15 ms·

The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

184 points by vezycash 10y ago

olivermarks 10y ago
I've often wondered whether McArthur Wheeler - the lemon juice disguised bank robber discussed in this article - actually had some mental challenges rather than lacked common sense. It seems a whole branch of academia has grown off his unfortunate back...
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Is this real? It is unbelievable.
  - teh_klev 10y ago
    Yes, yes it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#Original_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...
  - pavement 10y ago
    It's the first paragraph of the article.
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    The lemon juice story first appeared in the entertainment section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a compilation format article about dumb criminals. This article was referenced in Dunning's and Kruger's paper, and the story spread from there. The original article looks suspicious to me as well. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZNlRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DXADAAAAIBAJ&pg=6777%2C3720310 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZNlRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DXAD...
fiatjaf 10y ago
Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not understanding why the winner won.
- RangerScience 10y ago
  I think a variation on this is a key factor of life and culture in engineering - at some point, either what you made works, or it doesn't. You can argue, debate, philosophize and talk, but at the end of the day - there's either a working thing someone else can look at, or there's not. (I imagine this is true in other places - sales, business, design - it just gets increasingly hard to tell "if it worked")
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    You're right, but sales, business and design have too many variables involved in the apparent success of what you make, so you're not able to safely verify what "worked". Even in engineering, two people can make something that "works", but which one is better? Maybe the worst product had the better marketing, so it sold more and in the end there are more people praising it, then you'll think it is better.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Yes, "it works" is a rather low bar. Almost all generic products in the market "work", but some are clearly better than others.
    - RangerScience 10y ago
      We're in agreement. It's a filter, not a metric: you can say this product worked, as in it did what it said on the tin, but the worse/better comparison doesn't work out. The other aspect of "at some point you can just build it and it works or doesn't" is that when it's built, you can (ideally) just go read the code and find out how it works. It's ye olde issue of "it would take me almost as long to explain it as to make it..." - if I'm having trouble communicating an idea, I can just go make it, and then show it to you.
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  Some players end up being non-transitive though.
- 10y ago
rustynails 10y ago
There's another category that fits beautifully with this article. Critical thinking. The article focuses on knowledge domains. It would also benefit from discussing the ability to correlate facts or deduce conclusions based on prior knowledge. I often talk about domestic violence because it's a fundamental issue of ethics: why all western media outlets only focus on fully grown white women, ignoring government bureaus of statistics that dispel such an obvious fallacy that drives victims to be starved of funding and support based on their sex. What we see is that the ability to critically think, to correlate information, to ascertain truth (even when presented with hard numbers from an authoritative source such as governments) is compromised. There's a deeper issue beyond knowledge domains. Is this linked to a change of emphasis/importance in our virtual society? Are we becoming encyclopaedias of partial truths (ie. knowing lists of discrete information without aggregation and without deeper understanding)? The Internet opened up a new world. There are many fewer older people on the Internet. That collective wisdom that comes with age is often lost. I don't know if it's this collective loss of knowledge on the Internet, whether it's Facebook's filters that only tell a person what they want to hear, whether it's information overload, or a combination of factors that appear to have changed our focus from gathering knowledge to gathering information.
awarer 10y ago
"The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand Russell
- UltimateFloofy 10y ago
  Ah, Dunning-Kruger at scale; summing up populism as a startup.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  That and our psychological quirk the we mistake self-confidence for competence. The two together make a pretty combustible mixture and explain a lot, IMHO.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  Or, in graph form: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2177 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2177
- phoenixProgram 10y ago
  The fundamental difference between modernism and traditionalism is that modernists see doubtful intelligent people and cocksure stupid people whereas the traditionalists see a group of people; the traditionalists observe that when you turn on the stupid lamp, they act stupid, and when you turn on the intelligent lamp, they act intelligent. Actually, this "acting" is a matter of perspective. You were told to see them act stupid or intelligent by some higher power. The traditionalists are quite confident that the lights are the source of the difficulty whereas the modernists are determined to keep their manichaean glasses on and see a human being as a source of light rather than a network of filters of light.
JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
I see this sort of thing on Hacker News all the time. Programmers that are, I'm sure, the top of their field comment in threads about biology or something out of their field with the most silly and wrong answers. A thread about nutrition or something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain. That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it. :)
- kuschku 10y ago
  Luckily most of the people here, if they wanted, could easily get an entry-level education in any field, because they know how to study from books, can get access to the material, etc.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Potential is not reality.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Potential is the requirement for democracy, though. You can only have democracy if everyone has the chance to educate themselves on the topics that are relevant to them. If, in your country, the majority never learnt how to do so, then democracy will inevitably fail. Many people in STEM or other sciences have an advantage due to that, but this should be standard for all.
  - EliRivers 10y ago
    Why would I? Surely the point is that I'm an expert on everything already.
  - louithethrid 10y ago
    Oh, yes, its so easy, thats why every programmer aquiring domain specific knowledge never makes any mistake and the software - once feature complete, always guarantees satisfied customers. We are instant experts, just add hot water and stire for five minutes.
