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Is Google Making Us Stupid?
mjasay writes "Is Google making us stupid? Following a growing body of research within neuroscience, Carr argues that as we use the Web 'we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.' This sounds great: Who wouldn't want to have the 'recall' capacity of Google? But, as Carr writes: 'The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. ... The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image.' In other words, as we 'go online' in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree, are we losing our ability to think coherently and deeply, preferring instead to process byte-sized information quickly, regurgitate 140-character 'tweets,' and skim thought? Is the concern overblown, or are we becoming the Web that we created?"
The Internet in general will make us sutidp.
do cars make people drive drunk?
do purses make people thieves?
I think tools of any kind are just there, and it is our choices that determine what happens to us. They can be good or bad - depending on what we choose to do with them.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
It seems that every piece of technology gets accused of this.
Television, Calculators, Computers. All these things have been accused of making our children stupid. Now it seems it's Google's turn.
I'm sure there are more examples, but I can't think of them, and not sure what search terms to put into Google.
Is Slashdot making us stupid? We've lost the ability to come up with new jokes, instead preferring to spread the same old memes about hot grits, Natalie Portman being naked and petrified, welcome our new Google overlords, and saying that In Soviet Russia, YOU make Google stupid.
Oh well, I guess all are brain are belong to Slashdot.
My blog
correct question:
"are google making us stupids? is our childrens learning?"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The internet is somewhat like an extended library, saying it makes us stupid is like saying books make us stupid.
Most people lost the ability to think coherently and deeply long before the Internet. It's just becoming far more apparent now that every idiot can set up a MySpace/Twitter.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
"Is the Internet making us even more stupid?"
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
Just because it makes some tasks easier does not mean we are getting dumber or lazier.
It frees us for more fun things, like, uh, using google for porn.
Even calculators didn't make us lazier, hell if anything it gave me time to figure out hard math but making the simple math automatic.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The expertise required to advance development in many fields is becoming more and more immense, and beyond what a human brain can easily absorb in a lifetime. The Internet allows the time to acquire information to be radically decreased, which will make it possible to continue the advancement of knowledge. It would still happen without it, but I think at a decreasing pace.
To "stand on the shoulders of giants" requires an ever longer ladder.
This sounds so much like old teachers fretting over the use of calculators in math class.
In some ways, the scale of it is different, and it will be interesting to see how a kid born in 1995 thinks differently at 30 than one born in 1975, but still.
The net gives us all of the knowledge of humanity at our fingertips. It frees us from thinking about facts and gives us more time for abstract thinking and problem solving. At least for those of us who remember a time before google. Maybe a child born today really will be made dumb by google.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
> Is Google Making Us Stupid?
I can't answer your question, my internet connection was down all morning.
by this logic, we are killing our mental capacity by using a writing system to store thoughts on a physical medium. wasn't the original point of writing to catalog our history and make us learn more from it?
Wish I had access to the original Atlantic Monthly article, although all I could get at was the blog. Anyone else find a link to the original source?
... or perhaps it's merely a desire to have access to information just in time?
The internet (and to a lesser extent, Google) could be making us stupid
There is so much information out there, it's rapidly becoming impossible for me to read "all the classics" in my leisure time. So the answer is to make a machine do it and just access the information just in time.
I don't know if it's making us stupider or merely more boring or even, perhaps, more effective at a specialized skill while lacking breadth?
If it's making us stupid you should at least be able to provide evidence that we are worse at academics than we have been prior to the internet. I'm sorry but claiming the youth are no longer interested in the media that mattered to prior generations just doesn't cut it.
I'm sure I'll bitch that my son doesn't read every Philip K. Dick book or Ray Bradbury short story when I'm long in the tooth. I think it would be unfair to claim that makes him stupid, however.
My work here is dung.
Ironically this article is on CNet, which is full of "byte-sized information", "regurgitated tweets", and "skim thought." Just another sensationalist article on a site that claims to be above the problem while actually promoting it.
Developers: We can use your help.
Old people say "this new music or entertainment or technology is ruining the young". We fear this new thing.
If people were so smart before Google, they might remember when this was said about calculators and spell checkers and Elvis and moving pictures and electricity.
Book? Hell, by this logic, cave painting was a mistake.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
> as we "go online" in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree, are we losing our ability to think coherently and deeply,
Oh no. It's the other way around: people who have no ability to think coherently or deeply are going online in increasing numbers and to an increasing degree.
> preferring instead to process byte-sized information quickly, regurgitate 140-character "tweets," and skim thought?
Now that there are so many people online who are of the aforementioned variety, a great deal of "information" is created by them. Is it any wonder we have to learn to skim? If we read it deeply, our minds would be fried.
The Internet does not make us stupid. Lazy, perhaps, but not stupid. Indeed, I would say that the increased MENTAL interaction it provides makes us, in many ways, smarter and more flexible.
Also, why the focus on the tools it replaces? Is this not the way of things? Tools are used until a better one comes along. Or would the Author have us all still using stone axes or flintlock rifles or riding horseback to get to work each day?
Ultimately, the Internet is a tool and simultaneously a source of entertainment. It expands our horizons and connects us to people in new and exciting ways. What's not to love?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
It's.. People!!!
... electrolytes!
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
Hold on, let me check! www.googl... nope.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
No, people generally never had the ability to think deeply. The Internet has merely revealed that to a greater extent than anything before it. The rest of the Carr's screed is horsepucky, and I shall now coherently express my displeasure by pissing upon it.
(pissing sound)
On the one hand, Google is reducing my desire to learn. When I can just look it up at any moment, I'm not really trying to memorize it.
On the other hand, Google has brought me into contact with exponentially more information than I would have otherwise had. Pre-internet, we just used to believe the person deemed most knowledgeable on the topic. Post-internet, we now look stuff up to settle disputes of knowledge. In fact, some of the stuff we all 'knew' then was wrong.
If any of this information is 'sticking' we're probably smarter because of it.
Chasing after everything they do.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
YA RLY
The list of things that can make us stupid now includes writing, calculators, computers, TV and the internet.
The internet deals with low level computation, leaving you to raise your level of thought. Just like all the computational/storage tools that came before it.
The provided link is just a review of the article. The premise of the article sounds too absurd to take seriously, but it would have been nice to at least see what the author (Nick Carr) had to say.
No. We're already that. Lazy. Nope, got that covered, too.
Google -and the Internet as a whole- are just more things that we have created for which we have not found a meaningful use for, yet.
I've got your sig, right here.
I googled this, and it appears to be a spelling mistake - skim through being offered as the likely one. I think I'll wait and see if it is something that google wants to learn about before looking further into it.
It might be better to think of it as Google as a porthole into peoples ignorance.
Let me google it and find out.
I dunno... the internet is a source of information (and admittedly often misinformation). How and what you do with that is up to you. I like to think google has made me smarter. It's allowed me to study after the facts things my doctor has said that I may not have fully understood. Instead of buying a book to get a beef stroganof recipe, I now read a half dozen of them online to distill what is the essence of beef stroganof. When my daughter asks me what sound a moose makes, instead of "I don't know", it's now "let's find out!" I use google multiple times daily. No, I'm not stupider for it, and yes I still read books.
I had forgotten how tedious it was to do research before there was google and other library databases until I saw the 25th anniversary showing of WarGames on AMC last week. The kid is tryign to break into an account and researches the account-holder's in the library life for clues. I spent many of a college evening in the library during my college years doing that.
