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These days, you can not have Pub Quizes with at least a few teams cheating by using a phone to Google the answers. Knowing trivia of the top of your head seems

These days, you can not have Pub Quizes with at least a few teams cheating by using a phone to Google the answers. Knowing trivia of the top of your head seems to have become as useful a skill as calligraphy. A friend of mine was about to fall for a hoax/scam. And even though they changed the words and meaning of quite a few elements, I was able to pinpoint the exact scam using carefully crafted Google queries. With Google there is just no way to bullshit people anymore. Someone would tell a strong story in the 90s during a birthday, and you'd have to go to library the next day to verify or discard it. Not anymore. Someone asked why those old modems made noise, and instead of giving an answer right away, it took all of 15 seconds to find the answer online, much better than I ever could answer it. I remember my first job skill test. It was multiple choice and you were allowed to use the internet. I answered all questions by Googling keywords from the question, in combination with keywords from each answer, and looking which combination gave the most results. Answering this way I got a near perfect score. There were questions about programming languages I hadn't even written a "Hello World"-example for. With all this goodness, comes of course the danger of relying on Google for all your answers. If it is not on the first page of the results it is not true. Especially younger people believe a lot of facts they find online. Another danger is using Google for confirming a bias: With so many pages online, there is bound to be a page in the results that agrees with your initial hunch, however incorrect it is. I participated in the pilot for Google Answers. There were people there that, if the answer was to be found anywhere online, could answer it, no matter their expertise on the subject. Googling well is a valuable skill.

