

Google Effect - rsiqueira
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect

======
carleverett
Socrates said the same about the invention of writing:

"And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made
you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it
will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will
not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing,
which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of
trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."

[http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1-literacies...](http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1-literacies-
on-a-human-scale/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing/)

~~~
exodust
Nice find, and good reminder about the static nature of written words.
Socrates would have been fascinated with online forums and Wikipedia where
words are constantly updated, fought over, defended and attacked by anyone
with a soul!

~~~
derleth
> by anyone with a soul

And a lot of people without souls, such as myself.

~~~
derleth
Why in the world was this downvoted?

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alan_cx
What were reference books for then? Sneaky cheats of some sort?

For some things relying on memory is not the best way. To exaggerate the
point, pilots have procedures written down to follow, a check list. They
deliberately do not rely on memory. When I was doing things like upgrading
server OSs I always looked for the latest check-list and procedures. I could
usually remember the steps, but I didn't want to rely on that in case
something crucial had changed or something new added.

Another thing that springs to mind is that courts don't accept memory as
perfect or reliable.

Personally I do everything possible not to rely on memory, as I consider my
self to have a poor memory, and google helps massively with that. And yes, I
considered my memory poor way before google existed.

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darkchasma
The one true strength of humans over all other species is we adapt like no
species before. This is simply another adaptation, and if we suddenly lose the
internet, we'll adapt again. I don't fear the consequences, because we'll
either have the internet "forever", or we won't, and whatever causes it to go
away will be a far bigger problem than our ability to remember quotes.

~~~
OGinparadise
_"if we suddenly lose the internet, we'll adapt again"_

If we suddenly lose the internet, say by a solar or asteroid thing, we have
bigger problems to worry about...although tips of making shelter and fire
could come in handy ;).

But I almost agree with you, I am afraid that this dependence on Search
Engines will translate into less research and eventual advancement.

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sazpaz
The classic way of learning has evolved with history. Before having books,
everything was memorized with a few exceptions. The Google era is just another
step in this evolution. Why would we waste time memorizing stuff if we can
just look it up? Might be argued that Googling takes time. Of course it does,
but there will come the next era where our thought could prompt a query and
get an answer without physically doing it. That will be the next step in human
learning.

Sounds like sci-fi? So did the idea of having all the information available on
the tip of your hands 30 years ago.

~~~
mtts
The problem I've found is I've become so used to no "waste time memorizing
stuff" I've forgotten how to memorize things.

Which is a problem when I need to learn things that can't just be looked up
online when you need them, like a new language. When I try to learn new
vocabulary or something my brain just refuses to leave its default lazy "aww,
just look it up on Google" mode. It's annoying.

~~~
ybaumes
I agree with you, it is quite annoying. I found an interesting quote from a
PG's essay "Great Hackers" [1]: "Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to
concentrate-- their ability, as one put it, to "tune out everything outside
their own heads.'' I've certainly noticed this. And I've heard several hackers
say that after drinking even half a beer they can't program at all. So maybe
hacking does require some special ability to focus. Perhaps great hackers can
load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a
line of code, they see not just that line but the whole program around it.
John McPhee wrote that Bill Bradley's success as a basketball player was due
partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision. "Perfect'' eyesight means about
47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision. Bill Bradley had 70; he could see
the basket when he was looking at the floor. Maybe great hackers have some
similar inborn ability. (I cheat by using a very dense language, which shrinks
the court.)"

[1] [<http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html>]

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tokenadult
The Wikipedia editing-needed tag on this article: "This article may require
cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: poorly
written. Please help improve this article if you can."

No kidding. The sources are not good-quality sources by Wikipedia standards

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS>

for the kind of assertions found in the article. This needs a lot more work in
reading reliable secondary sources to be worth discussing here. In general,
Wikipedia articles as articles to be submitted for discussion in Hacker News
are usually not a good first choice of a submission source--I write this as a
Wikipedian.

AFTER EDIT: From another top-level comment in this thread, I see the
"quotation"

 _"Never memorize what you can look up in books." -- Albert Einstein_

Are you sure that Albert Einstein really said that? The memory of his life is
plagued by falsely attributed "quotations" of sayings Einstein never said. The
particular "quotation" you mention is listed as unverified on Wikiquote.

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein>

------
nathos
"Never memorize what you can look up in books." -- Albert Einstein

~~~
pavanky
Never memorize anything you can derive.

~~~
lostlogin
Yes. Memorizing answers when learning the method is possible. Takes longer,
but you tend not to forget. The reams of notes I used to watch people take to
avoid learning the method and equation.

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contingencies
Hang on - isn't it widely accepted that spatial information represents our
greatest mental bandwidth, both in terms of input and in terms of memory? The
ancient Greek orators' "memory palaces"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci>) provide one early recognition
of this mental faculty.

With the preponderance of meatspace-spatial terms used for electronic services
("room", "space", "site", "zone", "stream", "page", "locker", "file", etc.)
doesn't it follow that spatial reasoning will begin to function on nonspatial
environs, based upon mental conceptions?

On an interesting and related tangent I recently saw a presentation in Jarkta,
Indonesia by an Arizona-based academic who analyzed the twitter words used
around recent conflicts and determined a heavy spatial semantic bent:

The argument IIRC was that the general population of twitter are responding to
oppression against high-level cognitive concepts such as human rights with
spatially reasoned dialogue: '"The Cloud and the Ground: Political Activism in
the Digital Media Age"' @ International Conference on Communication,
University of Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia, 6-7 December 2012.
<http://merlyna.org/appearances/>

Unfortunately it's not available online. Oh, the irony!