I think its much more important with what you do with your raw material afterwards than how painful it was to obtain the materials. I'd prefer a studing to write a novel critical review of 2 or 3 major conflicting sources rather than some weak regurgitation (or direct copy) of a large number of sources.
We had an old encyclopedia set in our house. When I came across a new topic, I would generally go look it up. Sometimes there was information, sometimes not, and when it was there, it was frequently incomplete our out of date. Occasionally we'd make trips to the library and I'd have a chance to look a little deeper at certain things.
Now when I come across something, I can quickly go online and lookup information on it. It's generally more complete and more up to date, and it covers a wider array of topics. I really can't imagine life without this instant access to information.
Stupidity is the inability to correctly reason given a set of perceived facts. Acquisition of knowledge, no matter the source, can not produce stupidity; only complacence can do that.
I have found that the people that harbor these ideas are often bright in their own right and during their "Hay Day" were looked up to at every job they had. The problem comes in when you take a piece of information that only they knew and give it to everyone with a web browser, than their superior intellect means jack squat! This is the most peaty type of fear mongering a person can spread. "I don't care that you memorized the periodic table in the third grade and can recite any of the elements by heart. I memorized the character string 'www.wikipedia.org' and when I ask that site for information it doesn't give me the same grief that you do!"
Google has nothing to do with that.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Ewe muss bee knew hear. Naw, Goooooooogle ain't be makin' us stew pod. Teh internets is makin us stew pod.
Whut iz makin uss stooopid is reading shit from people like Nick Carr. "Following a growing body of research within neuroscience, Carr argues that as we use the web 'we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies'" despite the fact that Carr has absolutely no credentials in the field of neuroscience whatever.
The guy's a fucking writer for Gawd sake! Wikipedia entry: "Nicholas G. Carr (born 1959) is an American writer who has published books and articles on technology, business, and culture. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University.[1]"
Guys like Nick Carr are making us stupid by writing utter bullshit thet nobody can rebut anywhere that matters.
If I say something stupid about physics on slashdot, someone with a degree in physics will set me and everyone reading my comment straight (and it happens lots, kiddies). When Carr spouts his unlearned drivel on c|net, nobody has a chance to rebut anywhere that matters unless his drivel gets on slashdot. Then kids who haven't read enough or lived enough to realise the taste of bullshit when it's spoon fed to them believe the hokum and parrot it elsewhere, lending credence to dumb "facts".
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
How is using the internet as a map any different from using a map? How is using the internet as a calculator any different from using a calculator? Last I checked, you still need to know how to read a map. You still need to know how to use a calculator. The only difference between using the internet (and computers in general) for these things is that it's consolidated into one place. The basic premise behind all of these things remains the same, and in that vein, no, there is no inherent difference and no loss of intelligence.
This is a rather stupid concept.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Hrm, what?
Al Gore made us stoopid by inventing the Internet (right after he invented the VCR)
its memory thats being affected, silly, and its both boon and bane. i no longer have to remember everything, not if i can find it quickly enough - isn't that a common database issue ;-) but now, the past can be rewritten with the push of a button - orwell must be turning in his grave.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
I find writing a few moderate length pieces in discussion keeps my writing sharper. Otherwise I would not practice wrting as much.
In a discussion group you have to make your point clear int he first screenful. People arent likely t read further unless you caught their attention. Its a lot like journalism.
when we have increased tool usage, we have started to become a less strong specie as a result. whereas our ancestors were stronger, now modern man is by no means on par with wilderness standards when it comes to strength.
are we worse for it ? on the contrary, much better. see, we have a goddamn civilization going on here.
same goes for internet. we are creating a collective , all encompassing, participation based brain that can take over the menial parts of thinking process from us. even, due to automation, physical aspects of goods production too. what we will be doing in future will be creating. creating new ways and methods that we can practice through the world wide brain, internet, and whatever physical application/appliance we have attached to it, and the computers.
is this bad ? is this going to make people weak, lazy species that only eat and get fat ?
no. by nature, mankind cannot stop. if they are free of all worries, they go find something else to do. examine how high is the trend towards extreme sports in the last 30 years that wealth and comfort throughout the world increased in levels incomparable with last 3 century's standards. people are doing stuff that would be seen as crazy, lunatic, dangerous stuff 200 years ago, as sports today.
check scandinavian countries. they have a very high quality of life, they are insured to their toes, can live on unemployment money very comfortably. and are they sitting lazy and getting fat ? nay. there are a lot of open source projects being produced and released through scandinavian countries. they are many people involved in charity work in scandinavian countries.
thats the way of life. it gets easier, and as it gets easier mankind finds new stuff to do, never stays idle or lazy.
no worries.
Read radical news here
Who gives a fuck?
These stories are nothing but trolls to catch the reader's eye. They amount to the "Think you are safe in your home? tune in tonight at 10 to find out" stories.
Are we safe? Are you safe? Is your mother smarter than you? Are you dumb because of the clothes you wear? Are your clothes killing you? Is anyone out there? is this thing on? How much for the Ape?
I mean hell, serious discussion and thought drives humanity. But when it's all boiled down to short snippets between ads it sort of loses something.
Moral of the story? Read more books and get off my lawn.
Next time firehose folks, mod this one down. Seriously, every time I see an article like this it boggles my mind that folks are worrying about this gibberish. Yes, the internet is physically removing neurons from our brains, planting child porn, killing kittens, and screwing your spouse.
Next up your toaster could be making you more prone to nervous breakdowns!
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Assessment1, in other words, assessment2. The article fails to prove any relation between assessments 1 and 2. This should have never arrived to Slashdot's front page.
In the '80s I used to have memorized of my relatives and friends phone numbers. Now that I have a cell phone, I've programmed in their numbers and I never actually dial the number let along see it. We just hit #1 or their number in the addressbook and it dials. If the callerID doesn't show up, I might not even recognize it. Try it with coworkers friends etc... when you had to dial all 7-11 numbers, you ended up memorizing them...
The article is conjecture built atop unsupported claims and baseless assumption. The full article isn't online yet but even form the passage cited has multiple examples.
Really? Based on what exactly? Its a pretty strong statement and one that requires actual backing instead of a statement from authority.
The ability to quick retrieve information is not inherently "dumbing" any more than an automatic transmission makes one a bad driver. But even if that was true, the author makes a huge assumption in the nature of Internet technology. Who says it will remain the way it currently is? The medium still has almost unlimited potential for growth, and the argument is essentially assuming the usage with remain the same or become less intellectual. He assumes we'll become dumb because we won't be able to elevate the medium. We will become dumb because we are dumb.....
It's happening!
I've completely lost my ability to operate the physical card catalog system at the library. Dewey who?
I have lost all memory of the organization for the Christmas Time Sear's Toy Catalog.
I have forgotten the correct duplex split to set my radio to use the local autopatch to connect to the PSTN.
I now lack the patience to spend 2 hours flipping cassettes in and out of my boom box to make a mix tape.
I'm DOOOOOOMED!
Or not.
I would make the counter-point to Nick's argument:
Previous generations of humans were doomed to the ugliness of warfare because their ignorance was a tool easily exploited by the greedy and the power hungry. You could burn the books and cut the phone lines and publish your own paper, and completely control the flow of information to your society.
