14 ms·

People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

304 points by nabla9 5y ago

bhouston 5y ago
This means sense and has for some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
- abeppu 5y ago
  I think the "extended mind" view makes sense but also gets way more complicated in the presence of computers that have capabilities beyond just information storage and retrieval (i.e. knowledge "that"). Knowledge "how" to do something can be much richer, especially when the things we partly know how to do are often about interacting with computers. People learn arithmetic in school, but often become functionally dependent on calculators or computer. When this happens, I don't have the sensation that I "knew" the right answer, or that I did the calculation; clearly the device did the work. The separation is apparent. What about when a script or tool you use every day does something you could in principle do on your own, but the computer is far faster and more reliable? Do you feel you "know" how to typecheck your code? Or to resolve dependencies?
  - bhouston 5y ago
    There is the further idea of an "exocortex" that ties into your brain at a deeper level and shares cognitive processes more directly: https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Exocortex https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Exocortex I guess that is sort of where you are going?
- zaat 5y ago
  This line from the abstract: > When information is at our fingertips, we may mistakenly believe that it originated from inside our heads reminded me immediately of Chalmers standing with his iPhone in his hand, arguing that there is nothing special in the skull as a location that is required for establish ownership of an idea.
glimshe 5y ago
Isn't internet access at your fingertips a form of transhumanism? So maybe it's ok, people do indeed "know" more in an objective sense.
- rellekio 5y ago
  Issue comes in when it gives you the experience of knowing more than you think and making judgements based off of that feeling. My concern is the difficulty of tracking down sources years later without a means of reference. Unless you are actively archiving and organizing those links in a useful way. What we have is more prone to forgetfulness, but also at the time that is our strength. Still a pain though
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > My concern is the difficulty of tracking down sources years later without a means of reference. Also when the "facts" in one's sources change, as we've seen in journalism in the past few years.
- legrande 5y ago
  > Isn't internet access at your fingertips a form of transhumanism Well to some degree. At some stage we will forgo having a smartphone and have Google hardwired to our brain. I think that's where we're heading eventually. Tech companies want to be inside our head (if they're not already). Musk talks about the bandwidth problem of accessing information. If it was super readily available (i.e hardwired to our brain), then we could be superhuman. This is why we're to some extent already cyborgs, just not in the cyberpunk aesthetic way of being half machine half human, but we're already half-way there with smartphones.
  - svnt 5y ago
    > Musk talks about the bandwidth problem of accessing information. Has he thought about using the eyeballs? I have it on good authority that the eyeballs have a standard fuckton of functional bandwidth.
buescher 5y ago
Even before the WWW, I remember being taught that the next best thing to remembering something was knowing how/where to look it up.
omarhaneef 5y ago
I believe this predates the internet. I can't remember the study now -- perhaps fellow HNers can -- but there is a study where they asked a group of people to take a side in a debate. The debate was structured so that it sounded like A was the intuitively better choice, and when polled almost everyone agreed the group would support A. One plant was armed with excellent arguments for B, and when presented with these arguments, the group switched to supporting B. When asked later, they thought they had supported B the whole time.
wirthjason 5y ago
The easy access of facts on line is a good thing. This kind of “knowledge” is shallow, assembling the parts together to synthesize new knowledge is the important step. That part isn’t easily found online. This reminds me of leaning math. At one point “doing math” meant calculating numbers, like memorizing multiplication tables or performing long division. I was always relieved when the teacher said we could use a calculator on a test. But at some point I came to realize that math is not calculating. Math is about relationships between numbers and their general properties. Googling facts is akin to using a calculator. Extracting meaning from that jumbled pile of facts is knowledge.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Memory is the basis of any real knowledge. This we have known since for ever… Intelligent people tend to think that you do not need to memorize because everything is out there at a button-press distance. But they do not realize that what makes the intelligent is that they can memorize lots of things without effort.
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    > But they do not realize that what makes the intelligent is that they can memorize lots of things without effort. I play board games with my friends. We all know all the rules of the game, although we took varying amount of times to memorize these rules. Yet some of us come to dominate the game play. To the degree that there is correlation between the speed with which someone learns the rules and the percentage of time they win the game, I do not believe there is causation. How could there be? One would have to believe that once everyone has all the knowledge in the system, those who memorized that knowledge faster still have an edge because they memorized the knowledge faster. That's difficult to believe.
    - dougabug 5y ago
      It’s not just memorization of the rules, in a game like Go that would only be a tiny fraction of the memory utilized. Remembering large numbers of examples assists in recognizing patterns and developing strategies.
lordnacho 5y ago
As a coder I don't think I can do anything without the internet. Even if one specific site (maybe there are two actually, SO and GH) were down, it would wreck my day and many of yours. My style of coding is very intimately connected to having access to online resources. I regularly search for things like how to concatenate strings or the syntax of a for loop in some language. I also use the internet for higher level things like how memory management works on some system, or how something like an ECS architecture works. I also spend a lot of time looking for the right components to put into my own systems, so if GitHub were down it would bother me. Basically I'd be useless without the internet. The coding tools themselves, all the examples of how to use them, and all the actual knowledge about how everything works is on there. Perhaps the only thing that's actually my own input is the judgement about what things are important, which sources are reliable, and which people are authorities.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  The best thing about the world now is that I can develop software for purposes I know nothing about using tools I know nothing about.
- mostertoaster 5y ago
  And sometimes it is knowing what you don’t know that makes one a good developer. Leet code interview question where I could just find the answer in 5 seconds with a google search, might actually be good interview questions if they just let me use a google search. You still have to know what to look for. Being good at word problems in math I think are the only place where “being a math whiz” is what it takes to be “able to code”. How you setup your equations to solve a simple algebraic word problem, can make solving the word problem super simple, or more complex. My kids do Singapore math, and holy crap does it force you to think about other ways to approach solving problems, a valuable skill.
  - MonaroVXR 5y ago
    > My kids do Singapore math, and holy crap does it force you to think about other ways to approach solving problems, a valuable skill. Do you have any resources yo share? about Singapore math in English?
drcongo 5y ago
I've seen almost this exact study before somewhere. As a side note though, how do we pronounce that domain name?
- suchow 5y ago
  You say each letter separately; it’s an acronym and stands for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    No matter how you say it, the acronym still sounds a little like "penis," there's no escaping it. I've seen this topic come up organically at least a dozen times. Which arguably is better than the joke ... "Paper Not Acceptable Science" or "Probably Not Any Science"