Lxr 10y ago
The difference in tech skill between me and my 80 year old Grandma is mostly my ability to Google.
tsm 10y ago
I used Google extensively and skillfully throughout my careers as a student and software developer. In the past few years I've been taking the music of 18th century Scotland very seriously, and it's been a major change of pace to have Google be next to useless. Suddenly all the skills I'd let languish—remembering what part of what book I'd read something in, using specialty research databases, inferring the answer to a question from multiple suboptimal sources, etcetera—matter again. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's incredibly frustrating.
- leatherdaddy 10y ago
  wee laddie
danso 10y ago
At my university, the radio station held a massive all-day quiz competition. Google was still relatively new, but they adapted by making the questions more compound and reliant on some familiarity in a domain (e.g. What would the mass of the world's heaviest man be in picograms when using the IPK as measured in 1889?). There was also a scavenger hunt component to the contest. One such item was a photo of a famous annual naked soccer game that you couldn't have had unless you were actually there in previous years. This was before Google Images (I think), so I had my friends go outside in their underwear and then Photoshopped them onto a picture of a soccer field. Edit: in response to what you said about the dangers of over-relying on Google, I remember there was a quiz question that required knowing some fact that could only be found in some obscure printed book (again, probably before Google Books was around). So I altered a Wikipedia page (each quiz question allowed for several minutes until calling an answer in) to mention a fact that coincidentally matched the answer we called in, and when the radio station said we were wrong, we successfully disputed their answer by sending them a link to the Wikipedia page.
- zeptomu 10y ago
  Out of curiosity. Did you change it back and did you inform the radio station?
  - danso 10y ago
    I think the page was reverted back soon after, because other teams were doing the same thing from the university IP and there was a temporary blanket hold on edits from our IP when Wikipedia editors noticed what was going on.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ryandrake 10y ago
> With Google there is just no way to bullshit people anymore. The existence of spam, nigerian prince scams, "Windows Tech Support" scammers, phishing, etc. show there's more than enough bullshit to go around. At what rate do they say suckers are born?
- danso 10y ago
  In the case of Nigerian scams, it's been hypothesized that the design and medium of that scam is optimized to target the specific people who are not using Google: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909111
- eriknstr 10y ago
  Furthermore, the proliferation of fake news shows that having the tools available does not mean that the tools will be used by everyone all of the time. If we were to check everything always, we'd have no time to do anything else.
- 50CNT 10y ago
  > At what rate do they say suckers are born? About 4/s[0], considering newborns are all suckers, both regarding their knowledge of scams and more literal minded sucking. That said, I'd be interesting to know what the percentage of suckers is by age against a broad spectrum of scams. That said, someone who can tell a tech support scam in seconds might still fall for the Chinese Tea house scam (two women invite foreigner for tea at teahouse, owner shakes foreigner down for money). Or the China Stock Options scam (foreigners can't own stock in pre-IPO Chinese company. This makes stock option agreements with foreigners null and void). Or the China Investment scam (where you get treated as a cheap dev team instead of a viable investment). Anywayys, I'm getting carried away. [0]http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/ http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
tribby 10y ago
> as useful a skill as calligraphy. Typography is a multi billion dollar industry; see Gerrit Noordzij's The Stroke for why the calligraphic stroke is as relevant as ever in the digital age :)
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  But actually being able to do it with your hands is nothing more than a party trick. Skill in a vector editor is key, and some domain knowledge, but surely not actually hand writing beautifully?
  - sjy 10y ago
    Some people earn income by preparing handwritten calligraphic wedding invitations and signs; plenty of graphic designers (and software developers, for that matter) use paper in the process of preparing a digital product. It's no more of a party trick than playing a musical instrument.
    - tehwalrus 10y ago
      Sure, but the ancestor comment mentioned "typography". I've never heard that used to refer to hand-written stuff (although, perhaps in the past hand-designed stuff.)
      - tribby 10y ago
        calligraphy is part of the typographic process. typography has been around for much longer than vector graphics. font forging, typesetting, type design -- pick any part of the "stack," and go as far back as the northern song dynasty, if you like -- has always involved a lot of hand work. thinking of typography as a superset of calligraphy -- inextricable and dependent on one another -- might help your understanding.
  - tribby 10y ago
    this is also incorrect. type designers usually start with drawing letters by hand, in fact. this is how it's taught to MA students at the university of reading and at the royal academy in the hague, NL (i.e. the most respected programs that churn out designers to places like monotype). even (especially?) in preliminary sketching phases done with pencil, the drawing method used is specifically meant to best mimic the stroke made with traditional tools. when it comes to more ornate lettering -- like a script -- hand tools are even more common to start with. it's a bit less common for someone to finish a script before digitizing it and making it suitable for the screen (usually you do a few key letters by hand and can figure out the rest on a computer from there), but it does still happen more than you seem to think.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Information availability has improved markedly. I make use of online sources, especially archives of previously published works (some legally provided, some not: Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, ...) constantly. The ability, seconds after having read of some reference, to be looking at scans or PDFs of an original work from the 16th - 20th centuries, is profound. That said: I'm finding online search itself less useful, and far less reliable, shy of specific filters. There's simply too much crap online. Which leads to the observation: the way to hoax or scam someone, or simply to create ambiguity over the truth, is to pre-seed the search results. There's a phenomenally good case of this in today's Wall Street Journal, concerning a businessman who'd invoked the ire of another who spent years attempting to tarnish the former's reputation. https://archive.fo/kz1Rt https://archive.fo/kz1Rt Which is to say -- there's something of a shift back in the scammers' favour as well. Where the ultimate balance lies I'm not entirely sure.

Lxr 10y ago

The difference in tech skill between me and my 80 year old Grandma is mostly my ability to Google.

tsm 10y ago

I used Google extensively and skillfully throughout my careers as a student and software developer. In the past few years I've been taking the music of 18th century Scotland very seriously, and it's been a major change of pace to have Google be next to useless. Suddenly all the skills I'd let languish—remembering what part of what book I'd read something in, using specialty research databases, inferring the answer to a question from multiple suboptimal sources, etcetera—matter again. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's incredibly frustrating.

leatherdaddy 10y ago
wee laddie

danso 10y ago

At my university, the radio station held a massive all-day quiz competition. Google was still relatively new, but they adapted by making the questions more compound and reliant on some familiarity in a domain (e.g. What would the mass of the world's heaviest man be in picograms when using the IPK as measured in 1889?). There was also a scavenger hunt component to the contest. One such item was a photo of a famous annual naked soccer game that you couldn't have had unless you were actually there in previous years. This was before Google Images (I think), so I had my friends go outside in their underwear and then Photoshopped them onto a picture of a soccer field. Edit: in response to what you said about the dangers of over-relying on Google, I remember there was a quiz question that required knowing some fact that could only be found in some obscure printed book (again, probably before Google Books was around). So I altered a Wikipedia page (each quiz question allowed for several minutes until calling an answer in) to mention a fact that coincidentally matched the answer we called in, and when the radio station said we were wrong, we successfully disputed their answer by sending them a link to the Wikipedia page.