How would history have been different if the Internet had been there so that a fourteen year old boys in 1935 Germany could have said to his pals with the cool brown shirts: "Hey guys. Did you know that only 26% of the banks in this country are actually owned by Jews? Did you know that most of the economic progress of the new regime comes from eliminating women and Jews from the unemployment figures and counting conscripted soldiers as employed?"
My arguments are: that in making ideas easier to research, more of them reach more of us, but more importantly, the potential for a new but altogether stupid idea to change the world is sharply limited.
By the time I got to the end of this story - I forgot what it was about? Can you resubmit it to slashdot - this time smaller so I can search for it easily on google?
and was told that it is not.
I think there is some truth to this.
My office is my shed/refuge from everything.
I have even arranged it that the two desks are arranged so that if I am studying/reading my back is to the other desk where my computer is just to stop me being distracted by it.
As another useful tidbit of information when I was revising for my last degree I used to listen to a radio detuned to static, this gentle hiss in the ears was amazingly good at cutting out all distraction and somehow I always managed to concentrate more when doing this.
I find it harder and harder to work/study now - not that I cannot find the time, its just that there are too many other distractions when I do so.
I think having vast amounts of basic information available is a good thing; God knows I use Google to find info on everything. But, I think TFA may be onto something. Great thoughts, new innovations, and significant progress rarely arise in a vacuum. There is a certain amount of information, learning, and thought that provide a foundation for further development. A person needs to not only "know," but understand the things that have gone before; to marinade stew in ideas and information. I think there is a danger in becoming so dependent on Google (or Wikipedia, or calculators) to do the difficult work of understanding for us that we'll have difficulty moving beyond our current corpus of knowledge. If the ability to pull up vast amounts in information becomes the goal of education, rather than learning and understanding the underlying concepts, then I fear we do risk becoming "more stupid" as a society. The point, though, is not to demonize the tool. Instead, we need to make our educational process oriented more around teaching students how to learn and make connections between facts, not simply regurgitate data they found on wikipedia. Really, shouldn't this have been the goal before the internet, too?
Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?
Well. I dont think its making US, stupid. I think its making YOU stupid.
There is this great essay by the celebrated Sartori called "Homo Videns" written somewhere arround the 80s. In it he makes the pretty good case that when politics and, in general, most of the information we receive moves to mass media and, particularly, video, men stop excercising their capacity to abstract, translate and analyze symbolic representations of reality (letters, at their most basic and atomic representation) and thus abandon what makes us Sapiens: the ability to apply abstraction to extract information from reality and analyze it through symbolic manipulation.
He argues that images are the most concrete form of information. If you read in your red-note paper about that huge car crash, you need to imagine it. Information missing from the blurb are oportunities for abstraction and extrapolation (was the car red? how do you imagine it? was it new... was it a sports car? was the dead woman a blonde?). An image, in contrast, does not invite you to think: it invites you to accept the precise and concrete information you see in two seconds of evening news: brains splatered on sidewalk with blonde, long hairs sticking out from it, all in HDTV, 1080 resolution.
So, back to my original idea. I think whomever chooses to abandon "Sapiency", is wellcome to do so. Its not like humanity will loose anything: we are mostly ignorant assholes, only ever the elites get mildly educated and its supperb and almost very rare that people get to this state of openess and continuous learning that i like to call intelectuallity. Then again, compared with the TV, the Internet ROCKS. At least it gives you the CHANCE to keep being sapient, to keep reading and writing long thoughtful blurbs if you want. It lets you get in touch with like-minded individuals. The intenet is full of potential for this, whereas the world we come from is just the fucking TV.
So i think we were already idiots, dont go blaming my internet of that.
NO SIG
This is precisely how books made us stupid when the printing press came into being. Before that, everyone figured out everything on their own and they were all geniuses. Then the printing press came around and people said, "Hey, I don't have to learn anymore because all the information is in books now."
Sorry, but this is a pretty stupid line of reasoning in my mind. But then maybe that's because Google made me stupid.
That's not to say that the net might, to some degree, worsen the problem of ADD/ADHD which I think has been made worse by television already. I can't say for sure. But does it make us stupid? I don't think so.
I can't speak for others, but since the WWW came into being, and my access to information has increased, I've been able to learn more, faster, than I ever had the opportunity to learn before then.
If nobody remembers the "facts" anymore, then how is it to be judged that the "facts" in the intarwebs are true? .. Of course, history has always been written in biased fashion, so I guess there's no change there. The sad thing is that Internet, at least theoretically, provides us the opportunity to change this; having differing views of history on the record more easily.
Whether that will happen or not, remains to be seen, of course.
Find a copy of his short story "Someday". I remember reading it as a child and thinking that there was no way something like that could happen.
It's possible our tools won't need to have a revolution to rule us after all. Maybe we'll just give in quietly, becoming much less than we could and should be.
As witnessed here by many, if someone asks a question and if a google search reports that the answer is in the first 10 results posted by Google, the questioner is labeled as STUPID if you do NOT use Google.
I think the answer to the question, "Is Google making us stupid?" is yes, and no.
I find that, as a moderately intelligent person, Google, and the internet in general, greatly facilitates and speeds my ability to research information, and organize my thoughts, on subjects which interest me. So, yes, for the thinking person, Google can make you "smarter".
For the non-thinking person, Google, and the rest of the internet, allows them to quickly ascend new heights of stupidity. This really can't be helped, but the problem is no different now than it has been in the past with any other emerging information technology.
Proverbs 21:19
I may be able to "recall" via Wikipedia, the capitol of any small country in the South Pacific, but that doesn't mean I know that countries' capitol. Ask me about it again an hour or so later and I'll probably end up going back to Wikipedia/Google, if I really didn't care about the subject when you asked me. We are relying on our short-term memory for so much but we are committing less and less to long-term. We can build better queries, but that doesn't mean we really know any more. Now I'm not knocking all of this information that we have instant access to, it makes this one of the most exciting times to be alive but when Alzheimer's skyrockets 30 years from now, who are we going to blame? Blueberry pancakes?
Check Wikipedia for this guy, I'm sure it's the same one and I didn't even finish the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Carr This guy is a modern day soothsayer. He writes inflammatory articles to get attention. I should have known, This guy also just wrote a book and is probably trying to drum up publicity.
If you must. Does this mean we won't be seeing any more tech articles from Matt Asay copying/pasting Nick Carr's work and throwing a few extra comments in there?
Before the neck-beards jump on my karma, please be familiar with this "writer".
You still need facts for context to understand the information google gives you, and as a first-order filter on whether it makes any sense. Chocolate chip cookies are often drunk with milk. Otherwise you can be distracted by irrelevant information. Or people trying to convince you to try shrimp cookies, perhaps because they're trying to sell you special shrimp cookie sheets.
Without that background, you'll run the risk of being a Chinese "invisible idiot" who is always out of sight, out of mind. Machine translation was first attempted in the 1950s.
One thing google is very good at is exposing you to new things that can be used to broaden your knowledge, so you get a cascading effect. But you have to be very careful -- there are eddies and cesspools of groups that create their own reality (Bush is one of the best presidentz evr!) and you need that outside context to see just how out of touch they are.
This problem has existed since the first libraries -- how could you ever be sure that the book you are reading isn't full of shit? -- but people were generally only exposed to stuff on the edge of their existing knowledge. Google makes pet cats good. It also exposes younger and younger people to information they don't have the experience to judge properly.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The biggest problem I see with google is the creation of what I call "Instant Authorities".