dkarl 5y ago
Personally, I'm starting to identify a lot of cases where looking things up in an external resource is a deeper mental disruption than remembering it, even if the lookup is just as fast or even faster. (Or, it's possible that the external lookup only seems faster because the several mechanical steps compress my perception of time, like keyboard navigation can seem faster than the mouse, even when it isn't.) For example, I find that when I'm working with an API enough that I am frequently looking up the same operations, investing twenty minutes in identifying and reviewing the important operations, as if I were preparing for an exam where I wouldn't be allowed to consult external resources, pays off in fluency and immersion. Another example is that when I am reading a history book, before I start, I review relevant names and contemporary dates. Then when I find myself thinking, "Wait, at this time, how long ago was X? Has Y happened yet?" I can answer from memory. This gives me a richer reading experience than if I needed to remove myself from the context of the book to look up those dates. I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning experiences richer.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  > I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning experiences richer. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-m... - Article I read years ago on this, I think it helps to frame the debate of memorization vs anti-memorization. In particular this sentence: > I define memorization as learning an isolated fact through deliberate effort. [emphasis in original] I'll emphasize isolated fact. A lot of people who say memorization and rote learning are bad or ineffective are probably framing it in the same sense as this author. They (mostly, there are exceptions) aren't arguing against committing information to memory, but of committing information to memory with no (or minimal) understanding attached to it. If you just learn isolated facts, you become a meat sack Chinese room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). You can't connect the dots and perform the real interesting work of synthesis (combining information and ideas) or derivation (from what you know, determine new results). The author talks about students "knowing" that the sine of pi/2 is 1. What do they actually know, though? What can they do with that fact on its own without any understanding of what "sine" itself means and the contexts in which it is used?
1970-01-01 5y ago
No internet connection is required! Q: You won more than US$2.5 million dollars over 75 episodes of “Jeopardy!” How did you do it? Jennings: I’ve always considered myself to be a very curious person by nature. If I don’t know the answer to something, it’s like a mystery I need to solve; it spurs me on to find out more information. I read just about everything I can pick up, I watch a lot of movies and I also like to enter my questions into Encarta; it’s a great digital encyclopedia with the answers a mouse click away. https://news.microsoft.com/2004/12/06/q-what-are-ken-jennings-and-encarta-a-these-two-fonts-of-information-are-combining-their-intellectual-firepower/ https://news.microsoft.com/2004/12/06/q-what-are-ken-jenning...
faizshah 5y ago
I feel like people take for granted the ability to ask the right question with the right words. I get that this study is talking about general knowledge questions but I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to search for an answer for something in another field only to find that I need to find the right keywords for the question first. For example a social network in humanities is a complex network in physics is a graph in mathematics is a network in ML (but sometimes its also called a graph) this is very annoying cause all these fields have different ideas on “community identification” (clustering). I’m sure people must have the same problem for general knowledge questions as well.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Small correction: in mathematics, such a thing could also be called a graph.
moosey 5y ago
I often hear a thought process to the effect of: > Why learn something in depth when it can just be looked up? And the answer is that you can't daydream about something or think about it deeply unless that information is easily pulled up from your memory. Daydreaming, out the "default mode" of the brain organizes and helps is too understand information. If I had taken the care to study and memorize information regarding, well, everything in school, via a tool like Anki, I would have a lot more information that I could use to connect disparate ideas together. The brain can't do this to the full extent possible unless that information is memorized. That being said, it's important to know that memorization has a cost in time. The time for a single data point is low, but 20-30k data points in Anki is a serious time commitment. If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  > If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life. I slightly disagree. I do agree that the end goal of having the information memorized is important, but drilling flashcards never worked for me. What makes information stick is drilling practice problems that touch on the knowledge to be memorized until it's established. It's more useful for recognizing when those facts will be relevant, too, compared to having a memory silo of 10,000 stored facts.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Anki and similar systems can be used for practice problems, not just "read card" or "read card, say the reverse side, check if correct". There are some add-ons for math that actually generate problems, or you can construct the cards in a way that they promote use and not mere recall. "Io {parlare} con mia moglie" can be one of many such cards that prompt you to conjugate, or set the article, or properly determine the plural. Or can be combined with reading comprehension or listening comprehension scenarios (play or show some sentences, follow on with questions about what was heard or read).
- Jensson 5y ago
andai 5y ago
I was at the supermarket one time and tried to remember something. In the act of trying to remember it, I instinctively reached into my pocket (to Google it), and found that I'd left my phone at home, and suddenly felt like part of my brain was missing. At that moment I realized the Internet had become part of my my "memory". The feeling wasn't "I can't look it up", but literally "I can't remember."
- _0ffh 5y ago
  Seems like the time of the exocortex has arrived faster - if in a more primitive way - than we anticipated.
  - LesZedCB 5y ago
    the interface is just slow, but if we have time, it'll probably catch up
bregma 5y ago
A frequent mistake is to confuse knowledge with intelligence or wisdom. It is neither, but a prerequisite for both.
joshstrange 5y ago
When I was younger I worried a little bit about this but now I'm perfectly happy to use my brain as an index instead of a data warehouse. As in, I don't bother committing to memory things that I can reach out and grab if they fall out of my "cache". As others have noted, I regularly reach out to SO/Internet to "remember" how to do basic language features if I haven't worked in said language recently or I've just forgotten the syntax. I can speed 5min+ racking my brain and/or reading docs or I can search and find it in a few seconds. Often I just need to see an example to "remember" or kick start myself.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  The problem for me now is my mental index can suffer from link rot. For programming its okay because this doesn't happen often. But for other topics when a site or blog with the details of how something works disappears from the internet its very disorienting. Like you unlearned it. I guess this is why people get into archiving content.
  - svnt 5y ago
    Evernote’s web clipper and notebook system is quite good for this. It is the only service I’ve consistently paid for over the last decade.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    You're right. It is. I'm thinking about setting up some sort of archiving web proxy on my home network to archive most of the pages I visit. I'm not sure if that will turn out to be any more useful than searching the Google index, but, at least it'll be a fun project. :-)
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      That could be really interesting to analyze after a year or so. Look for trends in usage like a Fitbit for your browsing habits.
- mindcrime 5y ago
nescioquid 5y ago
