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Before the internet, I user to spend a lot of time pondering questions to which the answer was in a textbook somewhere. Sometimes I figured them out for myself.
by tlb 7y ago
Before the internet, I user to spend a lot of time pondering questions to which the answer was in a textbook somewhere. Sometimes I figured them out for myself.
Today, I rarely spend much time pondering questions whose answer is in Wikipedia. I just look it up.
Pondering any question is good mental exercise for others. I wonder if the easy availability of answers to most questions makes it harder to tackle the truly unsolved ones.
- crochi 7y agoI think it hinders our ability to identify an unsolved problem, I'm always left wondering if there's no easy answer to the question I asked Google or if I just wrote the wrong query. The feeling is that there's always an answer, someone already did or thought about that and wrote it somewhere, on Stack Overflow or a personal blog, and I just didn't write the right Google query yet.
- pm90 7y agoIts a fair point. However, I don’t think it has reduced our capacity for thinking, it’s simply allowed us to think more about stuff that others haven’t, which is pretty awesome. We’re building a shared corpus of understanding as a species that we never had before, which seems exciting. Most of my friends verify things on Wikipedia or the internet before giving an answer to a question; basic fact checking allows making informed decisions which perhaps have a higher likelihood of success. Well maybe not but the success or failure would both be worthwhile since the reason it failed couldn’t just be that it was based on a lie.
- _jal 7y agoThere's a related thing, too. I notice that easy answers mean it takes me longer to realize I'm asking a slightly wrong or less useful question than I should be.