters reflexivity.

The question is, how sophisticated a writer is Powers? Can it be that the seeming incoherence and lack of explanation present at key points of the story is actually meant to make us aware that war and its effects do not fit our usual narratives neatly? That we will have to learn to accept that justification and explanation might be absent in strange ways from the actions and emotions of others?

I think such a lesson would be very valuable. Of course it does not matter much whether Powers intended to have this message or not. As anyone with a bit of skill in enjoying artworks knows the author's intentions only matter to a very restricted degree. We have to evaluate the work as it is. For me, this book achieved this feat. But I can imagine books better written, achieving this in an even more enjoyable and easy-to-grasp way.

On war

A powerful passage from Powers's book:

"Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught you whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but the then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever an yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done (...)" pp. 144-145.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

At the recommendation of a friend I acquired Kevin Powers' critically acclaimed 2012 book based on his experiences as a soldier in Iraq. I'm halfway through and this is what I can tell so far: the book offers one of those feelings for which I love literature. You just don't feel like putting it down. You want to linger in its world a little longer. You just want it to go on, and are already afraid that it will eventually end. You fear for the characters.

This book is well written, it has a good tempo, a healthy mixture of action-scenes, introspective-scenes, descriptions of characters and settings.

Also, what I just realized is that to be a soldier today for a Western person must be a terribly sad thing. A stupefying experience, except maybe if you are very rough. But as the reactions of most soldiers show they have lots of inner bruises to hide.   

Hope and Self-delusion

As Philippa Foot writes in one of her essays, hope is one of the virtues, and it is something important as it helps stick through hard times and great challenges. I like this thought. A hopeful person is probably less prone to be negative, and thus less likely to give up to early, to not to support her community in the face of difficult times. 

Another advantage of hopefulness might be that such a person might offer support to others. A hopeful person may be less prone to go 'all apeshit', as they say, and overreact when getting bad news. This way he doesn't strengthen the feeling of the person who trust's him with her problem that the problem is very bad. A hopeful person might provide calm advice, some supportive words, and maybe also a few practical ideas or good questions that point the way to a solution.

So, is hope all rosy? Not exactly. There are two things that matter. Hope can be exercised too much or about the wrong subject, and also for the wrong reasons. If one is hopeful in situations when there is an obvious danger that needs to be averted, one can do serious damage by remaining inactive. That is a problem people often point out with Christians who rely on divine intervention instead of, for example, medical treatment. Such cases draw criticisms that the agent rejecting medical treatment is irrational, since they are too hopeful. Even if there is a helpful, intervening God (I entertain this only as a theoretical possibility) it is not sure that 1) it would help in such cases, 2) in this particular case, 3) it would not help by offering the chance to get medical help, etc.

George Frederic Watts: Hope (second version, 1886)

A case where hope could be warranted, but one can still be irrational for being hopeful, is the case of a father who has an alcoholic daughter. The father hopes that his daughter will recover. Good thing, and hope can be a useful motivating factor that fuels his continuous support even after the roughest atrocities. But if he is hopeful for the wrong reason, his hope won't help him act in the right way. For example he might be hopeful because he has read many self-help books. These suggest things like 'everyone goes through difficult times, and that's a lesson we all need to get', or 'people need to fight their demons alone, and they will emerge stronger', or even just reading proper work without adequate training, and misunderstanding it. E.g.: the dad 'diagnosis his daughter with bipolar disorder. In fact, that's not the problem at all. The man does not seek adequate help, or tries to support his daughter with the wrong methods. In such cases the hope that would be beneficial if had for the right reasons can turn against those who should gain by it.

Some cases of placing too much weight on hope are instances of self-delusion. No matter that people didn't interact successfully with others earlier by following a certain set of principles, they still carry on. They base their hope that things will work out for them on some mistaken view. They might think that it was just that they did not get the right people as partners in business, or did not marry the right man. They might even think that they should actually take a firmer stance, since things didn't work out as they wanted them to work out. 'Now, it's time I do things my own way.' Whereby this led to some of the problems earlier as well.

It seems then that for hope to be a virtue one needs to have some constraints on it. If one is hopeful one should always assess what warrants the hope. If one finds the reasons convincing then hope needs no questioning. Also, being self-delusional about one topic does not mean that one is such about everything. As with other virtues, exercising hope in the right way needs practice and learning. And most of us screw up quite a few times on the way.