edmccard 10y ago
The brain must constantly be doing triage on memories, without conscious intervention. And apparently it recognizes that there is less need to stock our minds with information that can be readily retrieved. Or as my grandmother always said, "if you want to forget something, just write it down."
lordnacho 10y ago
The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but they think they know the facts, and they even have theories about why other people are wrong. I've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with "sure but I'm skeptical". I've been invited to a friends house to look at his "Time Waver" machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone's organs. Remotely. In fact he showed me a woman in Italy that he was helping out. First he asked me if I knew anything about quantum theory, which I don't really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I'll appreciate a cleansing. Good thing I can stay polite. But someone in his 40s who thinks this is how the world works is not going to have the veil of ignorance lifted. These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there's a bunch of stuff you can readily access which supports it. If you have some opinion about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of support, which will really test your reasoning skills.
- iamacynic 10y ago
  40s, huh? i'm in my 30s and i learned about 5 years ago that changing peoples' minds is an impossible, pointless task. people come to their own conclusions based on the bullshit they choose to surround themselves with. you could think the moon is square, doesn't bother me one bit. i'm living my life, not yours. it's far better to focus on your own knowledge and self improvement. it yields a higher return on investment. if you want to affect change, throw your time and money into actually influential things, not social media arguments.
  - eightysixfour 10y ago
    > you could think the moon is square, doesn't bother me one bit. i'm living my life, not yours. The problem is when this wrong headedness starts to interfere at a public policy level, like climate change.
SolarNet 10y ago
Ranking systems help solve this. For example in games. Even in 5v5 games better players will eventually get to the top, because they will cause more games to be won in aggregate over their career. Similarly, systems of apprenticeship, and rankings found in things like martial arts and sports. The problem is that we need 100,000 doctors, some of them will be more informed than others. The less informed ones will cause the other's to look worse. A doctor is still more informed, but when there are disagreements, it would be useful to know the relative standing of them. It would help with these sorts of problems.
- Qwertious 10y ago
  Problem with ranking is that the worse you are, the more you're put into toxic teams with players that don't cooperate/are griefing, thus are much easier to blame for your failure. What's worse, that blame is often legitimate.
  - SolarNet 10y ago
    Games have a solution for this. Toxic players have their own separate section where they are ranked against each other.
Ben2Wilson 10y ago
I want to publicly thank Binaryreap3r for their professional hacking service. Which I'm happy to recommend to you. Has your Social account been attacked by a hacker? Do you need to get back into your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Google+ account?, Have you lost your email or social media password and want to crack/recover it from computers?. Are you being cyber stalked and wish to find the source and stop the cyber predator?, Have you been scammed online? Do you need to locate and report the perpetrator?. Do you want to encrypt your data and protect your sensitive informations?. Any social engineering problem you may have. I know a white hat hacker that delivers!. He helped out with an issue and I think he's good what he does. Contact binaryreap3r@gmail.com or text +16155497267 for all yoiur professional hacking needs.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ars 10y ago
This is why I never took notes as a child. If I took notes I forgot everything I learned. If I didn't, I remembered it.
- kichuku 10y ago
  I found the opposite to be true for myself. If I don't take notes, I forget soon. But if I take notes, at the time of taking notes, I am processing the information in a way that I can explain myself. So somehow that helps me remember a little longer even if I don't read those notes a second time.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Since we are playing with words. Startup idea: the meta-internet to restore humanity to its previous intellectual glory.
cwp 10y ago
Ok, if the article is right, then: - our minds don't bother to remember things when we know the information is stored externally and easy to access - given the aggressive way our minds exploit this, remembering must be expensive - given that we can now get by while remembering less than before - to what end can we put memory capacity we've now freed up? One answer might be "living longer". As our lifespans extend, we may find ourselves accumulating too much knowledge to quickly remember things when we need them. If we're able to conserve memory more during our early lives, we may be able to stave of senility longer. Or maybe we can put that capacity to other uses. Our brains are pretty adaptable, and maybe we can use some of it that was devoted to remembering facts and experiences to instead remembering skills or languages or thinking about the present.
visarga 10y ago
We used to remember information, now we remember keywords to retrieve the information. We haven't lost it, it's just one step away. The information is stored implicitly. The upshot is that we have turned into skilled information seekers and are used to evaluate the quality and credibility of our sources. We might not remember all the trivia, but when it comes to discovering new interesting domains and quickly learning a lot about them, and finding people with similar rare interests, the internet (google) is king.
- tomjakubowski 10y ago
  I'll have to remember to recall that, once, I saw a very insightful HN comment about how we used to remember information, and now we remember... -- bah, I forgot, let me go look that up.
4ydx 10y ago
Deepak Chopra comes to mind. Listening to him weave a tail of why something is because of quantum vibrations always makes me feel slightly ill.
russellprose 10y ago
Today, people around the world marched in the name of science. Back in 1969 we put a man on the moon, and in 2017 we're having to march in the name of science.This appears to be one giant leap backwards for mankind. The age of the printing press coincided with the age of reason. Is the age of the internet the harbinger of an age of disinformation, alternative facts, and ignorance? This post looks at that very possibility, and if so, is the future taking us backwards? Are we devolving as a species? https://jimdroberts.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-information-communication-technology-paradox-or-why-the-internet-is-for-idiots/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true https://jimdroberts.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-information...