As I understood the abstract, participants are given general-knowledge questions (e.g. who was the fourth U.S. president), participant looks up the answer online, sees "Madison" and then thinks they must have know that (Washington - Adams - Jefferson - Madison). The participant will then predict that they will do well on subsequent questions without using the internet for reference (at least that's how I interpret "... [participants] predict that they will know more in the future without the help of the internet"). That's a foible fit for satire. I'm curious whether there is a process of rationalization like I just imagined, or whether there is just a fundamental confusion by the participant about whether they knew the information prior or knew it from the recent internet search. If the later, that could be horrifying (imagine you needed to find out how long Oceania and Eastasia have been at war). I've read about teachers struggling to convince students of the need to actually memorize things despite the ubiquity of easy reference: you just won't make new connections or insights if you don't have any information already in your head. I would say this study would suggest the teacher's task is even more difficult if people misattribute recent searches for prior knowledge.
- mc32 5y ago
  There is another tangential problem with relying on online information stores. At least with news media, if there was a significant error in reporting, that would go out in an upcoming edition. Both would be recorded. In recent times, news outlets, and other publications, _silently_ update things without issuing a correction or making it obvious there was a correction and the only way you can find out is by the internet archive, if it was there.
hogFeast 5y ago
If you word a question correctly, you can also find evidence for almost any belief with Google (it is Nietzsche, you ask Google, and Google asks you). It is actually quite bizarre to have a conversation with someone online, that person has literally no real knowledge of the topic, they pepper you with "sources" (usually those sources do not provide evidence for what they are saying, they don't know enough to know that), and then (and this is very 2020s) act outraged when you point they are wrong and have no actual knowledge of the topic beyond Google. In my experience, these people have usually integrated Google fully into their own perception of knowledge. They view themselves as totally rational, their views are all evidence-based because they can type the magic phrase into Google and get justification...but, of course, the feeling comes before the source and they have no real understanding of what "evidence" actually looks like. It is very odd trying to have a conversation with someone who is totally irrational but believes heavily in rationality (this is the "source? source? source?" meme of Reddit). I think this is distinct from the SO stuff. Programming languages are very explicit so it is easy to forget exactly how to do something basic if you do it infrequently (for example, I can never remember how to get an env variable in Python, I do it in every project but usually only a handful of times per project...it is easy to forget) Once you get into more complex problems, you can look stuff up on SO but you still won't be able to do it unless you actually understand what you are copying (in my experience, I have usually copied something, something is slightly different, and then I spend time going through it/reworking/understanding).
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
There’s an SNL skit here.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Stackoverflow makes me think I know C++.
nathias 5y ago
There is no knowledge on the internet, only data.
- LesZedCB 5y ago
  eh. data point of one.
m3kw9 5y ago
It should be “Many people repeat facts written online without understanding it.”
Grimm1 5y ago
I partially judge the novelty of the problem I'm solving by the level of access to information about it I have. You realize you're on the edge of knowledge when you're deep down in the research papers and there's only a couple papers on the subject and you implement from there. The solutions you come up with from that tend to be the most rewarding and unfortunately relative to all the mundane work few and far between. I think I run into that type of problem a few times a year, if even.
Animats 5y ago
With Google available, there's no upper limit on programming complexity. Before search engines, programming had to be simple enough that people could learn all the necessary parts. That restriction has been removed.
msla 5y ago
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus > At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. So this is not a new concern.
beloch 5y ago
There is an inherent and not entirely unfounded bias evident in this article that external knowledge is inferior to internal knowledge. It is certainly true that reaching the point where you don't have to look something up usually means you have a deeper understanding of it and are more competent and fast using it. Quality of knowledge matters, but there are limits to how much knowledge a single person can internalize. Quantity has a quality all it's own. Having vast amounts of external knowledge available for rapid access offers unique capabilities. Skill at searching as well as quality of search tools can enable people to do things that would have taken far longer just a couple decades ago when any given search would have involved dead-tree books. Perhaps we should start thinking of google and other such tools, not as poor substitutes for knowledge painstakingly internalized, but rather, an augmentation of human intelligence that grants humans rapid access to far more knowledge than any single human could possibly internalize in a lifetime. As these tools improve, this augmentation effect will become more pronounced, as will the deleterious effects of being cut off from the internet. The blurring of lines between internal and external knowledge may also intensify with future technologies. e.g. Wetware out of a William Gibson novel lets people with data jacks install modules of mental expertise at will. Will an article like this even have meaning once people can look up a module of deeply internalized knowledge and install it in an instant? One day, the Internet's knowledge may be indistinguishable from our own.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  It's problematic to not distinguish between things you know and thing you just googled, regardless of which is more accurate. The problem is similar to not looking and determining what the information of the article you Google is. This feeds into the now stereotype behavior of someone confusing a Google search with actual research. Google doesn't help with it's question-answer section, many of which are mis-categorized and from not-necessarily reliable sources. Quantity has a quality all it's own. A large quantity of poor quality of information is certainly not something that it would be useful to have automatically pouring through one's cranium, to say the least.
- pomian 5y ago
  This is what the Internet started to do, and seemed to promise. But, as we all lament on HN, the Internet is no longer that which we yearn for. Walled gardens, embedded links, snippets instead of articles, titles instead of papers, ads ads ads. It is almost impossible to find the actual fruits of knowledge among the trash. It wasn't long ago, that you had free access to research, data, results, of studies from around the world. Knowledge unbounded. Its almost hopeless now. How to fix it? (And the best scientific paper resource is 'illegal '.)
ksec 5y ago
I am not sure if this is related. It isn't the access of information ( Internet or not ) that is a problem. It is the access to "answer" that is the problem. Or more precisely access to answer without explanation why this is an answer. People no longer "think" if this answer is correct or not ( misinformation ), but presume it to be true. And then they built up a mental model using that information. Which leads to all sort of wrong conclusion. In the old days access to information ( library ) tends to be much better because quality of information is likely millions times higher. This leads to "way" less thinking. And "thinking", the process to digest information is critical to gain knowledge. The more access you have to answers, the less thinking you have to do. Which ends in a negative feedback loop. I have been teaching kids these days and making this point extremely clear. It is not the answer that matters, it is how you arrive at the answer that is the most important. Especially in the day of Google. But generally speaking they do ask a hell of a lot "why" :) Part of the joy of working with kids.
lvl100 5y ago
I think of it as my own RAM. Search used to be quite slow and you had to have knowledge stored in your RAM to be proficient. Memory was valued but you also had to deal with human limitations. Fast forward to today and search can be done quite a bit faster. And your internal RAM effectively multiplied or perhaps your storage (SSD) became faster and bigger. In that sense what’s become more valuable is not necessarily how much information you can physically retain in your brain/memory but how FAST and EFFECTIVELY you can look up things.
