
Is Google Making Students Stupid? - clwen
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/is-google-making-students-stupid/380944/
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tjradcliffe
Students have _always_ been stupid. The only thing that changes is the reason.
It used to be newspapers. Then comic books. Now Google.

The hand-wringing and moral panic are always talked up by innumerates who have
neither measured the purported decline in student capabilities nor adduced any
reason as to why the technology in question creates the purported affect--at
least, they never give any reasons that go beyond pandering to the prejudices
of their own generation.

Generally, technology improves intellectual capabilities. Newspapers informed.
Comic books introduce young people to stories they might not have encountered
otherwise. Texting improves literacy (what _else_ would you expect from a
technology that allows young people to carry on complex social lives entirely
via the written word?) and the kind of transparent access to a diversity of
information sources that Google provides increases a wide range of
intellectual capabilities by giving students access to actual facts to think
about, rather than the completely useless contents of their imagination.

It is true, as the article says, that certain formerly-important skills will
be lost, and the _type_ of mistake we used to make will be replaced by a new
_type_ of mistake. But are the new types of mistake more frequent (unlikely,
and not mentioned) or more severe (also unlikely, also not mentioned) than the
old types of mistake? Strangely, anti-Bayesian articles like this one never
even try to do a proper accounting of the number of old-type mistakes avoided
by the technology, focusing entirely--and misleadingly--on the types of
mistake enabled by the new technology. This is lazy, dishonest and misleading.

To put it another way, work-processing has had a terrible effect on typing
accuracy, but who cares?

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noobermin
As a true nerd, the way I want the future to be would like in star trek; take
a person like Picard in the 24th century, with their all-knowing computer a
voice command and their replicators and their ease of transport via the
transporter, but strand him on a desert planet, he's able to figure shit out,
improvise, and survive.

Technology is just an augment to the good life and an augment for good people.
Lazy people being lazy with technology or otherwise have existed in the past
as they do today, I haven't seen _convincing_ evidence that modern tech
increases the numbers of lazy,incompetent people.

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kazinator
Searching for information online isn't making anyone stupid, because people do
in fact retain what they discover. Because it is so accessible, some people do
it all the time. By contrast, in the past, people didn't have time to go a
library frequently. The world wide web is making people better informed,
including people from walks of life that are not traditionally associated with
being informed. At least broadly if not deeply, but perhaps deeply, too, in
areas that catch their interest.

Today you're stupid if you don't make effective use of all this. We cringe
when someone asks a question online that could have been googled in three
seconds.

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afarrell
The author is well aware of the tradition of hand-wringing he is joining; He
makes reference to Plato’s Phaedrus! But he doesn't actually make an argument
for why it actually matters that students don't learn to spell English's
arbitrary orthography. His introductory example of GPS and wilderness survival
is the only compelling case.

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fallinghawks
I think it's ludicrous that spelling skills would be "eroded" by spell
checkers and drop-downs. If anything, steady exposure to corrections to
misspellings would teach one to spell correctly the first time (though errors
like 'their' vs 'there' might still be an issue).

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afarrell
Indeed. Except for a few words like "exercise", which I can never figure out
how to spell correctly on my own.

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bane
I'm going to throw out a different idea. Google (and WP) is a cognitive aid to
humans. Instead of trying to jam all this information into a couple/three
pounds of neurons bouncing around in our head. Why not just store the
mnemonics/semantic pointers for accessing that information wherever it might
be. In our brain pans, out on the web, in a book, wherever.

Human civilization underwent a radical transformation because we learned how
to put what's in our heads into long-term storage (writing), why isn't a
massive, immediately accessible global knowledge base of all knowledge just
the next step in this?

Perhaps it's stupid to try to cram an encyclopedia+ into the volume of our
skulls, and maybe it's smarter to try to cram it all into a globally
accessible information store instead?

 _full disclosure, I looked up the average weight of a human brain and
synonyms for skull on Google while writing this_

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vhseran
Everybody is unique and they are capable of understanding the environment
around us in a better way. Having "faster" access to knowledge via Libraries
in the past, Internet these days is really amazing -- when individual tries to
understand things and improvise on it.

Rather, one behavioural change that occurs is "why remember, when i have can
select from the list of other answers" \-- is what is going to degrade
(shortcircuit) the thinking process and is not going to contribute back in any
different way. Being student is the phase where there is lot of reasoning,
getting answers, improvising on existing like qualities needs to be developed.
In such a phase, getting into "why remember" might not be good for an
individual growth. There is no surprise that in future when the intellect of
an individual becomes that of "few intelligent folks who are on internet." \--
this is going to be really bad. (Remember wall-e movie ?) Technology is just
one part of life, there are so many things that our senses are capable of
processing, understanding, experiencing. All that happens when we put the
correct "student" hat.

Nobody is "stupid". If you don't go in the right path, even after so many
clues you will remain stupid.

People who are "smart" should guide these so called "stupid" people. Why are
we here for else ? Lets encourage students to rely more on their acquired
intellect and build upon it. Its really good for the socieity as the newer
generations can look at things in a rapidly different way.

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michaelq
Vision was one of the last senses to evolve in animals. And yet it's the most
useful sense, significantly reducing our reliance on other senses. As a
result, if I were to lose my vision, I might well be at a much larger
disadvantage than if I'd never been able to see in the first place.

Instead of intentionally walking around blindfolded in preparation for a loss
of vision that will hopefully never occur, I could thank my lucky stars that
my eyes work and focus on using them to the fullest.

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Varcht
I can't remember or spell some of the things I've learned with google but I've
learned a lot. Several programming languages, Electronics, Calculus, Robotics,
RC Helicopter mechanics, aerodynamics, ditto for multicopters, flight control
algos, Survival, etc., etc. Hard for me to think that it has made me dumber.