I'm active on another site, and post / comment only in Finance and Capital Markets. I've got a MSc in Quantitative Finance, have worked in banking for 20+ years and even teach part time at the Masters level in London. Finance is what I do.
However invariably someone will google up a contradiction an argument or staement, and insist they are correct.
Google is dangerous for the ignorant (actually the stupid) as many folks can't tell the difference between data and information, between noise and knowledge.
Many people lack critical thinking skills. Pre-google these skills had to be much less developed, as access to information was more difficult. Now these skills must be finely honed, due to the huge amount of information google indexes. I've found LOTS of finance stuff on google that is just plain wrong. And yet I'm sure I missed some stuff, accepted as fact some thing that was wrong.
Just because you can find something on google doesn't mean its correct, even if you find it multiple times.
A message from our sponsor
Here is an old post, but exactly about the problem. "Internet Causes Amnesia?" http://thedialogs.org/2007/04/19/internet-causes-amnesia/
More information faster simply accelerates
you on the path you have chosen.
(being stupid is frequently a choice, not
a condition)
It will make stupid people stupider, since they will be able to be even more intellectually lazy.
It will make smart people smarter, since they will have even better resources at their disposal.
To quote a familiar old monster from the swamp, "It only makes you more of what you really are."
Google and other knowledge repositories no more make us stupid than a library does. It has, however, tremendously cut the amount of work required to acquire knowledge. As brought up by OzRoy above it seems every technology gets it's turn under this gun. What people quoting this fail to understand is that this time is somewhat offset by the amount of due diligence required to verify knowledge that is obtained. With TV society held true to journalistic practices in this regard. Through that we were able to somewhat deter the effect. Google, however, is based on popular opinion. Wikipedia, again popular opinion. Perhaps society has lost respect for these practices due to the abuse of it's trust by old media, but the saying holds true that one should always "check their sources".
In hind sight of this it would also seem that we have built a system which favors those already well-versed in their subject. Mis-information is often not only duplicated, but presented along side harder to find factual information. This means to teach our students to learn, we must first teach them discernment.
Google has not made us stupid. It has instead changed the tools necessary and way we learn. It's up to the individual to keep up.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
Even in the summary, all these other, older technologies are mentioned. Why is it perfectly normal to use those technologies, but not this one? Didn't the printing press relieve us of having to write everything by hand, and didn't written language relieve us of having to simply remember everything? You can't be saying that written language contributed to some loss of coherence because it freed us from having to remember so much, can you?
The knowledge and coherence of humanity only continues to grow in size and complexity because of technology. It's not static. Modern technology allows us to use our innate comprehension to think about different things, or think about the same things differently, just the way that written language allowed ancient peoples to think about greater and more complex economies - since they were able to write down the exact details of trades instead of having to remember them.
This all boils down to "those damned kids and their rock and roll."
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Leela: "Google make people dumb!"
Fry: "No, Leela, Google make people SMART!"
dr
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I see no reason why it would dilute intellectual capacity at all, and in fact, can and does enhance it. If I am doing some research, it is very helpful to me to be able to scan the world quickly to see what else have been done already by others. New ideas may lead to new ways of thinking, and spark innovations that may not otherwise have happened.
However, those adverse to thinking and processing lots of information may indeed fall prey to the temptation of "thought-bytes" -- taking summaries and blips as gospel instead of doing the more rigorous work of finding the high-quality information over the shoddy low-quality stuff the Internet has become known for.
So, the choice is yours. And your brain will be shaped by the choices you make. The Internet offers a plethora of possibilities, including the possibility of hanging yourself. The challenge will be -- as it always is -- in developing the wisdom to know how to proceed though the endless onslaught of possibilities. And that exercise will shape your brain as well -- for the better.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
We're stupid by default. We learn what we can to compensate. Google, by taking a lot of the basic processing load off us, lets us focus on more abstract concepts.
If anything, Google is making us SMART. Of course, we're screwed if the internet ever collapses.
Way back in grade school of the late seventies I remember a debate about letting students use calculators. It would destroy our math skills. We needed to memorize those times tables or we would be stunted in math subjects for life.
I was recently at a presentation about finance and the presenter, an accountant, made a joke about how experienced accounts can't add two numbers without a calculator in hand. However these accountants can balance trillions of dollars in transactions and determine the marginal profitibility on a per unit basis of just about anything to a surprisingly accurate degree. Could quantum physics researchers really do their job if they were forced to use an abacus?
Google is similar to a calculator. It speeds up the mundane in information gathering. This bunk about memorizing facts is less important than understanding how to react to facts. The fact of the matter is (no pun intended) that facts change quickly these days. Information is becoming more and more real time. The person that understands how to look up and react to information has a better chance of getting ahead than some one who memorizes stale facts.
Before Internet (and google in part) when you didn't know the answer to something you look it up in the dictionary or the encyclopedia, if you had one. Sometimes you found what you were looking for and sometimes you didn't... in the latter case you simply didn't learn anything, if you found it you get the "encyclopedia truth".
... so WTF are they talking about? Now you LEARN a lot of things, get access to a lot more information that you did before
Now you "ask" the question to google. Not only you get an answer in about 99.999% of the cases, you also get different points of view, analysis, opinions, photos, videos
Google is making me smarter. While it's true I don't make an effort memorize quite as much as I used to, it's also true that I've been exposed to far more information than I ever would have been without the internet. My reasoning has been tested and refined by confronting other points of view that I never would have encountered without the internet.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Something Awful called and it wants its tagline back.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
.....it's naive to expect anything else.
"Tou see, there was one tiny problem with the plan....it was bollocks" - Blackadder goes forth.
technology decreases the barrier to entry for access to knowledge. No longer is it necessary to purchase a book or magazine to gain insight to the world around us. This increase in technology also produces another interesting effect: it also increases the specialization of knowledge. For example, cars used to be made such that anyone with a small degree of experience could fix and replace parts in his own car. Lately, this isn't the case. Technology has given way such that many problems require very specialized knowledge of how the engine compartment of a car is built because efficiencies in compacting it have been achieved.
Now, to get to your transmission requires a near disassembly of the entire hulking mass of the car. It now requires very specialized knowledge to do this whereas before, it just meant unbolting it from the engine block, unhooking a few items and your free.
The Internet isn't making us dumber, it just forces us to specialize our knowledge in order to compete in the market place of human intelligence and knowledge.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I have thought about this issue in depth, and what I think is going to happen is something very similar to Vernor Vinge's book Rainbows End.
People are going to be divided into 3 groups. Those who consumer information, those who can aggregate information, and those who create information.
The consumers of information will the general public, they will log into Google, type their search term, and get an answer. They will add nothing but their opinions on the information, problems they had with it, and any improvements that help them.
Then you will have the aggregators, these individuals will be professionals whose job it is to be able to find specific important information from a heap and make sense of it for consumers. If they do it in the private sphere they will be paid every time they produce the information. If they release their information to the public (IE on a forum or a blog) the information will lose its "value" as something to be known. They will be highly respected, and at times paid (through donations and doing the same kind of work for those looking for it for a "first" time).
Then you will have the actually smart people, these individuals will be consumers of the same data but will also be able to take that knowledge and create more knowledge. They may release it at a very high level, and to a small initial peer group, but will be very highly paid.
So who would fit into these groups?