Mistaken stereotypes about 'women logic'

I've just recently been to a coffee in town. At the table besides me a few engineers (young professionals, not students) were chatting. I overheard them entertaining each other with the difficulty of programming a robot which can understand 'woman's logic'. I guess in most cases it is actually quite easy to explain to people like them the lack of sophistication behind such a label. But just to make sure, here are a few easy pointers to why talk about 'woman's logic' (especially in a demeaning sense) is just plain stupidity.

We have different concepts of rationality. Some of these applies to the capacities we posses as the types of animals we are. Such are our basic spatial positioning skills, our mathematical logic, our abilities to make inferences based on evidence, our mathematical skills, our skills tracking regularities in changes, etc. These are not specific to any gender.

'Rationality' is sometimes also used to stand for intelligence. Intelligence is gender independent - you find researchers, doctors, engineers, skilled professionals, mechanics, soldiers, and pretty much anything - requiring skill and doing well at school - among female population. Of course this only applies to countries where woman are allowed to get schooling, and throughout their upbringing and schooling aren't held back by harmful stereotypes they are made to adhere to, or pressure from peers.

What female agents seem to be more prone to do is placing value on emotions, personal relations (especially kin relationships). I emphasize 'seem' because I'm almost sure that most males are worried about, care about, etc. much more than they admit. Even if not, the explicitness is a difference. By explicitness I mean things that males often consider repugnant about female behavior, and hence, use discriminating terms like 'woman's logic' to talk about them. (Quick additional remark: valuing emotions and stable relationships is crucial to society.)

Such cases of making something explicit are for example being often worried about health of family members, about their emotional balance, getting stressed by cheeky remarks, etc. I do not even mention cases when females ask a male 'Do you still love/Find me attractive/etc.?' If you don't understand such games, teasers and affectionate jokes, you are not yet mature enough for a relationship. Just say something nice, complementary, and funny. No need to think your girl is really worried, expect if you start taking the question seriously. After all, that sends the message: 'Oh, I really have to think about this.' Silly response, isn't it?

So, what about the less obvious cases? Why do 'woman make so much fuss about things'? One obvious reason is evolutionary: females are hard-wired to care a lot about offspring. Also, social structures enable better survival chances for them and their kids, and more protection. A larger, healthier, more successful group can do better in terms of evolutionary fitness. These things do not depend on culture. They have evolved long ago, when small changes had higher stakes for staying alive.

Some other issues are culture influenced. Most of our societies are still male-dominated. Being male-dominated does not (only) mean that most good jobs are occupied by guys, and they get to make decisions for woman as well in many situations. It also means that this has been the situation for quite a long time, and hence the shape social institutions took, including norms of interactions, what's right and what's not, etc. have been heavily influenced by guys. I'm not making here any claims about this being good or bad. Just saying that this is the way it is. It seems to be quite likely that in many respects our communities are more physically and overtly aggressive than they would have to be given our current rates of food production. There is no need for as much vicious competition as was a long time ago. Of course competition does not disappear if more woman are elected. They also have in them to secure the necessary means for themselves and their groups. But the forms of aggression are different.

The male dominated character of culture places many normative behavior on woman. In most societies if one is not a good mother that still stigmatizes one strongly. Whereas if one is an awful father, one is reproach but not held responsible and blamed for the same degree.

Still, one might ask, if man and woman aren't so different then why are there so many visible differences in behavioral patterns? Well, already the question shows the fallacy of mixing up cause and effect. It is not that there are some differences in man and woman which would ground all of the behavioral differences between them. It is rather that there are some cultural expectations, stereotypes, social pressures, and basic hormonal processes, that are all involved in leading to such differences in behavioral patterns. So, it's not just inherent differences which cause different behavior, and then lead to different treatment. It is rather different treatment that causes different behavior.

One more thing. Different behavioral patterns aren't in themselves bad. If I would say 'let's change some of our social institutions which influence woman to behave in ways that bother man' that would not be much more than saying 'oh, yes, of course guys are always right, so if some of the less emphatic/sensitive/intelligent don't understand a piece of behavior without effort we have to change it!'. And that idea is bollocks.

Accepting the possibility of there being different but still okay patterns is a good step. And no, it does not mean 'anything goes'. It just means that you first think, and assess whether the difference is okay, or not. Obviously, differences in female and male behavior are perfectly fine. And, ideally, up to choice.