184 points by vezycash 10y ago

I've often wondered whether McArthur Wheeler - the lemon juice disguised bank robber discussed in this article - actually had some mental challenges rather than lacked common sense. It seems a whole branch of academia has grown off his unfortunate back...

fiatjaf 10y ago
Is this real? It is unbelievable.
- teh_klev 10y ago
  Yes, yes it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#Original_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...
- pavement 10y ago
  It's the first paragraph of the article.
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  The lemon juice story first appeared in the entertainment section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a compilation format article about dumb criminals. This article was referenced in Dunning's and Kruger's paper, and the story spread from there. The original article looks suspicious to me as well. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZNlRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DXADAAAAIBAJ&pg=6777%2C3720310 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZNlRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DXAD...

fiatjaf 10y ago

Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not understanding why the winner won.

RangerScience 10y ago
I think a variation on this is a key factor of life and culture in engineering - at some point, either what you made works, or it doesn't. You can argue, debate, philosophize and talk, but at the end of the day - there's either a working thing someone else can look at, or there's not. (I imagine this is true in other places - sales, business, design - it just gets increasingly hard to tell "if it worked")
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  You're right, but sales, business and design have too many variables involved in the apparent success of what you make, so you're not able to safely verify what "worked". Even in engineering, two people can make something that "works", but which one is better? Maybe the worst product had the better marketing, so it sold more and in the end there are more people praising it, then you'll think it is better.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Yes, "it works" is a rather low bar. Almost all generic products in the market "work", but some are clearly better than others.
  - RangerScience 10y ago
    We're in agreement. It's a filter, not a metric: you can say this product worked, as in it did what it said on the tin, but the worse/better comparison doesn't work out. The other aspect of "at some point you can just build it and it works or doesn't" is that when it's built, you can (ideally) just go read the code and find out how it works. It's ye olde issue of "it would take me almost as long to explain it as to make it..." - if I'm having trouble communicating an idea, I can just go make it, and then show it to you.
MiddleEndian 10y ago
Some players end up being non-transitive though.
10y ago