The consumer of information would be regular consumer trying to find out what a specific error message on their computer is or what they can cook with some of the stuff they have in their fridge.
The second group, the aggregators, already work in the Googles, Lycos, and Database Marketing companies of the world where they take a vast amount of data, either from free or pay sources, and aggregate the results into something useful.
The Information Generators would be people that actually create knowledge, such as scientists, engineers finding real problems in unique systems, and even those that commission to have software made (though maybe not the programmers that generate it).
I will note that the above is not entirely thought through, but it seems intuitive on the surface, especially with those we see around us.
I have found kids who have problem doing math on paper, I tutored a girl who had problems doing math problems such as expanding X(X + 1) when they are in college.
But these people are making it because they are good and knowledgeable consumers of aggregated information. When they needed to get through a literature class, they just looked up and found what other people said about it using Google.
And is this all bad? Sure it is. Or maybe not! Who can tell?
Am I any better at solving a business problems because I can sit down for 5 minutes and come up with a solution than a person who has been trained through life to use Google and type a 3 word phrase that comes up with the same, or better, answer?
As a programmer I have seen myself become a consumer of information more and more, and less and less as a creator of information. I am finding that sometimes that spending an hour of thought on a specifically interesting programming problem is sometimes less good than simply finding a well known and accepted reference implementation by someone on the net.
How do I justify saying that I am a better employee because I could have done it without searching when the world is becoming more and more result oriented?
Just a thought. Hope for comments and criticisms!
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Google would be a bane to memory of people's memory didn't suck to start with. For starters, it would require that they actually remember to use Google in the first place!
Seriously, the number of questions I'm asked or I see online that would be answered by the "I'm Feeling Lucky" link of Google is just astounding.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Hmm, that's a good question. Let me do a little research on Go... Oooh, clever. Very clever.
what?
Sometimes when I try to find a passage in a book, my brain tells me to Ctrl-F for just a split second.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
Pffff... ...
Duuude, enough with those cliche existential questions....
guess what no, you can t become the web
think OH MY GOD! a squirrel! whee whee wheeeeee
let me check.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
We should Ask Jeeves about this question...
...but it allows stupid people to pretend they are smart.
Not everyone has a bard like memory.
I can remember snatches of things- this was true before there was even an internet.
Now, I can use that snatch to remember the entire thing where as previously, I would have let it go.
I seem much more witty and clever online where I can open a secondary window and browse for lyrics or a poem or a thought than in day to day situations where I'm disconnected from my memory.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I was going to RTFA, but the summary was already more that 140 characters...
:\
Really, though, it seems to me this article is talking about intellectual laziness rather than stupidity. You can pretty much figure out most things within minutes with the net just by using Google, which makes you impatient when you actually have to read a book.
Of course, I guess you could say the same thing about books; before people had to actually figure everything out for themselves or talk to each other and then books came along and people got into the find-existing-stuff instead of figure-out-stuff mentality.
Guy might be right, but sometimes, laziness can be a force for efficiency. Which I've obviously not learned since I'm still writing essays instead of quick witty snippets
"Soc. 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." Translation from here.
I think what bothers me the most about the book is that "The Internet" is looked at as one single item. I just don't see how it's fair to lump things like Wikipedia in with Twitter. Yes, they use the same core technology, but one is an intellectual pursuit built (theoretically) on lofty principles--the other is a system that allows people to keep the world informed of the frequency of bowel movements.
Afraid I have to call FUD on this one
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
sometimes i google basic math...
Is gopher making us stupid?
Is TV making us stupid?
Are books making us stupid?
It really seems like questions like this are providing their own answer. Stop asking stupid questions.
No, I don't think the internet will be making us stupid, not when what it's replacing is TV, radio, and corporate controlled newspapers.
I've seen this argument applied to other technologies too. Eclipse, for example. A friend of mine used to say that he would never use an IDE because it was for "stupid people" and that he didn't need a programs help to find things in the application he was working on.
:)
;)
I tried to explain to him that all it did was automate the mundane tasks to make you more efficient.
In a way my friend was right. Because you use Eclipse to locate issues with your code or to find symbols or to refactor, you may lose some of the skills you acquired to do those things.
But also... you're time is better spent.
All google is doing is automating the mudane task of sorting and searching through tons of data.
So, on some level yes. But as long as you stay in practice with some things.. it should be okay. Challenge yourself every once in a while to do things the hard way.
In parting... how many of you can take a square root without using a calculator?
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
that is all
Well, the sad thing is that some people actually do use Google as some kind of definitive proof. And often not even as in "Google found a peer-reviewed authority on the domain, who explained that X is true". More like if searching for X returned 200,000 hits and searching for !X returned 100,000, then obviously X is true.
We've even had an article recently which claimed you can know who's gonna win an election, by how many hits Google returns when you search for their name. And when it all broke down for Ron Paul, they just handwaved an and removed it from the sample, rather than wonder if their hypothesis is false.
Now I'm not saying that Google is making us stupid, but that IMHO stupid people unsurprisingly end up doing stupid things with it. So far.
On the other hand, maybe it is worth wondering what long term effects it might have. Calculators didn't make everyone stupid either, and even less so in the short run, but some half a century later we have a lot less people who can do even elementary addition or subtraction without one. And a lot of people who not only took calculators as an excuse to not learn their 1+1=2, but as an excuse to not learn any maths at all. Why bother, when some calculator or computer or cash register can do it for you anyway?
But the real harm is that maths isn't just about being able to sum your grocery bill in your head. Most of it is about long abstract operations with all sorts of funny letters, so to speak. Actually calculating a result for some particular values of those variables, is the least interesting part of it. But that's based on concepts and theorems, which are in turn based on others, and so on all the way to that 1+1=2 you start with in primary school. And the more you skip at the front, in the name of "bah, I'll just use a calculator for that", the less of a foundation for the whole edifice you'll have later.
In effect, it's not just that some people use a tool (well or badly, as the case may be), but that a lot of people effectively don't have the foundation to understand anything maths-related. I.e., they won't even know what an integral is, or when to use the funny tool to calculate one for them.
And in some countries already the maths and science education in school is gradually getting dumbed down, so they just avoid the issue altogether. So regardless of whether they're teh uber-nerdy genius, or the school jock, whole generations do end up knowing less when they finish school.
So I sorta idly wonder if, given ample time, Google and Wikipedia will have the same effect on, say, logic. Why bother learning to follow an inferrence and examine the premises, when you can probably just Google the conclusion later? Let's just hope I'm wrong.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There are many reasons for this. Some people are not interested in applying their abilities outside of a narrow range of interests. I could name examples from the web of people recognized as brilliant and insightful who are petulant, stubborn, and dumb as rocks as soon as the discussion moves outside of the main topic.
In some cases, the web moves too fast. Maybe I would like to think for a day or two about my reply here -- that would certainly improve the quality of it. But if I don't get it up fast, no one will read it.
Perhaps another point is that we are working with a medium that allows the lazy and the loud to dominate. If you think the rampant fanboy-ism on /. is bad, read a popular political site for a few minutes.
An interesting viewpoint on this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html
In the last six months, Google has been visibly "dumbed down". Originally, Google was literal about spelling; a misspelled word would not match much. Then Google started offering hints: "Did you mean Mississippi?." Now, Google has aggressive spelling correction, and looks for the most common word close to the input word. To look for an uncommon word, it may be necessary to exclude common words similar to it with "-".
