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Is Google killing general knowledge?
- jacquesm 17y agoI think 'general knowledge' is a moving target. Like any other power tool google changes your abilities to a different level, the brain cycles you were using before to remember things can now be applied to other items of interest. Whether you do so or not is up to each individual. A parallel development is the address book in mobile phones. I used know all the phone numbers of all my acquaintances by heart, now that my phone remembers them that 'skill' is absolutely atrophied. The only phone number I remember now is my own... If anything google is enabling people to find general knowledge, not kill it. The trick about information always was to be able to find it and use it, not necessarily to remember it, even though a good memory is obviously an asset.
- nazgulnarsil 17y agoAre books killing the oral tradition? The ability to recite long tracts from memory, from The Odyssey to bread recipes, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be looked up in a book? "It's a damn shame" say out of work poets everywhere.
- pixcavator 17y agoYou didn't read the whole thing, did you?
- nazgulnarsil 17y agonope, I skimmed and got the impression that it was making the point that people don't distinguish between offloading knowledge and offloading responsibility for how the knowledge is used. To jump from a few examples of that to the headline is too big to swallow. thus my quip. I've read up on debates about this subject before, and there are far better arguments on both sides than this article presents.
- ljlolel 17y agoAnswer: Google is killing many kinds of Trivia. For example, I always have to look up how to link external CSS. Google is also teaching people more than ever (e.g. I know many more definitions of words than I ever would have looked up without Google). Google (more Wikipedia) gives me instant summaries of complex topics or figures or events, which I remember.
- tocomment 17y agoI wish job interviewers would catch up with this. They always seem to expect you to have this kind of triva memorized :-(
- sfphotoarts 17y agothere's some truth to that, but if you're interviewing for a job where you'll be doing a lot of CSS and claim you've been doing a lot of CSS, its also pretty reasonable to assume you can remember the things you do every day. I always think its really lame when an interview candidate claims they can't possible show me an example of iterating over a collection in the language they use every day because they don't have intellisense, autocomplete or google.
- lacker 17y agoAs a somewhat frequent job interviewer I keep seeing the opposite side. me: "Let's write some code, what's your favorite language?" them: "My favorite? I guess C++" me: "So how about, write a function to find the most common string in a vector of strings." They write something like int MostCommonString(vector v) { for (int s = v[0]; s < n; s++) { int count = s count++ } return count } me: "I see. Well for one, in C++ you need to end each line with a semicolon." them: "Jeez! Interviewers always expect you to have all this trivia memorized!!!"
- jpeterson 17y agoNot sure what point you're making here. It doesn't really say anything about a programmer if he/she forgets the semicolons when writing out a C++ function by hand. Especially if this person is constantly juggling many different language syntaxes, some of which have line terminators and some not. The function logic is wrong; yes, that's a problem. But forgetting the semicolons has no significance whatsoever.
- TrevorJ 17y agoIf anything, I know more now than I would have without Google. I tend to look up words and interesting facts I don't know on my palm when I am out and about and run into something I don't know much about.
- Eliezer 17y agoI don't know - I couldn't find the answer on Google.
- mquander 17y agoSomeone wiser than me once noted that the purpose of technology is to allow individuals to be incompetent at more and more things.
- ashleyw 17y agoThere aren't many situations where I'd need information, without being able to look it up. So it's not killed my general knowledge, it's expanded it beyond any level I could have had without it.
- TommyWiseau 17y agoYou know it's really crazy, but imagine how it will be in the future? What will it be like when we have some technology where it will be possible to get an answer from google in the space of a second no matter where you are? We're getting close with cell phones but I'd say it might take about 20 seconds to get the answer. That's still a big enough barrier to keep you from asking it everything. But eventually we'll have some sort of device that will have us connected to information at all times. I don't know how it will manifest itself (wearable computers, maybe a wristwatch?) but it's surely coming. I think it will be transformational.
- bkovitz 17y agoThe article just barely touches on the main point: without general knowledge in your head, you can't put things into context. One person cited in the article proposes that the trade-off is between learning to analyze vs. learning facts. That doesn't sound plausible, since facts are what you analyze and general background facts are the main things that enable you to analyze well. The real trade-off is simply between which millions of facts people are learning as they grow up. The Internet, in the last 10 years or so, has pushed toward learning facts of immediate currency, like celebrity gossip and scandals and pop-culture memes. This is because the Internet continually dumps more information than anyone can take in, and the economy is based on competition for current attention. The real shift is from contextual understanding to tactical skill, or you could say, from wisdom to immediate payoffs.
- edw519 17y ago"...should schoolchildren be taught the capital of Colombia? " Should bodybuilders lift weights? Should basketball players run on off days? OP never mentions what learning facts really is: exercise. The purpose of education isn't to know the capital of Columbia. The purpose of education is to learn. Which requires exercise. Just like the body, the mind needs exercise, too. There are as many ways to exercise the mind as the body, some better than others. Like taking the elevator, using a search engine may get you the answer faster, but not much mental muscle is built.
- DannoHung 17y agoI think the problem comes in the categorization of useful data versus trivial factoids. If you're going to spend time memorizing facts, they should be very useful facts.
- edw519 17y agoAnd who should be the judge of "useful", student or teacher? I've never had to run from a tiger (fortunately). But I'm sure glad I put in the roadwork to be healthy enough to catch a bus or pick up my luggage. If I didn't know any better I would have thought I was wasting my time back then.
- ken 17y agoThe trouble is that I often don't know what a "useful fact" is even after I've learned it. I certainly don't expect to be able to figure that out before I've learned it! A segment I once saw on Reading Rainbow (airdate: 1986) recently changed my life. Trivial factoid for 2 decades, then boom, useful data point. Nobody could have predicted the set of experiences I'd have that would create a context in which this was useful. When my dad was in college, a classmate of his complained that he'd never need something taught in a particular course. The professor's response was "The only way to be sure of that is to take the course!" (If you still think it was worthless on your deathbed, I'll give you a refund...) If you can figure out a priori what's going to be important without knowing it, I'd like to see your stock portfolio. :-)
- sfphotoarts 17y ago
- FreeRadical 17y agoKnowledge that can be applied to construct something supersedes general/gameshow knowledge
- TweedHeads 17y agoGoogle is an extension to my brain, which is running out of storage.
- jacquesm 17y agoMaybe you should take the tweed out then eh ? On a more serious note, the storage capacity of the brain is vast, the lowest estimates run in the hundreds of terabytes. Your remark raises an interesting question though, how big the variation is between brains in storage capacity.
- TweedHeads 17y agoNot even a petabyte? So when the iPhone v15 comes out with 1PB of storage we will be carrying more info in one device than our whole brain. Interesting times ahead...
- jacquesm 17y agonow for some content-addressable memory of that size... Our brains are not really comparable with digital computers in one respect though: Just like TTL logic does not have resistors or diodes but only transistors our brains do not have cells specializing in remembering, controlling or evaluation but only processors. Each of them is very simple but the quantity of them and their amazing connectivity is what gives us our amazing pattern recognition abilities.
- barrkel 17y agoGoogle is just a backing mechanism from which we can page-fault into memory. If we have to do it repeatedly, it'll end up in long-term memory, but that long-term working set of memory will be different for everybody, so the value of trying to teach it in school is somewhat lessened. That's apart from school's other purposes, such as light introductions to topics you otherwise might not look into, and state-controlled cultural and political indoctrination. In essence, Google / the web has added another layer to the human cache hierarchy, in between long-term memory and the written word (traditionally on paper and incoveniently non-colocated).
- ken 17y agoOK, who else used google to look up "doyen"? :-)