6 ms·

Great article. A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down

by edanm 14y ago

Great article. A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out. And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.

vecinu 14y ago
Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.
- jcoder 14y ago
  That's interesting, but completely counter to my experience. I finally discovered that my most intelligent friends (programmers, teachers, businesspeople) enjoyed the challenge of reasoning to an answer, and felt a sense of triumph and join accomplishment when they got the answer (however close or far they were when they grabbed an iPhone to check their work). They cherished the shared experience, and remember it fondly. They couldn't give two shits that I had wikipedia.
- dagw 14y ago
  For what it's worth me and all my friends have post-secondary education and we all consider looking stuff up on the phone at the pub bad form and only to be done if after we've either come up with a valid guess or are completely stumped after having given it our best shot.
  - alexfoo 14y ago
    That's part of the point. Almost everyone can drive google to get the answer to a question (doing so efficiently is a useful skill though). I think that some of the IGG (Instant Gratification Generation) believe that being able to provide an answer (or being the first to) somehow makes them special, despite them not actually doing anything really clever to get that answer. What bugs me (taking the XKCD spark plug example) are people pretending they know something without revealing the actual source, because they don't attribute their source. It's also great fun to see how people react to technology questions in interviews when they don't have access to the Internet. It doesn't take long to find where the edge of someone's comfort zone is and start probing there. I consider bullshit or waffle as the worst possible answer, followed closely by confidently giving a wrong answer. At the other end of the spectrum are answers of the form "Not absolutely sure but I think it is..." and/or "If I had to look it up I'd look in <book>/<man page>/<documentation>/<website>/etc." Being able to quote possible sources is good as it is a useful indicator of breadth/depth of knowledge. Back to the look-it-up or not debate; from my anecdata I'd guess at there being a better correlation with age rather than education level. IME, the younger people I work/socialise with are, the more likely they are to look things up. I seem to be on the cusp of the "look-it-up" camp which may be related to the fact that Google wasn't ubiquitous during my education (a Comp Sci degree finished in 1999), nor was the technology/access to look things up whenever I wanted (I had to go into a University building for Internet access - I only got fixed line dialup access in my final year and even then it was expensive and slow).
  - stfu 14y ago
    Some companies, mostly in the consulting sector, are even making these kind of question part of the job interview. The idea is about coming up with close-enough numbers based on a series of realistic assumptions.
Mon_Ouie 14y ago
What I find funny in that is that when I'm in a social circle, we usually don't have quick access to the Internet. Is using a phone for browsing (I guess that's the only way you could) during a conversation that common?
- X-Istence 14y ago
  At work when sitting down with co-workers for lunch every single one of us programmers will grab our phones when it comes to fact looking up time. We won't spend time arguing about it, we won't spend time trying to reason through something, we simply look it up, and move on to the next topic of conversation.
dagw 14y ago
And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually. I'm the sort of person who would happily spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of Greece and frown upon anybody who tried to Google it. I like the fun, social 'game' of trying to work out random stuff from a few first principles . Having someone Google for it and tell me is like someone telling me the ending of a movie. Sure it saves me the two hours having to sit though the movie, but it kind of misses the point. It's not like I actually care about what the population of Greece is.
- edanm 14y ago
  Yes, Fermi Problems are a favorite past-time of programmers everywhere. Including me - I love them. I'm talking about cases where trying to solve a Fermi problem wasn't the context.
- jeromeflipo 14y ago
  If we discuss an issue that depends on the size of the population of Greece but isn't about the Greece population, there's no point to waste time for a guess. We should get the right number from Google in a second, and move on to the core issue. Most of my conversation are about ideas and strategies, not characteristics. Like 98% of them. Maybe a little less, let say 96.5%. Or 95%, what do you think?
- PakG1 14y ago
  That's nice if the purpose of the conversation is only to figure out the population of Greece and to pass the time. I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though, where Googling clearly has benefit to help the conversation achieve its goals faster. I say this not to you, but to people on the board in general. Given that I've seen self-centred comments like "I considered the project a success because I got paid and I had fun doing it", rather than thinking about the bigger picture, I can totally see people thinking thoughts like "Don't tell me how long it would take them to make and deliver 15 pizzas, I want to figure out on my own when is the latest we should give them a call, who cares what time people will arrive for the party? The important thing is having fun figuring out how late I can call the pizza place." Sorry I can't think of a better example.
ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
It's almost as if they were more interested in having a conversation than in looking up trivia...
tgrass 14y ago
Refusing to use one's phone to access information during a conversation is not necessarily Luddite (not that you said it was). In modern architecture after the boisterous 1920's when design was seeking to incorporate the concept of the machine and industrial life into our domestic living, designers found themselves in the 30's longing for more organic expressions. Life had changed. The economy had crashed and values shifted. Just because technology is available does not mean it is always what people want or even that people will use it to its utmost capacity. Sometimes we just want to hang out.
mej10 14y ago
In my experience, people primarily bring up "factual" information when trying to argue some point. If you tell them that their facts are wrong then their only choice is to disregard that knowledge, else they could be wrong. "Please, continue arguing! Don't let reality get in your way."
sstrudeau 14y ago
This reminds me of one of my favorite Tom Waits' quotes: "Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now." A lot of people I know argue against this line of thinking but they're usually missing the point. The "problem" isn't that information is readily available ("that's fine," he says) but that the exercise of wondering is often worthwhile and under-appreciated. There's value in not knowing and wondering why.
- coyul 14y ago
  I think of this as analogous to the way computers have increased productivity at work. It's not necessarily that you get your work done faster, it's that you can have a better product in the same amount of time. So instead of wondering about the stuff that's easy to look up, wonder about deeper things. I love Tom Waits, but he's off the mark here: like so many other things, a "deficit of wonder" is a social problem, not a technological one.
nazgulnarsil 14y ago
"facts" are not the primary use case for language.
dstroot 14y ago
There is an old tale of greek philosophers debating how many teeth a horse has. - "They have a small mouth that cannot fit very many teeth - they must have less than 20." - "They chew a lot so must have big strong teeth - big teeth take up more room so I agree they must not have very many." - "I disagree, they only eat grass their teeth do not not need to be strong. But they need very many teeth to chew it effectively!" and on and on. Finally one of them opens a horse's mouth and counts...