This reflects user behavior. Most search requests are incredibly dumb. Look at any list of top queries. In fact, most requests to Google don't reach the search engine at all; there's a canned set of responses to common queries in the front end machines, which cuts the load on the main engine by at least 50%. Yahoo put considerable effort into special cases for common queries (weather, sports, directions, etc.) back in 2007, and for a while Yahoo was technically ahead, not that it helped their stock any. Now Google is doing that too.
What about Microsoft and their excellent sw ?
(ben)
"Brain Brain. What is Brain?" Soon, we will all be intellectual children like the Star Trek episode.
Oh oh, fart!
Jeopardy is on in 11 minutes.
Kmart, Kmart, I only get underwear from Kmart, This is Hanes briefs, size 32.
You threw your briefs on the highway!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
My telephone is my cell phone. Before that, it was nothing (no phone), before _that_, it was my land-line.
I love internet maps, because they do so much, but they don't beat my paper map when I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere.
The internet isn't my clock, my internal clock works pretty well. If I have to know the exact time, then I suppose the internet is my clock... sort of: I check my cell phone which is updated by the cell network, which is updated by some atomic clock over the internet (presumably), and I like that set up. It means I'm never more than a few milliseconds off what my servers think the time is.
Radio and TV? No, the Internet is no where close to being our Radio and TV. I think nothing will be like "our Radio and TV" ever again. It used to be everyone had a similar experience with local radio and TV, now people get to choose what they want when they want. If people switch to Internet viewing, it will be more like buying movies from the brick and mortar.
I suppose it is replacing our press and typewriter, but how does that make us dumber?
Is the concern overblown or are we becoming the Web that we created? Overblown. I still remember as much as I used to, and now I have a way to find more information about things. Google expands the limits of our potential so that we _think_ we're dumber because we finally see a portion of the vastness of human knowledge and we realize we don't know jack in comparison. Was it Socrates or Plato that said something about that? Hold on, let me check Wikipedia...
Am a big fan of Google, but equating Google to Internet is plain ignorance to say the least. Yes its true that some of our mental faculties (apparently for you map reading skills and ability to tell time are big skills) will take a hit, but you need understand that we have access to knowledge far more than ever in the history of human race.
Access to advanced knowledge was privilege of the elite, not the case anymore thanks to the internet. The kind of accelerated learning and development thats happening is mainly due to computers and internet is unparalleled.
Data is accessible to more people and they are contributing at lighting speed and things that would have come say 5 years down the lane are happening within weeks. This means the people who have any "real" skill or capability will continue to "advance" faster.
Just like any communication medium web can be used to "tweet" or use it to increase your knowledge and contribute to it. So stop blaming the web for your shortcomings!!
I think you mean: "they have".
Google can encourage mental habits where people can talk about subjects that they do not understand.
This was covered in one of Feynman's semi-autobiographical books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! There's a bit where he goes to Brazil. There, in the science classes, the professor would call on the students, and a student would stand and deliver the answer right out of the textbook. This bothered Feynman somehow, so one day he's looking out the window at the sun glinting beautifully off the bay, and asks the students to point out an example of polarized light. Reflected light is polarized, but the students were unable to use their memorized knowledge. Feynman's conclusion was that the science professors weren't teaching science, but public speaking and elocution.
Vernor Vinge also covers this in Rainbows End. The protagonist, a revived Pulitzer-Prize winning poet from the old days, notes that the younger folks seemed to have an inability to really synthesize knowledge and understand anything, though they could instantly look anything up through their wearable computers and talk about it.
Slashdotters need to read more McCluhan and less Vinge.
He is the same guy who was fired a few years ago from Harvard Business for saying IT does not matter. He was entirely proven wrong. The guy likes to put out provocative thoughts, and is a rabble rouser, with little meaningful content.
He likes to get attention. Ignore him.
If you have a problem with Google, you should really take a razor to the table of contents and index of every book you own.
Did the invention of writing make us dumber? True, one rarely can memorize entire bodies of knowledge word-for-word, but you also no longer have to worry about Ook the weather-prognosticator dying and not knowing when to plant crops or why you stick fish bones in the soil.
Similarly so with Google. All kinds of minor and major bits of knowledge become accessible without having an entire reference library and dozens of grey-haired specialists on hand. If somebody has had a similar problem or question as you, there is a good chance they asked it on Usenet, discussed it on a forum, or complained about it in a blog.
Whatever it may or may not do to a particular individual, Google + the works it indexes have raised the average and collective knowledge available.
This was part of the premise of an awesome book called Feed. In the book, everyone has a neural implant that's called a "feed", that's essentially internet access. The net result of having all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips essentially turns everyone into an immature idiot.
Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that progress let us forget. And if you think of what computers do, it is that they allow us to forget to do something: they make us smarter cause they take the load off, just as FEDEX lets us forget to do something - surely not one person in 100 really *needs* FEDEX, but it lets you forget to plan.
New is bad. Same story different tune. If you replace google with library (or librarian) in the summary it reads exactly the same. Since the printing press we've had places where skilled people could look up tons of information (and the unskilled could browse gossip mags).
Unequivocally! If you start with the assumption that for the vast majority of the population, learning is dictated by their experiences, by watching others and very little experimentation, then any pre-masticated sources of information are a seriously dangerous thing. Consider, how propaganda is so effective and (sadly) there are too many recent examples to mention which show how just framing an argument can lead to disastrous consequences both in blocking critical thinking and badgering people to jump to unfounded conclusions. There are many reasons for this, not the least being that when we use a tool without having a fundamental basis of what we're actually trying to explore/comprehend the answer(s) it provides can be too easily seen as the be all, end all.
:) I optimistically believe that's to free ourselves to do what we prioritize higher, but then how many of us actually do something more useful?
The problem is not just Google, though it has certainly accelerated the visible effects. It's statistical rankings may appear to be effective, but in the end, too often they act as amplifiers for the loudest opinion, and that's usually not the most rational/informed one. The 'problem' is spread across all kinds of tools, teachers, technology and policies that detract away from giving us and our children a chance to explore and learn for ourselves. The tools/language/method-of-instruction become the means by which free thought is kept at bay.
As others have noted, it is too easy for our minds to be 'lazy' - that's not all bad
The gentle leech, causes no pain. In fact, it is quite comfortable, don't ya think?
But also... you're time is better spent.
;)
It's true! You're right. Your time is better spent.
"If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows."
Somehow we seem to have managed in the millenia since Plato, despite having the crutch of writing; I dare say that we'll survive Google as well.
There was an Outer Limits episode where everyone had brain implants that connected them to a 'super computer'. They could all recall and information they wanted by thinking about it...basically a glorified pimp-my-ride google.
Long story short, everyone knew everything, but actually knew nothing. Server goes boom, everyone becomes stupid.
That, I think, is the underlying question of TFA. With that said, I think is it off base. The same could be said about calculators, computers in general, books even? Where would it end? A tool is a tool is a tool.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
...my brain returns more and more 404 pages.
FTA:
Remember books? Those were the things we read before e-mail, Web browsing, and Twitter came on the scene.
This is inane. Books are not the same as email. Before email we read letters sent along the post. Before web browsing we read magazines and trade journals and newspapers. Before Twitter we read fortune cookies. All the internet provides is a digital format for old technologies. And Google is just the modern day Dewey Decimal System/Yellow Pages of locating all this information.
