Is Google killing general knowledge?
moreintelligentlife.com
moreintelligentlife.com
"It's a damn shame" say out of work poets everywhere.
I've read up on debates about this subject before, and there are far better arguments on both sides than this article presents.
One person cited in the article proposes that the trade-off is between learning to analyze vs. learning facts. That doesn't sound plausible, since facts are what you analyze and general background facts are the main things that enable you to analyze well.
The real trade-off is simply between which millions of facts people are learning as they grow up. The Internet, in the last 10 years or so, has pushed toward learning facts of immediate currency, like celebrity gossip and scandals and pop-culture memes. This is because the Internet continually dumps more information than anyone can take in, and the economy is based on competition for current attention.
The real shift is from contextual understanding to tactical skill, or you could say, from wisdom to immediate payoffs.
Google is also teaching people more than ever (e.g. I know many more definitions of words than I ever would have looked up without Google). Google (more Wikipedia) gives me instant summaries of complex topics or figures or events, which I remember.
I always think its really lame when an interview candidate claims they can't possible show me an example of iterating over a collection in the language they use every day because they don't have intellisense, autocomplete or google.
me: "Let's write some code, what's your favorite language?"
them: "My favorite? I guess C++"
me: "So how about, write a function to find the most common string in a vector of strings."
They write something like
int MostCommonString(vector v) {
for (int s = v[0]; s < n; s++) {
int count = s
count++
}
return count
}
them: "Jeez! Interviewers always expect you to have all this trivia memorized!!!"
The function logic is wrong; yes, that's a problem. But forgetting the semicolons has no significance whatsoever.
Your framework doesn't just do that for you?
Edit to downmodders:
I'm not being flip or sarcastic. In all seriousness, if you're writing repetitive boilerplate - and particularly if you have to look that repetitive boilerplate up - you should be using some kind of templating system that does the repetitive (and hence programmable) stuff for you.
It could be as simple as a text file web page template with the proper doctype and generic css / javascript imports already typed out. You'll save yourself time and aggravation and reduce the incidence of silly mistakes.
Yes, your framework should have a shortcut for boilerplate like that, so you don't have to type it every time. I have worked with numerous frameworks, and I am in fact building one myself: jperla webify. Please notice that to include this feature in my framework I had to look it up using Google because I didn't know!
I have to look it up every time precisely because my framework usually does it for me.
But also, what is your framework's magical shortcut function to link the external CSS? I don't know because 1. it's not standardized across frameworks like html is, 2. it's often coded in automatically (e.g. rails asset-packager) so I practice it little and never learn it. Like I said, I know a number of frameworks intimately, but not this trivia. I have to look it up. Google does, however, teach me the high-level concepts about the benefits of using a web framework and asset packager.
Finally, sometimes I just bang out a quick 1 page of static html with 1 statically linked CSS file (for debugging or mocking or random wanton fun) for which a framework would be wasteful overhead.
Whether you do so or not is up to each individual.
A parallel development is the address book in mobile phones. I used know all the phone numbers of all my acquaintances by heart, now that my phone remembers them that 'skill' is absolutely atrophied.
The only phone number I remember now is my own...
If anything google is enabling people to find general knowledge, not kill it. The trick about information always was to be able to find it and use it, not necessarily to remember it, even though a good memory is obviously an asset.
That's apart from school's other purposes, such as light introductions to topics you otherwise might not look into, and state-controlled cultural and political indoctrination.
In essence, Google / the web has added another layer to the human cache hierarchy, in between long-term memory and the written word (traditionally on paper and incoveniently non-colocated).
We're getting close with cell phones but I'd say it might take about 20 seconds to get the answer. That's still a big enough barrier to keep you from asking it everything. But eventually we'll have some sort of device that will have us connected to information at all times. I don't know how it will manifest itself (wearable computers, maybe a wristwatch?) but it's surely coming.
I think it will be transformational.
So it's not killed my general knowledge, it's expanded it beyond any level I could have had without it.
Should bodybuilders lift weights?
Should basketball players run on off days?
OP never mentions what learning facts really is: exercise.
The purpose of education isn't to know the capital of Columbia. The purpose of education is to learn. Which requires exercise. Just like the body, the mind needs exercise, too.
There are as many ways to exercise the mind as the body, some better than others. Like taking the elevator, using a search engine may get you the answer faster, but not much mental muscle is built.
If you're going to spend time memorizing facts, they should be very useful facts.
I've never had to run from a tiger (fortunately). But I'm sure glad I put in the roadwork to be healthy enough to catch a bus or pick up my luggage. If I didn't know any better I would have thought I was wasting my time back then.
A segment I once saw on Reading Rainbow (airdate: 1986) recently changed my life. Trivial factoid for 2 decades, then boom, useful data point. Nobody could have predicted the set of experiences I'd have that would create a context in which this was useful.
When my dad was in college, a classmate of his complained that he'd never need something taught in a particular course. The professor's response was "The only way to be sure of that is to take the course!" (If you still think it was worthless on your deathbed, I'll give you a refund...)
If you can figure out a priori what's going to be important without knowing it, I'd like to see your stock portfolio. :-)
The mind needs exercise, but remembering facts that are trivial isn't helping much.
Think of Google as the calculator for knowledge. A calculator saves you from having to find the square root of a number, allowing you to figure out something useful and meaningful from the answer.
You base this fundamental conclusion upon what data? (I guess you'll google it.)
Being able to pagefault into Googling something is very different from knowing it off-hand. You're easily able to relate and see patterns in immediate knowledge, but not in things you'd need to look up.
I, for one, did relatively poorly in secondary school not least because I was primarily learning about computing and programming, in my spare time, when I "should" have been doing homework. Most of school time spent "learning facts" was a * * waste of time * *.
When I see education justified with that excuse, I'm tempted to say "OK, replace that with a targeted exercise", because I know the reaction would be horror. Exercise is the way you sell the task to skeptical persons. The actual aim is to require them to learn the capital of Colombia. Just because.
And that is ridiculous.
On a more serious note, the storage capacity of the brain is vast, the lowest estimates run in the hundreds of terabytes.
Your remark raises an interesting question though, how big the variation is between brains in storage capacity.
So when the iPhone v15 comes out with 1PB of storage we will be carrying more info in one device than our whole brain.
Interesting times ahead...
Our brains are not really comparable with digital computers in one respect though: Just like TTL logic does not have resistors or diodes but only transistors our brains do not have cells specializing in remembering, controlling or evaluation but only processors.
Each of them is very simple but the quantity of them and their amazing connectivity is what gives us our amazing pattern recognition abilities.