bitwize 5y ago
"Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! Estás usando este software de traducción in forma incorrecta. Por favor, consultar el manual. I... don't even know what I just said, but I can find out!" --Wheatley, Portal 2
bondolo 5y ago
I started developing software in the days before the Internet. It was indeed very different. My choices about what to remember and how I remember things have changed significantly since the ubiquitous availability of searchable information. I no longer have tomes of K&R, processor manuals, Inside Macintosh or Java books on my desk. The only technical book which happens to be on my desk at the moment is "Anti-patterns". I have been "weeding" my paper books, especially technical books over the last couple of years and gotten rid of an entire bookshelf of books. I still have an entire bookshelf with Knuth TAoCP, math books, type theory, graphics, graph theory, control theory, physics and some nostalgic books like my original Motorola 68000 processor guide, Rodney Zaks Z80 book, "Adventure game programming in BASIC", Commodore 64 Innerspace Compendium, etc. When a puppy chewed up my copy of "Linux in a Nutshell" I was tempted to buy the new edition but decided to try it online for a month with O'Reilly Safari through work and have not bothered to replace the paper copy for more than 2 years. I would categorize the main change in style of memory as a shift from focus on remembering details and facts, which I can look up, to using memory for decision trees, processes and methodologies which either can't be looked up or are significantly personally customized. I consciously "outsource" the simpler and to me, less valuable, aspects of memory. Some of this is handled automatically by the IDE I use and the rest is done with mostly Google searches.
- 6chars 5y ago
  I could use a new technical book to read. Is this the one you're referring to? https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130/thean04c-20 https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130/thean04c-...
  - bondolo 5y ago
    Yes, I got it on the recommendation of a friend but have read less than a quarter of it so far so don't have my own opinion yet. Because I am cheap bastard I got my copy on eBay for $4.
nsonha 5y ago
knowledge is part of reality, my mind is just a cache
t43562 5y ago
But don't we copy almost everything we know from outside anyhow and then think it's ours without remembering who mentioned it or where we read it? Are we really original thinking machines or do we copy most of the time?
Razengan 5y ago
Is there ANYbody today whose knowledge is all their “own”? How many people really learn something completely on their own? Even tools count as the sum of somebody else’s knowledge, like the computer and language you use even if you teach yourself how to program. Everyone builds upon the knowledge of billions who came before. It’s not a competition.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
> erroneously optimistic predictions regarding how much they will know without the internet People experience tools as extentions of themselves. If you always have the tool, does it matter whether you've misattributed (and if you have the tool, have you misattributed?) Are we not tool-users? Carpenter don't perform as well without hammers; cyclists without cycles; surgeons without scalpels; engineers without mathematics; writers without language.
kazinator 5y ago
I'm sorry, this is complete nonsense. Something you recently Googled is your knowledge, for the time being. It is not external. You may have an inflated sense of being able to retain it going forward, but that doesn't make it external. It's no different from any kind of learning. If you're able to recite the information without looking at an online reference it's internal, and if you looked at it a month ago, it's even long-term memory. It might vaporize in another few months, but that doesn't mean it had been merely external.
tony-allan 5y ago
Some additional references Does Googling Perpetuate the Dunning-Kruger Effect? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202110/does-googling-perpetuate-the-dunning-kruger-effect https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202... One with the Cloud: Why People Mistake the Internet's Knowledge for Their Own (2013) - http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11004901 http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11004901
jacquesm 5y ago
All those people in this thread turning to their Significant Other for help with coding problems: you are so lucky to have that option.
secludedrelish 5y ago
Is there any way to actually read the paper? It doesn't seem to be available on sci-hub.
ineedasername 5y ago
It would be interesting to see if these results replicated when the target was "home encyclopedia set" or "university library" Probably not possible these days since it would be hard to test when people already have internet access l, and part of that access can include these things. But I suspect this phenomenon is not unique to the internet, and would be more generalizable to any readily available source of information. Though the effect would probably increase with ease of access, so the internet would produce a larger effect. I acknowledge this is just speculation though.
grouphugs 5y ago
people still think musk started spacex look, the nazis got tricked into buying an entire countries worth of guns and ammo because the nra told them obama was gonna rewrite the constitution. i bet we can trick them into killing each other with all those guns, and i believe that's the right move
notacoward 5y ago
I think this finding is closely related to the fact that people think they're good at multi-tasking but they're really not. Think of your brain as a cache. People sit at work, filling up half of their cache with random data from HN or YouTube or whatever, then when they need to pull up a fact actually needed for their work ... oops, cache miss. Instead of milliseconds pulling it from memory, they spend seconds to minutes looking it up on Google or Stack Overflow and don't even realize how much these interruptions repeated many times a day slow them down. People who will spend hours hyper-optimizing their editor and their window manager and their shell environment for maximum productivity won't spend any time at all keeping the "working set" for their job in memory. It's kind of crazy, really. This is where those 10x differences between developers come from. A bit of talent will get you far, but a modicum of good old-fashioned focus and self-discipline might get you even further.
nevoyu 5y ago
Our brains naturally seek out the easiest path to a solution. One of them is knowledge retainment. As long as we know we have access to information our heads won't retain much past where to find it.
uoaei 5y ago
There's a synthesis here: people know how to gain knowledge from the internet, even if only temporarily. It is a relatively explicit form of the phenomenon known as "external cognition", which every one of us utilizes in many respects and ways all throughout our days, even when the internet is not involved.
blindmute 5y ago
There's a whole lot of people in here trying real hard to justify why forgetting things about your craft is good. Guys, I understand memorizing is hard, but can we drop the ego a bit and just admit to ourselves that yes, we would be better developers if we remembered the standard libs? It's not strictly necessary nowadays, but it has not stopped being a useful edge.
acd10j 5y ago
I think waitbutwhy gets it. https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html Adding internet as our knowledge source and keeping brain as a cache for most important things let’s us scale our brains capabilities order of magnitude higher.
prima-facie 5y ago
I found that having an offline-first mentality helps with slowing down and actually acquiring a deeper understanding of the topic you're dealing with. I'm keeping offline docs for most of the tools I use. For example the Postgres manual is easy to browse offline, and offers a lot of insight into how the db engine works, much more than searching for random bits on SO. These docs are stored locally on my machine as html files. I have an nginx running just to browse them more easily at http://localhost/doc/ http://localhost/doc/ Also writing down things as you learn helps tremendously. I use Zim which is a local wiki application. It's easy to use and I have separate notebooks for different things (like work, programming, etc). This pattern pretty much mirrors what you would do in school.