PS. After the conference I hassled the keynote speakers about the lack of a
program incorporating Wikileaks and government surveillance. Furthermore,
Participants needed to register with the university in order to access
censored internet. Later, Creative Commons Indonesia threw a party within the
US-run '@America' facility (designed to manipulate the perception of America
by Indonesian muslim youth - source: NYT), a disgusting venue given that they
are currently pushing TPP. I did complain to Creative Commons' ethics board.

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ccozan
I am not sure why they call it Google effect, when it can be called
generically "library" effect. It's the adaptation of our brain to store
externally certain data, generally speaking.

What it means: our brains should be used to process and derive from raw data
and not hold the raw data, as well as the pointers to the certain not
important ( read: life esentials) processes or data.

Once you learn how to find ( in a library, or google, or whatever ), you can
offload your brain with remembering stuff that you know how to reach it in a
matter of seconds ( or any other useful time unit ).

On the other hand, own survival insticts will help us learn and remember
without any books what to do in certain dangerous or life-threatening
situations. This doesn't exclude that you may die from stupidity :).

This is nothing new, and the purposless of learning a poem while in school
seems to me now even greater. At the oposite, stays my techical university
where all the exams were open to documentation on table, and encouraged to use
them while in exams. I guess, for me, searching in google is a natural
extension to this.

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robg
See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Mind>

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signa11
vannevar-bush's idea of memex
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush#Memex_concept>) is _very_ notably
missing from discussion here as well as the referenced article.

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xzephyr
This reminds me of the difference between pointers and actual values - it is
more efficient for you to memorize where the detailed and possibly complex
information can be found. Memorizing all the long-winded data just doesn't
give you that much advantage anymore in this era of information explosion. I
think it is fairly natural that most people accept this trade-off. This is
comparable with the invention of cars vs. walking. Cars might increased the
rate of obessity but we certainly did not forget how to walk. It is very
interesting to see how human adapt to these big changes without the biological
evolution rate anywhere near the rate of change in technologies.

~~~
scott_w
It's probably because the successful technologies are adapted to humans, as
opposed to the other way round.

They are also built on top of technology that we are already familiar with.
For example, QWERTY keyboards because typewriters used QWERTY.

A technology that humans can't understand, perhaps because it's not yet time,
will struggle to gain any real traction outside a select few.

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edouard1234567
Same thing is happening with the GPS... we are loosing our sense of
orientation...

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nazgulnarsil
Similar to losing a friend? How about similar to losing a portion of my brain?

~~~
lostlogin
Better! Although its a corner of one's brain that harbours some pretty nasty
stuff that can spring to the fore at the slip of a key.

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sharkweek
I buy into this -- I very rarely remember a fact or tidbit of information that
I quickly search for, especially when compared to what I remember when I read
an article or news story and pick up a factoid from that.

Am I better or worse off from it? I'd almost assuredly argue better off, as
quick access to virtually any information is one of the biggest highlights of
our time.

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atas
Slightly irrelevant, but how valid would it be to be asked the SVN commands in
an interview? Should I go an memorize the SVN manual just to succeed in
interviews, although I use a graphical tool?

~~~
CodeCube
It depends, are you trying to get a job contributing to SVN? I would say no.

Bringing it back on topic, I was just thinking the other day how I've been
using git for the last two years straight, and still have to google
Every.Single.Time when I have to do a command I don't often do, like unstaging
a deleted file. And it's usually the same link to a StackOverflow post that my
eye instantly zooms to because it's purple.

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retube
This is particularly true for all thing programming-related.

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rshm
I have this tendency with the spelling of the java class names because of
expansion of the the camel case abbreviation by eclipse.

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timc3
Don't you just hate it when you notice something, talk about it amongst your
peers and go on talking it then ten years later someone gives it a name after
doing a study which wasn't really needed because its so visible.

I was interviewing people with a view that they didn't just rely on Google,
but if they did need to use the google effect they could find answers very
quickly. if the Internet wasn't available they could use whatever other
resources to find the answer.

~~~
antoko
I don't know that I "hate" it, quite the contrary, seems like an affirmation
that I was onto something quicker than other people which is probably a good
thing. I must admit I was pretty shocked that the year in the linked article
was 2011.

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wangweij
Using IDE in programming makes you forget the class methods and type of
arguments. Is that the same thing?

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rahulroy
Scumbag Google: Gives you access to infinite information, ruins your memory
for accessing information.

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Codhisattva
I saw the title, but I had to look it up.

------
npguy
Nicholas Carr wrote a book on this, right?

~~~
sharkweek
The irony of quickly searching for this made me chuckle:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-
googl...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-
making-us-stupid/306868/)

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lylemckeany
So what happens when I forget what the Google Effect is and I have to Google
for it?

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chuckreynolds
i have this problem ;)

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drivebyacct2
This happens to me and I think is related to learning habits for general
subjects. I remember my association to information more than the information
itself. It's why I'm bad at learning history (despite finding it fascinating)
unless it's an issue that I can link to myself and relate to personally and
build a connection. Similarly, on a weekly basis I Google for
`site:news.ycombinator.com drivebyacct2 <some keyword I know I used>` to get
back to a post or discussion that I want to reference.

I feel kind of bad about this as I introspect, I'm sure this reliance on third
parties has a detrimental effect on my ability to remember information that I
could compose to build new knowledge or apply to new situations.

~~~
antoko
You shouldn't feel bad, it is us optimizing, we're making use of our limited
mental faculties to focus on what we're good at - complex/creative/rational
thinking, offloading the data to whatever is convenient.

I'm so rarely optimistic about things, I feel my initial optimism in this
regard means I must be right... apparently I'm being optimistic about that
too! ;)

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OGinparadise
True but we're remembering (and using our brain for) more important things.
Like....ummm...uhhhh....

How about the spellcheckers? Can we even spell correctly after all these years
without them?