rustynails 10y ago

There's another category that fits beautifully with this article. Critical thinking. The article focuses on knowledge domains. It would also benefit from discussing the ability to correlate facts or deduce conclusions based on prior knowledge. I often talk about domestic violence because it's a fundamental issue of ethics: why all western media outlets only focus on fully grown white women, ignoring government bureaus of statistics that dispel such an obvious fallacy that drives victims to be starved of funding and support based on their sex. What we see is that the ability to critically think, to correlate information, to ascertain truth (even when presented with hard numbers from an authoritative source such as governments) is compromised. There's a deeper issue beyond knowledge domains. Is this linked to a change of emphasis/importance in our virtual society? Are we becoming encyclopaedias of partial truths (ie. knowing lists of discrete information without aggregation and without deeper understanding)? The Internet opened up a new world. There are many fewer older people on the Internet. That collective wisdom that comes with age is often lost. I don't know if it's this collective loss of knowledge on the Internet, whether it's Facebook's filters that only tell a person what they want to hear, whether it's information overload, or a combination of factors that appear to have changed our focus from gathering knowledge to gathering information.

awarer 10y ago

"The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand Russell

UltimateFloofy 10y ago
Ah, Dunning-Kruger at scale; summing up populism as a startup.
mpweiher 10y ago
That and our psychological quirk the we mistake self-confidence for competence. The two together make a pretty combustible mixture and explain a lot, IMHO.
nebabyte 10y ago
Or, in graph form: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2177 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2177
phoenixProgram 10y ago
The fundamental difference between modernism and traditionalism is that modernists see doubtful intelligent people and cocksure stupid people whereas the traditionalists see a group of people; the traditionalists observe that when you turn on the stupid lamp, they act stupid, and when you turn on the intelligent lamp, they act intelligent. Actually, this "acting" is a matter of perspective. You were told to see them act stupid or intelligent by some higher power. The traditionalists are quite confident that the lights are the source of the difficulty whereas the modernists are determined to keep their manichaean glasses on and see a human being as a source of light rather than a network of filters of light.

JohnJamesRambo 10y ago

I see this sort of thing on Hacker News all the time. Programmers that are, I'm sure, the top of their field comment in threads about biology or something out of their field with the most silly and wrong answers. A thread about nutrition or something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain. That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it. :)

kuschku 10y ago
Luckily most of the people here, if they wanted, could easily get an entry-level education in any field, because they know how to study from books, can get access to the material, etc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 10y ago
  Potential is not reality.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Potential is the requirement for democracy, though. You can only have democracy if everyone has the chance to educate themselves on the topics that are relevant to them. If, in your country, the majority never learnt how to do so, then democracy will inevitably fail. Many people in STEM or other sciences have an advantage due to that, but this should be standard for all.
- EliRivers 10y ago
  Why would I? Surely the point is that I'm an expert on everything already.
- louithethrid 10y ago
  Oh, yes, its so easy, thats why every programmer aquiring domain specific knowledge never makes any mistake and the software - once feature complete, always guarantees satisfied customers. We are instant experts, just add hot water and stire for five minutes.

edmccard 10y ago

The brain must constantly be doing triage on memories, without conscious intervention. And apparently it recognizes that there is less need to stock our minds with information that can be readily retrieved. Or as my grandmother always said, "if you want to forget something, just write it down."

lordnacho 10y ago

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but they think they know the facts, and they even have theories about why other people are wrong. I've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with "sure but I'm skeptical". I've been invited to a friends house to look at his "Time Waver" machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone's organs. Remotely. In fact he showed me a woman in Italy that he was helping out. First he asked me if I knew anything about quantum theory, which I don't really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I'll appreciate a cleansing. Good thing I can stay polite. But someone in his 40s who thinks this is how the world works is not going to have the veil of ignorance lifted. These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there's a bunch of stuff you can readily access which supports it. If you have some opinion about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of support, which will really test your reasoning skills.

iamacynic 10y ago
40s, huh? i'm in my 30s and i learned about 5 years ago that changing peoples' minds is an impossible, pointless task. people come to their own conclusions based on the bullshit they choose to surround themselves with. you could think the moon is square, doesn't bother me one bit. i'm living my life, not yours. it's far better to focus on your own knowledge and self improvement. it yields a higher return on investment. if you want to affect change, throw your time and money into actually influential things, not social media arguments.
- eightysixfour 10y ago
  > you could think the moon is square, doesn't bother me one bit. i'm living my life, not yours. The problem is when this wrong headedness starts to interfere at a public policy level, like climate change.