In general, if you don't understand someone, first don't blame them for not adhering to your standard of rationality (or 'logic'). Always try out different interpretations to see how you can make sense of their behavior. In most cases you simply don't exert enough effort to understand the other person. These skills can be learned and enhanced. So, before making jokes about 'woman's logic' think a bit about how logical your behavior would seem when you are emotional, moved, angry, stressed, tired, worried, etc. to others, who don't know you and are not sympathetic. See, you aren't that much of a role-model of rationality.

Stoppard's Arcadia at Oxford Playhouse

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is twenty years old. It is still popular and often played. The piece is a well balanced mixture of comedy, romance, and a few intellectual topics. It comments on topics through the learning, development, and debates of the characters on determinism, on the development of physics and mathematics, on differences between rationalism and romanticism, as well as on some difficulties of research. During all this it still manages to be witty, in the good, Oscar Wilde-sense. (Note: in one of his other plays, Travesties, Stoppard uses parts of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest).

The play was now performed at the Oxford Playhouse to celebrate it's twentieth anniversary. It was produced by the Oxford Student Company: Milk and Two Sugars. (Cast here.) It's hard to evaluate it in detail: the play has lots and lots of complicated discussions, and a storyline with several interrelated twists. I won't go into the details here. You can read the whole piece, or go and see it if interested.

The richness of detail draws away part of one's attention from the performance of the actual play. As one has to keep in mind many things, track all the relations between the characters - their romances, flirts, and rivalries - there isn't much energy left. Of course that I had this feeling tells that the actors were doing well. They managed to convey the story in an entertaining and accessible way. Some of the actors did excellently: David Shield's Septimus Hodge was clever, quick and critical, but a warm hearted young man at the same time. Amelia Sparling's Thomasina was charming and bright, brimming with ideas and youthful excitement. And Carla Kingham's Hannah was just as careful and a bit awkward as the written text suggests. I found a bit of difficulty with taking Ed Barr-Sim serious in Bernard's role. But I understand that for a student company it is hard to find anyone suitable for the role of a mature, established and donnish academic. Nevertheless, his performance in the scenes when Bernard becomes angry was a bit of a disappointment. Instead of a quick and clever, but dominant man, he rather portrayed a hysterical and self-important fake.

My only complaint would be about the directors work. The performance placed a lot of emphasis on the comical elements, and the characters rarely adopted serious tones. This way much of the darker tones and darker humor became too light, and its significance got lost among the many clever and cheerful riposts. Also, the more complicated elements of the plot were sometimes rushed through - the characters were portrayed as becoming very excited and quickly pouring out their ideas. This might have been disturbing for audiences who haven't met the text earlier or saw the play for the first time. And if one misses any of the story elements, some of the great jokes and surprises might be later incomprehensible.

All in all, the performance was a good interpretation of the play, focusing mainly on the fun site of the comedy. I do not want to suggest that the serious issues were downplayed, but they could have given more weight. Still, it was an entertaining performance, very good entertainment for Saturday afternoon, and material for interesting discussions with one's company.

What is natural for children?

A friend of mine voiced the opinion that it is important for kids to spend much time in nature. I always viewed claims aspiring to tell us that we should do something 'because it is natural', 'because that's how we did it always', etc., with suspicion. And not without any reason.

You often hear claims like: 'we should eat food X because it is natural food for us and our ancestors ate it always, and they never had cancer', or that 'in my time kids used to play outside a lot and ... [insert your favorite beneficial outcome for your life]'. There are three problems with such claims.

First think about it this way: evolution is a slow process. Most of the features of our body have evolved a long-long time ago (tens of thousands of years ago) and have changed little. Our basic structure is the same, our basic bodily functions (blood circulation, digestion, hormone transactions, etc.) are the same. And our ancestors have lived a very different life from ours. So, our body is basically not really 'made' for the sort of lives most people in second and first world countries live.

Nevertheless we live much-much longer and healthier lives than did our ancestors. Thanks to the development of moral skills and cultures we aren't killed by other humans at first sight, stronger individuals cannot just simply take what is ours or kill off our kids, males don't regularly rape females, we don't have to use physical violence to get our food, and so on. And thanks to medicine, fertilization, crops growing, vaccines and a whole lot of other inventions we are not subjects to mass early childhood death, to 30-50 years of average lifespan and so on. So, our inbuilt mechanisms aren't necessarily a good guide to how we should live.