304 points by nabla9 5y ago

This means sense and has for some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

abeppu 5y ago
I think the "extended mind" view makes sense but also gets way more complicated in the presence of computers that have capabilities beyond just information storage and retrieval (i.e. knowledge "that"). Knowledge "how" to do something can be much richer, especially when the things we partly know how to do are often about interacting with computers. People learn arithmetic in school, but often become functionally dependent on calculators or computer. When this happens, I don't have the sensation that I "knew" the right answer, or that I did the calculation; clearly the device did the work. The separation is apparent. What about when a script or tool you use every day does something you could in principle do on your own, but the computer is far faster and more reliable? Do you feel you "know" how to typecheck your code? Or to resolve dependencies?
- bhouston 5y ago
  There is the further idea of an "exocortex" that ties into your brain at a deeper level and shares cognitive processes more directly: https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Exocortex https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Exocortex I guess that is sort of where you are going?
zaat 5y ago
This line from the abstract: > When information is at our fingertips, we may mistakenly believe that it originated from inside our heads reminded me immediately of Chalmers standing with his iPhone in his hand, arguing that there is nothing special in the skull as a location that is required for establish ownership of an idea.

glimshe 5y ago

Isn't internet access at your fingertips a form of transhumanism? So maybe it's ok, people do indeed "know" more in an objective sense.

rellekio 5y ago
Issue comes in when it gives you the experience of knowing more than you think and making judgements based off of that feeling. My concern is the difficulty of tracking down sources years later without a means of reference. Unless you are actively archiving and organizing those links in a useful way. What we have is more prone to forgetfulness, but also at the time that is our strength. Still a pain though
- mistermann 5y ago
  > My concern is the difficulty of tracking down sources years later without a means of reference. Also when the "facts" in one's sources change, as we've seen in journalism in the past few years.
legrande 5y ago
> Isn't internet access at your fingertips a form of transhumanism Well to some degree. At some stage we will forgo having a smartphone and have Google hardwired to our brain. I think that's where we're heading eventually. Tech companies want to be inside our head (if they're not already). Musk talks about the bandwidth problem of accessing information. If it was super readily available (i.e hardwired to our brain), then we could be superhuman. This is why we're to some extent already cyborgs, just not in the cyberpunk aesthetic way of being half machine half human, but we're already half-way there with smartphones.
- svnt 5y ago
  > Musk talks about the bandwidth problem of accessing information. Has he thought about using the eyeballs? I have it on good authority that the eyeballs have a standard fuckton of functional bandwidth.

buescher 5y ago

Even before the WWW, I remember being taught that the next best thing to remembering something was knowing how/where to look it up.

omarhaneef 5y ago

I believe this predates the internet. I can't remember the study now -- perhaps fellow HNers can -- but there is a study where they asked a group of people to take a side in a debate. The debate was structured so that it sounded like A was the intuitively better choice, and when polled almost everyone agreed the group would support A. One plant was armed with excellent arguments for B, and when presented with these arguments, the group switched to supporting B. When asked later, they thought they had supported B the whole time.

wirthjason 5y ago

The easy access of facts on line is a good thing. This kind of “knowledge” is shallow, assembling the parts together to synthesize new knowledge is the important step. That part isn’t easily found online. This reminds me of leaning math. At one point “doing math” meant calculating numbers, like memorizing multiplication tables or performing long division. I was always relieved when the teacher said we could use a calculator on a test. But at some point I came to realize that math is not calculating. Math is about relationships between numbers and their general properties. Googling facts is akin to using a calculator. Extracting meaning from that jumbled pile of facts is knowledge.

pfortuny 5y ago
Memory is the basis of any real knowledge. This we have known since for ever… Intelligent people tend to think that you do not need to memorize because everything is out there at a button-press distance. But they do not realize that what makes the intelligent is that they can memorize lots of things without effort.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  > But they do not realize that what makes the intelligent is that they can memorize lots of things without effort. I play board games with my friends. We all know all the rules of the game, although we took varying amount of times to memorize these rules. Yet some of us come to dominate the game play. To the degree that there is correlation between the speed with which someone learns the rules and the percentage of time they win the game, I do not believe there is causation. How could there be? One would have to believe that once everyone has all the knowledge in the system, those who memorized that knowledge faster still have an edge because they memorized the knowledge faster. That's difficult to believe.
  - dougabug 5y ago
    It’s not just memorization of the rules, in a game like Go that would only be a tiny fraction of the memory utilized. Remembering large numbers of examples assists in recognizing patterns and developing strategies.

lordnacho 5y ago

As a coder I don't think I can do anything without the internet. Even if one specific site (maybe there are two actually, SO and GH) were down, it would wreck my day and many of yours. My style of coding is very intimately connected to having access to online resources. I regularly search for things like how to concatenate strings or the syntax of a for loop in some language. I also use the internet for higher level things like how memory management works on some system, or how something like an ECS architecture works. I also spend a lot of time looking for the right components to put into my own systems, so if GitHub were down it would bother me. Basically I'd be useless without the internet. The coding tools themselves, all the examples of how to use them, and all the actual knowledge about how everything works is on there. Perhaps the only thing that's actually my own input is the judgement about what things are important, which sources are reliable, and which people are authorities.

TigeriusKirk 5y ago
The best thing about the world now is that I can develop software for purposes I know nothing about using tools I know nothing about.
mostertoaster 5y ago
And sometimes it is knowing what you don’t know that makes one a good developer. Leet code interview question where I could just find the answer in 5 seconds with a google search, might actually be good interview questions if they just let me use a google search. You still have to know what to look for. Being good at word problems in math I think are the only place where “being a math whiz” is what it takes to be “able to code”. How you setup your equations to solve a simple algebraic word problem, can make solving the word problem super simple, or more complex. My kids do Singapore math, and holy crap does it force you to think about other ways to approach solving problems, a valuable skill.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  > My kids do Singapore math, and holy crap does it force you to think about other ways to approach solving problems, a valuable skill. Do you have any resources yo share? about Singapore math in English?

drcongo 5y ago

I've seen almost this exact study before somewhere. As a side note though, how do we pronounce that domain name?

suchow 5y ago
You say each letter separately; it’s an acronym and stands for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  No matter how you say it, the acronym still sounds a little like "penis," there's no escaping it. I've seen this topic come up organically at least a dozen times. Which arguably is better than the joke ... "Paper Not Acceptable Science" or "Probably Not Any Science"

dkarl 5y ago

Personally, I'm starting to identify a lot of cases where looking things up in an external resource is a deeper mental disruption than remembering it, even if the lookup is just as fast or even faster. (Or, it's possible that the external lookup only seems faster because the several mechanical steps compress my perception of time, like keyboard navigation can seem faster than the mouse, even when it isn't.) For example, I find that when I'm working with an API enough that I am frequently looking up the same operations, investing twenty minutes in identifying and reviewing the important operations, as if I were preparing for an exam where I wouldn't be allowed to consult external resources, pays off in fluency and immersion. Another example is that when I am reading a history book, before I start, I review relevant names and contemporary dates. Then when I find myself thinking, "Wait, at this time, how long ago was X? Has Y happened yet?" I can answer from memory. This gives me a richer reading experience than if I needed to remove myself from the context of the book to look up those dates. I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning experiences richer.