zeptomu 10y ago
Out of curiosity. Did you change it back and did you inform the radio station?
- danso 10y ago
  I think the page was reverted back soon after, because other teams were doing the same thing from the university IP and there was a temporary blanket hold on edits from our IP when Wikipedia editors noticed what was going on.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ryandrake 10y ago

> With Google there is just no way to bullshit people anymore. The existence of spam, nigerian prince scams, "Windows Tech Support" scammers, phishing, etc. show there's more than enough bullshit to go around. At what rate do they say suckers are born?

danso 10y ago
In the case of Nigerian scams, it's been hypothesized that the design and medium of that scam is optimized to target the specific people who are not using Google: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909111
eriknstr 10y ago
Furthermore, the proliferation of fake news shows that having the tools available does not mean that the tools will be used by everyone all of the time. If we were to check everything always, we'd have no time to do anything else.
50CNT 10y ago
> At what rate do they say suckers are born? About 4/s[0], considering newborns are all suckers, both regarding their knowledge of scams and more literal minded sucking. That said, I'd be interesting to know what the percentage of suckers is by age against a broad spectrum of scams. That said, someone who can tell a tech support scam in seconds might still fall for the Chinese Tea house scam (two women invite foreigner for tea at teahouse, owner shakes foreigner down for money). Or the China Stock Options scam (foreigners can't own stock in pre-IPO Chinese company. This makes stock option agreements with foreigners null and void). Or the China Investment scam (where you get treated as a cheap dev team instead of a viable investment). Anywayys, I'm getting carried away. [0]http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/ http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

tribby 10y ago

> as useful a skill as calligraphy. Typography is a multi billion dollar industry; see Gerrit Noordzij's The Stroke for why the calligraphic stroke is as relevant as ever in the digital age :)

tehwalrus 10y ago
But actually being able to do it with your hands is nothing more than a party trick. Skill in a vector editor is key, and some domain knowledge, but surely not actually hand writing beautifully?
- sjy 10y ago
  Some people earn income by preparing handwritten calligraphic wedding invitations and signs; plenty of graphic designers (and software developers, for that matter) use paper in the process of preparing a digital product. It's no more of a party trick than playing a musical instrument.
  - tehwalrus 10y ago
    Sure, but the ancestor comment mentioned "typography". I've never heard that used to refer to hand-written stuff (although, perhaps in the past hand-designed stuff.)
    - tribby 10y ago
      calligraphy is part of the typographic process. typography has been around for much longer than vector graphics. font forging, typesetting, type design -- pick any part of the "stack," and go as far back as the northern song dynasty, if you like -- has always involved a lot of hand work. thinking of typography as a superset of calligraphy -- inextricable and dependent on one another -- might help your understanding.
- tribby 10y ago
  this is also incorrect. type designers usually start with drawing letters by hand, in fact. this is how it's taught to MA students at the university of reading and at the royal academy in the hague, NL (i.e. the most respected programs that churn out designers to places like monotype). even (especially?) in preliminary sketching phases done with pencil, the drawing method used is specifically meant to best mimic the stroke made with traditional tools. when it comes to more ornate lettering -- like a script -- hand tools are even more common to start with. it's a bit less common for someone to finish a script before digitizing it and making it suitable for the screen (usually you do a few key letters by hand and can figure out the rest on a computer from there), but it does still happen more than you seem to think.

dredmorbius 10y ago

Information availability has improved markedly. I make use of online sources, especially archives of previously published works (some legally provided, some not: Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, ...) constantly. The ability, seconds after having read of some reference, to be looking at scans or PDFs of an original work from the 16th - 20th centuries, is profound. That said: I'm finding online search itself less useful, and far less reliable, shy of specific filters. There's simply too much crap online. Which leads to the observation: the way to hoax or scam someone, or simply to create ambiguity over the truth, is to pre-seed the search results. There's a phenomenally good case of this in today's Wall Street Journal, concerning a businessman who'd invoked the ire of another who spent years attempting to tarnish the former's reputation. https://archive.fo/kz1Rt https://archive.fo/kz1Rt Which is to say -- there's something of a shift back in the scammers' favour as well. Where the ultimate balance lies I'm not entirely sure.