Thanks to our basic architecture we are pretty adaptive and can lead lives substantially different from the ones our bodies evolved to live. And thanks to the lucky cultural basics we developed we did not became a fiercely competitive but a very cooperative race. Furthermore, we can now use these bodies in much-much more efficient ways than 'nature told us to', and have far greater knowledge how to gain pleasure, fight inequality, fear, depression, death and pain, than any other animal, which lives a natural life.

Second, The 'keep to the well trodden path' style of arguments deserve no credit either. What was working as a good rule of thumb ten, twenty, or fifty years ago has not much to do with what will work nowadays. Don't misunderstand me: it might work. There are social settings and economic areas where the structure remained largely unchanged since long time. Also, these rules might work due to luck. But they surely aren't rules you should accept because they worked earlier, or someone found them useful. 

This does not necessarily apply to rules which pertain to personal matters, such as family or relationship matters. Since in these things it is extremely hard to get right what is beneficial both for individuals in terms of subjective feelings of happiness, security, etc., and what is good for society, plus these categories are - as we have them nowadays - almost purely social constructions, it is very much possible that a good constellation is one that we hit on earlier.

Third, what about the personal experience based views, for example when your friends say that kids should definitely start doing a part time job when they are 15, or when they want their kids to learn music, since it was such an important experience in their lives? There are two problems with these kinds of ideas: one is, that they are based on subjective thoughts formed here and now. But these thoughts do not reveal anything about the real processes that led up to the stage one is in. It does not underpin a relation between one's satisfaction with certain aspects of one's own life and the earlier experience. Also, it does not take into account all the people who had the same experience, but failed in life in all sorts of way - they ended up lonely and suffering from it, jobless, homeless, and so on.

The other problem with these sorts of views - held by everyone - is that they are very likely to be affected by cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological mechanism at work in all of us. It ensures that we have a picture of ourselves and our lives that is easy to live with. For this purpose it very often 'cheats us'. For example, if we are wrong about a factual question and someone points this out, and later we get to know that we were wrong, we like to look for explanations that suggest that the question is still open. There was a problem with the proof, with the evidence. We didn't understand the question in the same way. And so on. Everyone is good at giving excuses.

The same happens in cases of relying on personal experiences of what was and what wasn't useful for one. Most people would like to see their relatives, their partners and themselves in favorable light. So, they like to glorify and justify their methods and choices in raising them, living with them. Therefore we often adopt methods, or justify adopting method that have nothing to speak for them. Except that adopting them makes us feel better about our own lives.

Also, in many cases it might be true that it is useful to spend a lot of time outside. Kids might have hardwired, innate developmental segments which only activate or work really effectively if they receive particular stimuli. But whether this is so or not can only be decided by neurology, psychology and education studies. It is not something you should take guesses at, nor should you take advice from non-professionals.

Should we abandon all such rules of thumb? All such 'traditional' advice? I think not. The problem is, that we do not have anything better to rely on as long as we don't have sufficient relevant statistical data. Professionals in healthcare, education studies, psychology, sociology and other fields are working actively to gather such data. You can always find good books, correct websites with the most up-to-date positions, gathered and interpreted by professionals. 

If possible, do not rely on journals or websites run by journalists or other non-professionals. They might misinterpret the data, or even the interpretation of the scientists. Usually understanding research results is very difficult. Don't try it yourself. Let the professional explain it to you. If you don't understand it try again, try harder. It's no one's fault. You just lack the skills and education. We all face this problem and no one is good at everything. Take your time. Ask for help. Learn a bit. And don't run to easier solutions, don't read esoteric and alternative stuff. If it seems too plausible and easy, it's probably false. And it can seriously harm your kid's or your own development.

The critical way is hard, but the only good one. See this for example.

Doing research on XY

Whenever I go to a conference, talk or lecture and someone says "I'm doing research on XY" I see them before me as actually sitting/standing on that person/thing and doing research on it. It's one of those terrible jokes one never voices, because he has enough self-critique to know that they aren't funny. Nevertheless, I cannot get it out of my head. So here it goes. One I heard a few weeks ago from a philosopher: "I'm doing research on Wittgenstein".