Jtsummers 5y ago
> I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning experiences richer. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-m... - Article I read years ago on this, I think it helps to frame the debate of memorization vs anti-memorization. In particular this sentence: > I define memorization as learning an isolated fact through deliberate effort. [emphasis in original] I'll emphasize isolated fact. A lot of people who say memorization and rote learning are bad or ineffective are probably framing it in the same sense as this author. They (mostly, there are exceptions) aren't arguing against committing information to memory, but of committing information to memory with no (or minimal) understanding attached to it. If you just learn isolated facts, you become a meat sack Chinese room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). You can't connect the dots and perform the real interesting work of synthesis (combining information and ideas) or derivation (from what you know, determine new results). The author talks about students "knowing" that the sine of pi/2 is 1. What do they actually know, though? What can they do with that fact on its own without any understanding of what "sine" itself means and the contexts in which it is used?

1970-01-01 5y ago

No internet connection is required! Q: You won more than US$2.5 million dollars over 75 episodes of “Jeopardy!” How did you do it? Jennings: I’ve always considered myself to be a very curious person by nature. If I don’t know the answer to something, it’s like a mystery I need to solve; it spurs me on to find out more information. I read just about everything I can pick up, I watch a lot of movies and I also like to enter my questions into Encarta; it’s a great digital encyclopedia with the answers a mouse click away. https://news.microsoft.com/2004/12/06/q-what-are-ken-jennings-and-encarta-a-these-two-fonts-of-information-are-combining-their-intellectual-firepower/ https://news.microsoft.com/2004/12/06/q-what-are-ken-jenning...

faizshah 5y ago

I feel like people take for granted the ability to ask the right question with the right words. I get that this study is talking about general knowledge questions but I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to search for an answer for something in another field only to find that I need to find the right keywords for the question first. For example a social network in humanities is a complex network in physics is a graph in mathematics is a network in ML (but sometimes its also called a graph) this is very annoying cause all these fields have different ideas on “community identification” (clustering). I’m sure people must have the same problem for general knowledge questions as well.

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Small correction: in mathematics, such a thing could also be called a graph.

moosey 5y ago

I often hear a thought process to the effect of: > Why learn something in depth when it can just be looked up? And the answer is that you can't daydream about something or think about it deeply unless that information is easily pulled up from your memory. Daydreaming, out the "default mode" of the brain organizes and helps is too understand information. If I had taken the care to study and memorize information regarding, well, everything in school, via a tool like Anki, I would have a lot more information that I could use to connect disparate ideas together. The brain can't do this to the full extent possible unless that information is memorized. That being said, it's important to know that memorization has a cost in time. The time for a single data point is low, but 20-30k data points in Anki is a serious time commitment. If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
> If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life. I slightly disagree. I do agree that the end goal of having the information memorized is important, but drilling flashcards never worked for me. What makes information stick is drilling practice problems that touch on the knowledge to be memorized until it's established. It's more useful for recognizing when those facts will be relevant, too, compared to having a memory silo of 10,000 stored facts.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Anki and similar systems can be used for practice problems, not just "read card" or "read card, say the reverse side, check if correct". There are some add-ons for math that actually generate problems, or you can construct the cards in a way that they promote use and not mere recall. "Io {parlare} con mia moglie" can be one of many such cards that prompt you to conjugate, or set the article, or properly determine the plural. Or can be combined with reading comprehension or listening comprehension scenarios (play or show some sentences, follow on with questions about what was heard or read).
Jensson 5y ago

andai 5y ago

I was at the supermarket one time and tried to remember something. In the act of trying to remember it, I instinctively reached into my pocket (to Google it), and found that I'd left my phone at home, and suddenly felt like part of my brain was missing. At that moment I realized the Internet had become part of my my "memory". The feeling wasn't "I can't look it up", but literally "I can't remember."

_0ffh 5y ago
Seems like the time of the exocortex has arrived faster - if in a more primitive way - than we anticipated.
- LesZedCB 5y ago
  the interface is just slow, but if we have time, it'll probably catch up

bregma 5y ago

A frequent mistake is to confuse knowledge with intelligence or wisdom. It is neither, but a prerequisite for both.

joshstrange 5y ago

When I was younger I worried a little bit about this but now I'm perfectly happy to use my brain as an index instead of a data warehouse. As in, I don't bother committing to memory things that I can reach out and grab if they fall out of my "cache". As others have noted, I regularly reach out to SO/Internet to "remember" how to do basic language features if I haven't worked in said language recently or I've just forgotten the syntax. I can speed 5min+ racking my brain and/or reading docs or I can search and find it in a few seconds. Often I just need to see an example to "remember" or kick start myself.

monkeybutton 5y ago
The problem for me now is my mental index can suffer from link rot. For programming its okay because this doesn't happen often. But for other topics when a site or blog with the details of how something works disappears from the internet its very disorienting. Like you unlearned it. I guess this is why people get into archiving content.
- svnt 5y ago
  Evernote’s web clipper and notebook system is quite good for this. It is the only service I’ve consistently paid for over the last decade.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  You're right. It is. I'm thinking about setting up some sort of archiving web proxy on my home network to archive most of the pages I visit. I'm not sure if that will turn out to be any more useful than searching the Google index, but, at least it'll be a fun project. :-)
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    That could be really interesting to analyze after a year or so. Look for trends in usage like a Fitbit for your browsing habits.
mindcrime 5y ago

nescioquid 5y ago

As I understood the abstract, participants are given general-knowledge questions (e.g. who was the fourth U.S. president), participant looks up the answer online, sees "Madison" and then thinks they must have know that (Washington - Adams - Jefferson - Madison). The participant will then predict that they will do well on subsequent questions without using the internet for reference (at least that's how I interpret "... [participants] predict that they will know more in the future without the help of the internet"). That's a foible fit for satire. I'm curious whether there is a process of rationalization like I just imagined, or whether there is just a fundamental confusion by the participant about whether they knew the information prior or knew it from the recent internet search. If the later, that could be horrifying (imagine you needed to find out how long Oceania and Eastasia have been at war). I've read about teachers struggling to convince students of the need to actually memorize things despite the ubiquity of easy reference: you just won't make new connections or insights if you don't have any information already in your head. I would say this study would suggest the teacher's task is even more difficult if people misattribute recent searches for prior knowledge.