by edanm 14y ago

vecinu 14y ago

Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.

jcoder 14y ago
That's interesting, but completely counter to my experience. I finally discovered that my most intelligent friends (programmers, teachers, businesspeople) enjoyed the challenge of reasoning to an answer, and felt a sense of triumph and join accomplishment when they got the answer (however close or far they were when they grabbed an iPhone to check their work). They cherished the shared experience, and remember it fondly. They couldn't give two shits that I had wikipedia.
dagw 14y ago
For what it's worth me and all my friends have post-secondary education and we all consider looking stuff up on the phone at the pub bad form and only to be done if after we've either come up with a valid guess or are completely stumped after having given it our best shot.
- alexfoo 14y ago
  That's part of the point. Almost everyone can drive google to get the answer to a question (doing so efficiently is a useful skill though). I think that some of the IGG (Instant Gratification Generation) believe that being able to provide an answer (or being the first to) somehow makes them special, despite them not actually doing anything really clever to get that answer. What bugs me (taking the XKCD spark plug example) are people pretending they know something without revealing the actual source, because they don't attribute their source. It's also great fun to see how people react to technology questions in interviews when they don't have access to the Internet. It doesn't take long to find where the edge of someone's comfort zone is and start probing there. I consider bullshit or waffle as the worst possible answer, followed closely by confidently giving a wrong answer. At the other end of the spectrum are answers of the form "Not absolutely sure but I think it is..." and/or "If I had to look it up I'd look in <book>/<man page>/<documentation>/<website>/etc." Being able to quote possible sources is good as it is a useful indicator of breadth/depth of knowledge. Back to the look-it-up or not debate; from my anecdata I'd guess at there being a better correlation with age rather than education level. IME, the younger people I work/socialise with are, the more likely they are to look things up. I seem to be on the cusp of the "look-it-up" camp which may be related to the fact that Google wasn't ubiquitous during my education (a Comp Sci degree finished in 1999), nor was the technology/access to look things up whenever I wanted (I had to go into a University building for Internet access - I only got fixed line dialup access in my final year and even then it was expensive and slow).
- stfu 14y ago
  Some companies, mostly in the consulting sector, are even making these kind of question part of the job interview. The idea is about coming up with close-enough numbers based on a series of realistic assumptions.