SolarNet 10y ago

Ranking systems help solve this. For example in games. Even in 5v5 games better players will eventually get to the top, because they will cause more games to be won in aggregate over their career. Similarly, systems of apprenticeship, and rankings found in things like martial arts and sports. The problem is that we need 100,000 doctors, some of them will be more informed than others. The less informed ones will cause the other's to look worse. A doctor is still more informed, but when there are disagreements, it would be useful to know the relative standing of them. It would help with these sorts of problems.

Qwertious 10y ago
Problem with ranking is that the worse you are, the more you're put into toxic teams with players that don't cooperate/are griefing, thus are much easier to blame for your failure. What's worse, that blame is often legitimate.
- SolarNet 10y ago
  Games have a solution for this. Toxic players have their own separate section where they are ranked against each other.

Ben2Wilson 10y ago

I want to publicly thank Binaryreap3r for their professional hacking service. Which I'm happy to recommend to you. Has your Social account been attacked by a hacker? Do you need to get back into your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Google+ account?, Have you lost your email or social media password and want to crack/recover it from computers?. Are you being cyber stalked and wish to find the source and stop the cyber predator?, Have you been scammed online? Do you need to locate and report the perpetrator?. Do you want to encrypt your data and protect your sensitive informations?. Any social engineering problem you may have. I know a white hat hacker that delivers!. He helped out with an issue and I think he's good what he does. Contact binaryreap3r@gmail.com or text +16155497267 for all yoiur professional hacking needs.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ars 10y ago

This is why I never took notes as a child. If I took notes I forgot everything I learned. If I didn't, I remembered it.

kichuku 10y ago
I found the opposite to be true for myself. If I don't take notes, I forget soon. But if I take notes, at the time of taking notes, I am processing the information in a way that I can explain myself. So somehow that helps me remember a little longer even if I don't read those notes a second time.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Since we are playing with words. Startup idea: the meta-internet to restore humanity to its previous intellectual glory.

cwp 10y ago

Ok, if the article is right, then: - our minds don't bother to remember things when we know the information is stored externally and easy to access - given the aggressive way our minds exploit this, remembering must be expensive - given that we can now get by while remembering less than before - to what end can we put memory capacity we've now freed up? One answer might be "living longer". As our lifespans extend, we may find ourselves accumulating too much knowledge to quickly remember things when we need them. If we're able to conserve memory more during our early lives, we may be able to stave of senility longer. Or maybe we can put that capacity to other uses. Our brains are pretty adaptable, and maybe we can use some of it that was devoted to remembering facts and experiences to instead remembering skills or languages or thinking about the present.

visarga 10y ago

We used to remember information, now we remember keywords to retrieve the information. We haven't lost it, it's just one step away. The information is stored implicitly. The upshot is that we have turned into skilled information seekers and are used to evaluate the quality and credibility of our sources. We might not remember all the trivia, but when it comes to discovering new interesting domains and quickly learning a lot about them, and finding people with similar rare interests, the internet (google) is king.

tomjakubowski 10y ago
I'll have to remember to recall that, once, I saw a very insightful HN comment about how we used to remember information, and now we remember... -- bah, I forgot, let me go look that up.

4ydx 10y ago

Deepak Chopra comes to mind. Listening to him weave a tail of why something is because of quantum vibrations always makes me feel slightly ill.

russellprose 10y ago

Today, people around the world marched in the name of science. Back in 1969 we put a man on the moon, and in 2017 we're having to march in the name of science.This appears to be one giant leap backwards for mankind. The age of the printing press coincided with the age of reason. Is the age of the internet the harbinger of an age of disinformation, alternative facts, and ignorance? This post looks at that very possibility, and if so, is the future taking us backwards? Are we devolving as a species? https://jimdroberts.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-information-communication-technology-paradox-or-why-the-internet-is-for-idiots/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true https://jimdroberts.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-information...