mc32 5y ago
There is another tangential problem with relying on online information stores. At least with news media, if there was a significant error in reporting, that would go out in an upcoming edition. Both would be recorded. In recent times, news outlets, and other publications, _silently_ update things without issuing a correction or making it obvious there was a correction and the only way you can find out is by the internet archive, if it was there.

hogFeast 5y ago

If you word a question correctly, you can also find evidence for almost any belief with Google (it is Nietzsche, you ask Google, and Google asks you). It is actually quite bizarre to have a conversation with someone online, that person has literally no real knowledge of the topic, they pepper you with "sources" (usually those sources do not provide evidence for what they are saying, they don't know enough to know that), and then (and this is very 2020s) act outraged when you point they are wrong and have no actual knowledge of the topic beyond Google. In my experience, these people have usually integrated Google fully into their own perception of knowledge. They view themselves as totally rational, their views are all evidence-based because they can type the magic phrase into Google and get justification...but, of course, the feeling comes before the source and they have no real understanding of what "evidence" actually looks like. It is very odd trying to have a conversation with someone who is totally irrational but believes heavily in rationality (this is the "source? source? source?" meme of Reddit). I think this is distinct from the SO stuff. Programming languages are very explicit so it is easy to forget exactly how to do something basic if you do it infrequently (for example, I can never remember how to get an env variable in Python, I do it in every project but usually only a handful of times per project...it is easy to forget) Once you get into more complex problems, you can look stuff up on SO but you still won't be able to do it unless you actually understand what you are copying (in my experience, I have usually copied something, something is slightly different, and then I spend time going through it/reworking/understanding).

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

There’s an SNL skit here.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Stackoverflow makes me think I know C++.

nathias 5y ago

There is no knowledge on the internet, only data.

LesZedCB 5y ago
eh. data point of one.

m3kw9 5y ago

It should be “Many people repeat facts written online without understanding it.”

Grimm1 5y ago

I partially judge the novelty of the problem I'm solving by the level of access to information about it I have. You realize you're on the edge of knowledge when you're deep down in the research papers and there's only a couple papers on the subject and you implement from there. The solutions you come up with from that tend to be the most rewarding and unfortunately relative to all the mundane work few and far between. I think I run into that type of problem a few times a year, if even.

Animats 5y ago

With Google available, there's no upper limit on programming complexity. Before search engines, programming had to be simple enough that people could learn all the necessary parts. That restriction has been removed.

msla 5y ago

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus > At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. So this is not a new concern.

beloch 5y ago

There is an inherent and not entirely unfounded bias evident in this article that external knowledge is inferior to internal knowledge. It is certainly true that reaching the point where you don't have to look something up usually means you have a deeper understanding of it and are more competent and fast using it. Quality of knowledge matters, but there are limits to how much knowledge a single person can internalize. Quantity has a quality all it's own. Having vast amounts of external knowledge available for rapid access offers unique capabilities. Skill at searching as well as quality of search tools can enable people to do things that would have taken far longer just a couple decades ago when any given search would have involved dead-tree books. Perhaps we should start thinking of google and other such tools, not as poor substitutes for knowledge painstakingly internalized, but rather, an augmentation of human intelligence that grants humans rapid access to far more knowledge than any single human could possibly internalize in a lifetime. As these tools improve, this augmentation effect will become more pronounced, as will the deleterious effects of being cut off from the internet. The blurring of lines between internal and external knowledge may also intensify with future technologies. e.g. Wetware out of a William Gibson novel lets people with data jacks install modules of mental expertise at will. Will an article like this even have meaning once people can look up a module of deeply internalized knowledge and install it in an instant? One day, the Internet's knowledge may be indistinguishable from our own.

joe_the_user 5y ago
It's problematic to not distinguish between things you know and thing you just googled, regardless of which is more accurate. The problem is similar to not looking and determining what the information of the article you Google is. This feeds into the now stereotype behavior of someone confusing a Google search with actual research. Google doesn't help with it's question-answer section, many of which are mis-categorized and from not-necessarily reliable sources. Quantity has a quality all it's own. A large quantity of poor quality of information is certainly not something that it would be useful to have automatically pouring through one's cranium, to say the least.
pomian 5y ago
This is what the Internet started to do, and seemed to promise. But, as we all lament on HN, the Internet is no longer that which we yearn for. Walled gardens, embedded links, snippets instead of articles, titles instead of papers, ads ads ads. It is almost impossible to find the actual fruits of knowledge among the trash. It wasn't long ago, that you had free access to research, data, results, of studies from around the world. Knowledge unbounded. Its almost hopeless now. How to fix it? (And the best scientific paper resource is 'illegal '.)

ksec 5y ago

I am not sure if this is related. It isn't the access of information ( Internet or not ) that is a problem. It is the access to "answer" that is the problem. Or more precisely access to answer without explanation why this is an answer. People no longer "think" if this answer is correct or not ( misinformation ), but presume it to be true. And then they built up a mental model using that information. Which leads to all sort of wrong conclusion. In the old days access to information ( library ) tends to be much better because quality of information is likely millions times higher. This leads to "way" less thinking. And "thinking", the process to digest information is critical to gain knowledge. The more access you have to answers, the less thinking you have to do. Which ends in a negative feedback loop. I have been teaching kids these days and making this point extremely clear. It is not the answer that matters, it is how you arrive at the answer that is the most important. Especially in the day of Google. But generally speaking they do ask a hell of a lot "why" :) Part of the joy of working with kids.

lvl100 5y ago

I think of it as my own RAM. Search used to be quite slow and you had to have knowledge stored in your RAM to be proficient. Memory was valued but you also had to deal with human limitations. Fast forward to today and search can be done quite a bit faster. And your internal RAM effectively multiplied or perhaps your storage (SSD) became faster and bigger. In that sense what’s become more valuable is not necessarily how much information you can physically retain in your brain/memory but how FAST and EFFECTIVELY you can look up things.