None of these things are at all like reading a book, or even an ebook. The internet did not and will not replace the book. If he stopped reading books he needs to look closer than the internets to find the person to blame for that.
If you Google "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" the first link is to the same article!
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Having easy access to calculators, I have lost the ability to be facile with mental arithmetic. Stripped of calculating devices I have to resort to pencil and paper even for simple things. I think that if you don't use a particular facility it atrophies, whether it's muscles or mental skills. Google is an indexing system. I've gotten lazy in using other, more painful, indexing systems. I'm not sure that is a big loss.
What the hell is a typewriter?
I am not sure, let me check on google.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+Is+Google+Making+Us+Stupid%3F&btnG=Google+Search
And it looks like the quote lost a bit. Here is a link:
http://www.digitallyobsessed.com/showreview.php3?ID=367
The actual quote:
"The formula works in so simple a way. What Bruno took is what changed me. It only amplifies your essence. It simply makes you more of what you already are."
In order to synthesize new ideas we often need to hold many 'facts' in our head in order to generate the connections between these facts. if our memory capacity shrinks due to the availability of information on the internet, our ability think about deep and complex problems with many issues may also deteriorate.
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765
I don't know the answer, but a quick google search turns up... oh wait...
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
I wonder if the poster knows you can read classic literature on the Internet. Maybe he should Google it...
BTW, is this supposed to be about Google or the Internet? Google's in the title but the excerpts just complain that the Internet is a better medium for much of our information. I wonder if he would have complained this much had he been around when the printing press was invented.
It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio...I don't see how using the Internet for any of these things is making us stupid.
...and TVOh, now I see.
They said I was dumb, but I proved them
THis is a very complex question and it can only be addressed in a broader context. Another, simpler example of technology making people stupid are pocket calculators. When I was in school we were allowed to use non-graphing, plain calculators from grade 10, while nowadays pupils in my home country use any calculator from grade 8. The effect is that calculating fractions, even simple ones, is out of question. I was giving exercises in physics beginners (of other subjects, e.g. biology). It was tremendously hard to perform any symbolic calculation in the excercise. Rearranging a fraction required an extra step. I had to start to introduce cosmetic steps... On the other hand these students knew how theier pocket-calculator calculated variances for them, something which is error-prone. Both skills (manipulating fractions and using your calculator to make complex operations less error-prone) are needed. There is a very fine line between arrogance and wisdom in this case. I for my part just put this under "observation" and i won't interpret it. And unless you are willing to give and hear a detailed answer, dont'ask such questions.
Nobody spreads memes, memes replicate. So you can't blame /. or /.ters.
But I, for one, welcome our self-replicating meme overlords.This whole discussion is based on your definition of stupidity or intelligence. If your definition of intelligence is being able to recall every detail or fact from memory then, yes google is making us stupid.
If, however, your definition of intelligence is the ability to reason and come up with solutions to problems with the information at hand then google is making us all the smarter.
I do find that sometimes I've forgotten how to spell a rarely used word, so in that respect I do feel like I lost something. Does that mean I'm going to stop using spell check? Hell no. I forget some linux commands sometimes too, but once I start using them again it all comes flooding back. Btw tab is fracking awesome.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
Laziness is nothing new to our generation. Its how one uses a tool to their advantage that distinguishes us.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Having elected George Bush TWICE proves America has already reached the pinnacle of stupidity.
Does that make me unable to write? I also don't walk everywhere either (in general), I instead drive, does that make me unable to get around? History is littered with technologies that subvert older technology and causes our brain's work to be used for other things.
YES!!! At long last, we finally have some negative feedback going into the singularity. We're all saved...
AC post because I have mod points.
Some years ago I took a calc class with my dad in college. (He was in the Navy and went to nuke school for submarines, so hes a smart guy, but since it was the Navy he didnt get any real college credit. So he decided to go back to school when I did and we graduated together. Now anyway...) I, being a new generation computer whiz kid sprinted through my homework and used my trusty TI-92 calculator all the time. I first would learn HOW to do something on my own, but there wasnt any reason to do it like that unless I had to. There are very few situations in life when you are going to need to take a definite integral immediatly and not have a calculator handy. I would do my homework in half hour and i got a 3.6 out of the class. My dad, being old school, would do everything by hand. It would take him 5 times longer than me to do the same assignment, and he got a 3.8 out of the class. Now who is smarter? I was faster and more efficient, he was slightly more accurate. I used modern technology, he did all by hand.
Now to compare to google. It is a tool that can be used for good and ill. There are a million things to learn, and a million lies to be told. If you know HOW do search correctly, you can be fast, accurate and efficient. If you have no idea what you are doing, it will slow you down. Even with my trusty calculator then most people wouldnt be able to do calculus. It isnt supposed to replace your own SKILL and TALENT, but it does replace the need to memorize redundant INFORMATION and FACTS. If I know where to look it up when ever I need it, then I still consider that I know it even if I cant recall it immediatly.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Is+Google+Making+me+Stupid%3F&btnG=Google+Search
Iam not agree!
Yahoo & Google searches are on words occurring in pages, not meaning. E.g., "lead" could be metal a neck rope.
I find to use Google & Yahoo you must be smart enough to ask the right dumb question. Ordered Boolean searches get mostly irelevant "hits". "MTD lawn mower blade OR engine" is worthless. "Lawn mower parts" then hacking at links got there.
Much has been made in recent years of XML tags including meaning. Perhaps this will give a Wiki-like dis-ambiguation.
I disagree. If someone forced you to memorize the date "July 4, 1776" as the day the U.S. declared independence, and years later you read a book written in England or America in 1778, you automatically know something about the political environment it was written in.
Having your brain say "hmmm, this happened before X or during Y" is automatic in this case. Whereas you'd have to be quite curious to go out of your way to research the historical context otherwise.
Most learning is memorization in a way - names, properties, relationships, etc. And the more framework you have in your mind, the easier it is the place a new bit in. 1778 only means "Revolutionary Era" to me, but to my history-professor brother, I'm sure it calls up tons of associations.
Positives and Negatives.. but one thing is true: Although dictionary.com is easy to access. the first action when initializing an internet session is usually typing in the google search. I am finding that my spelling has decreased because google spells for me. Why do I need to go to dictionary.com?
Over the last month I've been reading user comments at sites other than Slashdot. The topic will draw me in but soon the idiocy, rudeness, thoughtlessness, etc. will drive me right back out. This experience has been at some sites that produce very thoughtful articles. But when I look at the quality of the associated comments I think I'd be out of my mind to try to respond to the comments, most of which haven't even read the original article. Comments have become a socially acceptable way to rant. To me it seems futile to try to engage in thoughtful conversation in that environment. So to me, yes, in that one area there's no question that not only is the internet making us stupider, it actually seems to be making stupidity legit.
That's not true at Slashdot, but only because I have the filter set as high as it will go, and know that I'll still need to ignore 50% of what I read.
Now some ranter can call this elitist or whatever term that they find handiest to deflect their thoughts from actually considering what I've just said. That seems to be the nature of comments.
There of course is much more to the internet and google than comments but the example is telling I think. Information can be found on the internet. Finding answers to programming syntax that I might have forgotten is incredibly easy. But that doesn't substitute for all the books I've read to help me understand the underlying language.
