By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Problem
- Going to school forces us to acquire a general education.
- Most people stop their general education when they stop going to school.
- What’s the best method to continue a general education throughout life?
Hypothesis
Regular reading of a general interest magazine that covers the widest possible number of subjects written by the best specialists on those subjects will provide the best continuing general education.
Proposed Test
Read The New York Review of Books. (not all articles are free)
Alternate Tests
Tell me your proposed solutions or preferred magazines.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
It is difficult for general public lacking a selective reader’s discipline to get valuable and honest information out there, most of time we get articles on the internet or even best sellers “books” that confuse ingenious readers ( like me), for some time I used to think they were teaching something useful but later or at the end I found out with some degree of frustration that is only
cheap marketing. So many e-articles for physical conditioning, weight lose secrets, etc which claim general public advisory, ending up selling magical secrets on the web. Lately some charlatan individuals with professional education, particularly with degree’s MD (medical doctors) where not being successful, instead they decide to write books that became best sellers, suddenly they chose to jump to alternative medicine, earning a lot of money. It is unbelievable what some people can do to get rich by cheating ingenious readers.
A good magazine for those folks would be The Skeptical Inquirer and maybe Consumer Reports. One thing our school system should do while they still got kids trapped in the classroom is to teach them how to be more discerning, and how to seek out information that stands up to evidence.
Here’s my own program:
1- Acquire a library card
2- Visit available facilities frequently
3- Always browse the “New Non-Fiction” shelf and
4- On occasion, browse the stacks more or less at random to see what you might stumble across — Amazon algorithms are still no match for serendipity and general curiosity.
I’ve always entertained myself with a steady diet of genre fiction, too. While that’s mostly for escapism or to pass the time, science-fiction and historical fiction in particular often contain nuggets of this and that as background material that may arouse one’s interest in all kinds of things.
“New York Review” isn’t a bad choice. Maybe “Smithsonian” as well.