bitwize 5y ago

"Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! Estás usando este software de traducción in forma incorrecta. Por favor, consultar el manual. I... don't even know what I just said, but I can find out!" --Wheatley, Portal 2

bondolo 5y ago

I started developing software in the days before the Internet. It was indeed very different. My choices about what to remember and how I remember things have changed significantly since the ubiquitous availability of searchable information. I no longer have tomes of K&R, processor manuals, Inside Macintosh or Java books on my desk. The only technical book which happens to be on my desk at the moment is "Anti-patterns". I have been "weeding" my paper books, especially technical books over the last couple of years and gotten rid of an entire bookshelf of books. I still have an entire bookshelf with Knuth TAoCP, math books, type theory, graphics, graph theory, control theory, physics and some nostalgic books like my original Motorola 68000 processor guide, Rodney Zaks Z80 book, "Adventure game programming in BASIC", Commodore 64 Innerspace Compendium, etc. When a puppy chewed up my copy of "Linux in a Nutshell" I was tempted to buy the new edition but decided to try it online for a month with O'Reilly Safari through work and have not bothered to replace the paper copy for more than 2 years. I would categorize the main change in style of memory as a shift from focus on remembering details and facts, which I can look up, to using memory for decision trees, processes and methodologies which either can't be looked up or are significantly personally customized. I consciously "outsource" the simpler and to me, less valuable, aspects of memory. Some of this is handled automatically by the IDE I use and the rest is done with mostly Google searches.

6chars 5y ago
I could use a new technical book to read. Is this the one you're referring to? https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130/thean04c-20 https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130/thean04c-...
- bondolo 5y ago
  Yes, I got it on the recommendation of a friend but have read less than a quarter of it so far so don't have my own opinion yet. Because I am cheap bastard I got my copy on eBay for $4.

nsonha 5y ago

knowledge is part of reality, my mind is just a cache

t43562 5y ago

But don't we copy almost everything we know from outside anyhow and then think it's ours without remembering who mentioned it or where we read it? Are we really original thinking machines or do we copy most of the time?

Razengan 5y ago

Is there ANYbody today whose knowledge is all their “own”? How many people really learn something completely on their own? Even tools count as the sum of somebody else’s knowledge, like the computer and language you use even if you teach yourself how to program. Everyone builds upon the knowledge of billions who came before. It’s not a competition.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

> erroneously optimistic predictions regarding how much they will know without the internet People experience tools as extentions of themselves. If you always have the tool, does it matter whether you've misattributed (and if you have the tool, have you misattributed?) Are we not tool-users? Carpenter don't perform as well without hammers; cyclists without cycles; surgeons without scalpels; engineers without mathematics; writers without language.

kazinator 5y ago

I'm sorry, this is complete nonsense. Something you recently Googled is your knowledge, for the time being. It is not external. You may have an inflated sense of being able to retain it going forward, but that doesn't make it external. It's no different from any kind of learning. If you're able to recite the information without looking at an online reference it's internal, and if you looked at it a month ago, it's even long-term memory. It might vaporize in another few months, but that doesn't mean it had been merely external.

tony-allan 5y ago

Some additional references Does Googling Perpetuate the Dunning-Kruger Effect? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202110/does-googling-perpetuate-the-dunning-kruger-effect https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202... One with the Cloud: Why People Mistake the Internet's Knowledge for Their Own (2013) - http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11004901 http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11004901

jacquesm 5y ago

All those people in this thread turning to their Significant Other for help with coding problems: you are so lucky to have that option.

secludedrelish 5y ago

Is there any way to actually read the paper? It doesn't seem to be available on sci-hub.

ineedasername 5y ago

It would be interesting to see if these results replicated when the target was "home encyclopedia set" or "university library" Probably not possible these days since it would be hard to test when people already have internet access l, and part of that access can include these things. But I suspect this phenomenon is not unique to the internet, and would be more generalizable to any readily available source of information. Though the effect would probably increase with ease of access, so the internet would produce a larger effect. I acknowledge this is just speculation though.

grouphugs 5y ago

people still think musk started spacex look, the nazis got tricked into buying an entire countries worth of guns and ammo because the nra told them obama was gonna rewrite the constitution. i bet we can trick them into killing each other with all those guns, and i believe that's the right move

notacoward 5y ago

I think this finding is closely related to the fact that people think they're good at multi-tasking but they're really not. Think of your brain as a cache. People sit at work, filling up half of their cache with random data from HN or YouTube or whatever, then when they need to pull up a fact actually needed for their work ... oops, cache miss. Instead of milliseconds pulling it from memory, they spend seconds to minutes looking it up on Google or Stack Overflow and don't even realize how much these interruptions repeated many times a day slow them down. People who will spend hours hyper-optimizing their editor and their window manager and their shell environment for maximum productivity won't spend any time at all keeping the "working set" for their job in memory. It's kind of crazy, really. This is where those 10x differences between developers come from. A bit of talent will get you far, but a modicum of good old-fashioned focus and self-discipline might get you even further.

nevoyu 5y ago

Our brains naturally seek out the easiest path to a solution. One of them is knowledge retainment. As long as we know we have access to information our heads won't retain much past where to find it.

uoaei 5y ago

There's a synthesis here: people know how to gain knowledge from the internet, even if only temporarily. It is a relatively explicit form of the phenomenon known as "external cognition", which every one of us utilizes in many respects and ways all throughout our days, even when the internet is not involved.

blindmute 5y ago

There's a whole lot of people in here trying real hard to justify why forgetting things about your craft is good. Guys, I understand memorizing is hard, but can we drop the ego a bit and just admit to ourselves that yes, we would be better developers if we remembered the standard libs? It's not strictly necessary nowadays, but it has not stopped being a useful edge.

acd10j 5y ago

I think waitbutwhy gets it. https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html Adding internet as our knowledge source and keeping brain as a cache for most important things let’s us scale our brains capabilities order of magnitude higher.

prima-facie 5y ago

I found that having an offline-first mentality helps with slowing down and actually acquiring a deeper understanding of the topic you're dealing with. I'm keeping offline docs for most of the tools I use. For example the Postgres manual is easy to browse offline, and offers a lot of insight into how the db engine works, much more than searching for random bits on SO. These docs are stored locally on my machine as html files. I have an nginx running just to browse them more easily at http://localhost/doc/ http://localhost/doc/ Also writing down things as you learn helps tremendously. I use Zim which is a local wiki application. It's easy to use and I have separate notebooks for different things (like work, programming, etc). This pattern pretty much mirrors what you would do in school.