The problem with "solving" problems this way is that bad feedback loops form: people who are only slightly better-informed than complete newbies repeat question

The problem with "solving" problems this way is that bad feedback loops form: people who are only slightly better-informed than complete newbies repeat questionable advice they don't completely understand, crowding out better answers. "You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare." - "A Conversation with Alan Kay", http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 The problem is that researching a problem this way is often pretty half-assed; fixing a deeper problem by googling can be like copy-and-paste programming, rather than solving the actual problem.