Mon_Ouie 14y ago

What I find funny in that is that when I'm in a social circle, we usually don't have quick access to the Internet. Is using a phone for browsing (I guess that's the only way you could) during a conversation that common?

X-Istence 14y ago
At work when sitting down with co-workers for lunch every single one of us programmers will grab our phones when it comes to fact looking up time. We won't spend time arguing about it, we won't spend time trying to reason through something, we simply look it up, and move on to the next topic of conversation.

dagw 14y ago

And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually. I'm the sort of person who would happily spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of Greece and frown upon anybody who tried to Google it. I like the fun, social 'game' of trying to work out random stuff from a few first principles . Having someone Google for it and tell me is like someone telling me the ending of a movie. Sure it saves me the two hours having to sit though the movie, but it kind of misses the point. It's not like I actually care about what the population of Greece is.

edanm 14y ago
Yes, Fermi Problems are a favorite past-time of programmers everywhere. Including me - I love them. I'm talking about cases where trying to solve a Fermi problem wasn't the context.
jeromeflipo 14y ago
If we discuss an issue that depends on the size of the population of Greece but isn't about the Greece population, there's no point to waste time for a guess. We should get the right number from Google in a second, and move on to the core issue. Most of my conversation are about ideas and strategies, not characteristics. Like 98% of them. Maybe a little less, let say 96.5%. Or 95%, what do you think?
PakG1 14y ago
That's nice if the purpose of the conversation is only to figure out the population of Greece and to pass the time. I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though, where Googling clearly has benefit to help the conversation achieve its goals faster. I say this not to you, but to people on the board in general. Given that I've seen self-centred comments like "I considered the project a success because I got paid and I had fun doing it", rather than thinking about the bigger picture, I can totally see people thinking thoughts like "Don't tell me how long it would take them to make and deliver 15 pizzas, I want to figure out on my own when is the latest we should give them a call, who cares what time people will arrive for the party? The important thing is having fun figuring out how late I can call the pizza place." Sorry I can't think of a better example.

ArbitraryLimits 14y ago

It's almost as if they were more interested in having a conversation than in looking up trivia...

tgrass 14y ago

Refusing to use one's phone to access information during a conversation is not necessarily Luddite (not that you said it was). In modern architecture after the boisterous 1920's when design was seeking to incorporate the concept of the machine and industrial life into our domestic living, designers found themselves in the 30's longing for more organic expressions. Life had changed. The economy had crashed and values shifted. Just because technology is available does not mean it is always what people want or even that people will use it to its utmost capacity. Sometimes we just want to hang out.

mej10 14y ago

In my experience, people primarily bring up "factual" information when trying to argue some point. If you tell them that their facts are wrong then their only choice is to disregard that knowledge, else they could be wrong. "Please, continue arguing! Don't let reality get in your way."

sstrudeau 14y ago

This reminds me of one of my favorite Tom Waits' quotes: "Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now." A lot of people I know argue against this line of thinking but they're usually missing the point. The "problem" isn't that information is readily available ("that's fine," he says) but that the exercise of wondering is often worthwhile and under-appreciated. There's value in not knowing and wondering why.

coyul 14y ago
I think of this as analogous to the way computers have increased productivity at work. It's not necessarily that you get your work done faster, it's that you can have a better product in the same amount of time. So instead of wondering about the stuff that's easy to look up, wonder about deeper things. I love Tom Waits, but he's off the mark here: like so many other things, a "deficit of wonder" is a social problem, not a technological one.

nazgulnarsil 14y ago

"facts" are not the primary use case for language.

dstroot 14y ago

There is an old tale of greek philosophers debating how many teeth a horse has. - "They have a small mouth that cannot fit very many teeth - they must have less than 20." - "They chew a lot so must have big strong teeth - big teeth take up more room so I agree they must not have very many." - "I disagree, they only eat grass their teeth do not not need to be strong. But they need very many teeth to chew it effectively!" and on and on. Finally one of them opens a horse's mouth and counts...