
Is Google killing general knowledge? - rglovejoy
http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/brian-cathcart/no-passes
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nazgulnarsil
Are books killing the oral tradition? The ability to recite long tracts from
memory, from The Odyssey to bread recipes, has long been a marker of an
educated mind. But what happens when facts can be looked up in a book?

"It's a damn shame" say out of work poets everywhere.

~~~
pixcavator
You didn't read the whole thing, did you?

~~~
nazgulnarsil
nope, I skimmed and got the impression that it was making the point that
people don't distinguish between offloading knowledge and offloading
responsibility for how the knowledge is used. To jump from a few examples of
that to the headline is too big to swallow. thus my quip.

I've read up on debates about this subject before, and there are far better
arguments on both sides than this article presents.

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bkovitz
The article just barely touches on the main point: without general knowledge
_in your head,_ you can't put things into context.

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.

------
ljlolel
Answer: Google is killing many kinds of Trivia. For example, I always have to
look up how to link external CSS.

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.

~~~
tocomment
I wish job interviewers would catch up with this. They always seem to expect
you to have this kind of triva memorized :-(

~~~
lacker
As a somewhat frequent job interviewer I keep seeing the opposite side.

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
      }
    

me: "I see. Well for one, in C++ you need to end each line with a semicolon."

them: "Jeez! Interviewers always expect you to have all this trivia
memorized!!!"

~~~
jpeterson
Not sure what point you're making here. It doesn't really say anything about a
programmer if he/she forgets the semicolons when writing out a C++ function by
hand. Especially if this person is constantly juggling many different language
syntaxes, some of which have line terminators and some not.

The function logic is wrong; yes, that's a problem. But forgetting the
semicolons has no significance whatsoever.

~~~
lacker
Take another look at that code. If someone makes that many mistakes in a short
space, then even if any one of those mistakes is forgivable, it reveals that
they are not a good programmer.

------
TrevorJ
If anything, I know more now than I would have without Google. I tend to look
up words and interesting facts I don't know on my palm when I am out and about
and run into something I don't know much about.

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jacquesm
I think 'general knowledge' is a moving target. Like any other power tool
google changes your abilities to a different level, the brain cycles you were
using before to remember things can now be applied to other items of interest.

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.

------
barrkel
Google is just a backing mechanism from which we can page-fault into memory.
If we have to do it repeatedly, it'll end up in long-term memory, but that
long-term working set of memory will be different for everybody, so the value
of trying to teach it in school is somewhat lessened.

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).

------
TommyWiseau
You know it's really crazy, but imagine how it will be in the future? What
will it be like when we have some technology where it will be possible to get
an answer from google in the space of a second no matter where you are?

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.

------
mquander
Someone wiser than me once noted that the purpose of technology is to allow
individuals to be incompetent at more and more things.

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ashleyw
There aren't many situations where I'd need information, without being able to
look it up.

So it's not killed my general knowledge, it's expanded it beyond any level I
could have had without it.

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edw519
"...should schoolchildren be taught the capital of Colombia? "

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.

~~~
DannoHung
I think the problem comes in the categorization of useful data versus trivial
factoids.

If you're going to spend time memorizing facts, they should be very useful
facts.

~~~
ken
The trouble is that I often don't know what a "useful fact" is even after I've
learned it. I certainly don't expect to be able to figure that out before I've
learned it!

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. :-)

------
FreeRadical
Knowledge that can be applied to construct something supersedes
general/gameshow knowledge

------
ken
OK, who else used google to look up "doyen"? :-)

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Eliezer
I don't know - I couldn't find the answer on Google.

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TweedHeads
Google is an extension to my brain, which is running out of storage.

~~~
jacquesm
Maybe you should take the tweed out then eh ?

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.

~~~
TweedHeads
Not even a petabyte?

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...

~~~
jacquesm
now for some content-addressable memory of that size...

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.