Many years ago there was a book that criticized television, not for it's content but for the physical medium itself, saying that staring at a TV screen for so many hours each day, was in itself harmful. To me the same is true of a computer monitor, regardless of content. I've never been able to concentrate on something I read online with the focus of something that I read on paper. That may just be my age. But I have a very hard time believing that is true.
Only time will tell.
Normally, I refrain from posting to slashdot. However, when subjects like this come up, I like to point out Theo Gray's and Jerry Glynn's rant on the subject (from "The Beginner's Guide to Mathematica V4")
http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/index.html
Also, wasn't it Feynman who later had the suspicion that he was lead by the nose to the o-ring discovery by General Kuytna who knew, but couldn't bring it up for political reasons. He later mused that he may have really just been manipulated to release controlled information as much as he thought other members of the commission were manipulated by controlled information.
Also, wasn't it Vinge that was a big proponent of the technological singularity (where machine intelligence ala google-search inevitably becomes dominant and self re-inforcing learning machines that exponentially create a new superhuman intelligence).
Not saying I understand anything about what I just said, though, as this is /. ;^)
It's not that our children are more stupid overall.
I could say the previous generations are stupid because they don't know how to use technology and multitask.
The truth is, todays generation and future generations will benefit multitaskers. People who learned the way you learned by learning one thing at a time will be at a disadvantage in a world of unlimited information coming from multiple sources at a time.
Instead of worrying about who is dumb and smart based on how they do in your math class, why don't we look at the lifestyles of the individuals to see who is dumb and who is smart?
In every generation we have people who are good at math, or very book smart, but dumb at life.
Basically they spent all their time memorizing useless knowledge which was not practical and could not be applied to improve their quality of life. I think we should be focused on teaching children logic and reasoning skills instead of focused on teaching brute memorization and calculation.
We need people who are reasonable and rational, and we honestly don't have many of these people because we don't teach it in school. People learn reason and rationality from church more than from school in fact.
When I was growing up many teachers complained I had bad handwriting and wasted months of my life trying to improve it.
Honestly, it was a complete waste of my time. Most of the stuff I learned in school was a complete waste of my time and ultimately I've learned more from search engines like Google that I've learned in my 12 years or more of school.
Now I admit, I'm not an expert at math, but I have a deep understand of philosophy, psychology, technology, and science. Would it have been of benefit if I understood complex calculus? Of course, but can a person be successful without knowing any calculus? Of course.
Game theory is more important than calculus.
Rational choice theory is more important than calculus.
Statistics are more important than calculus.
Logic is more important than calculus.
Basic reasoning skills are more important than calculus.
Many who know calculus have no ability to make reasonable decisions or good choices in life. So they know calculus and math but make dumb decisions because they have no concept of natural law, cause and effect, and forward thinking.
Just think of Han's Reiser, he's a genius at the sorta calculation that it takes to do advanced programming and I'm willing to bet he's book smart, but if you look at the situation he's in, if he actually did kill his wife, he neglected to develop his basic reasoning skills to the level where he can see that:
"If I do X, there's *% percent chance it could lead to Y, so maybe it's not worth the risk to do X."
You know, the basic ability to judge right and wrong. That is the most important kind of calculation ability a human can have, and many humans who get all As and who have mastered the mathbooks have no concept of how to make rational decisions in life. As a result they end up in a lot of dumb situations of their own making.
Do I consider these people to be smart? No.
If you don't act smart, you aren't, even if you got all A's in math.
I think the number of stupid people with access to information and education is increasing at a rate greater than average intelligence. People are also learning differently because of the way we have access to information, and that is a smart thing to do. More scientists today with respect to their time read more than they spend time in lab. Were it not for so many books, let alone the internet, that would not be possible. There is also more to learn today than ever before. That doesn't mean scientists are doing less work, or any less smart; they are doing different work, and we can see the difference.
And in the same respect, I think more stupid kids are browsing 4chan, facebook, lolcats, and youtube that might otherwise be burning ants with magnifying glasses, sniffing glue, hitting their heads against walls for fun, and shooting the neighbors cat with a BB gun.
As the internet has brought a new type of democracy to information and education the world has changed. Smart people went to libraries, others went to the county fair (to quote Jeff Foxworthy). Now we all hang out together on the INTERTOOBS!!! GREAT!
It is better than it isn't.
I think the article is very short sighted, and ignorant to the way people learn and adapt with their technology. This possibly really reveals how ignorant 'smart' people are about those with lesser opportunity. I think a better perspective would be how we can see intellegence as a whole versus averages or medians. The internet has grown to include so many more people. Remember that the internet started with colleges and expanded into wealthy communities. We can now see just how poorly educated some of the country is. In the parts of the country that are cut off from technology, you will find AT LEAST as many people made up of sound bites. How many people do you know that only repeat one really bad joke, that is short, and poorly told? This was not something new that the internet created, they are just no longer naturally censored... And now they get their own website and a "Top 10" list on cracked.com
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Intelligence is not based on brute calculation.
What this means is, while someone might have a better memory than another person, if they don't know the difference between right and wrong because they have no ability to weigh their own actions, they'll aways be putting themselves into dumb situations no matter what they scored on their written tests and no matter what grade they got in school.
The point is, life is the true test. If you want your kids to be smart, teach them how to measure right from wrong decisions. This means you have to teach them critical thinking and how to weigh their actions against the consequences.
This is something many book smart people are not capable of doing. They might be able to calculate and do advanced math in their head, but if they lack reasoning ability, none of this will matter.
Rational choice theory/game theory is really the only kind of math that must be mastered if a person is to be successful.
The only sorta problems you need to teach your child to solve are the problems of which choices to make in life.
Rational choice theory is more important than arithmetic.
If you think smart is just brute calculation ability, then the computer is already smart so why should humans be smart?
However if being smart is supposed to lead to quality of life, rational choice theory and game theory are far more important to understand than arithmetic.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's more important to be able to judge right from wrong and weigh your decisions against the consequences, than any kinda arithmetic.
Why? Because you cannot solve lives problems with basic arithmetic. You cannot be good at life by mastering arithmetic. Mastery of arithmetic will not raise your quality of life or keep you from making stupid decisions.
The only way to improve your quality of life is by adopting rational behavior, and despite what you think, most humans aren't rational at all, and this includes most of the humans who mastery arithmetic. What this means is, most people have no knowledge of rational choice theory and even among the humans who have knowledge of what it is or how it works, most don't use it in their every day decision making.
We have to teach kids to be rational and forget about using them as human calculators. Because only by being rational can life become better for you.
How does learning basic arithmetic improve an individuals quality of life? The calculator improves quality of life.
My point is that rational choice theory is more important than basic arithmetic. Why? Because if you want quality of life, you have to learn to make rational decisions to get what you want.
Arithmetic does not teach a child how judge right from wrong and weigh their decisions against the consequences. I think we should be focused on teaching children how to weigh their decisions against odds and consequences and stop teaching arithmetic altogether.
And man made the Internet to his own image
It's not Google, per se, but the Internet in general (Wikipedia? AltaVista was the old-guard Google for complete and obscure results) that causes people to place less value on recalling information. As with any generalist society, you have more and more information you want to retain to act in an efficient and sane matter, making it seem people are dumb because you know a specialized bit of information but others don't, only because you think the specialized bit of information is more important that the specialized knowledge they have chosen to retain.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
If the concern is that you can only learn/repeat small bits of information, then you could say there could never be any more philosophers! lack of introspect and depth would be a direct result of knowing only little bits right?
:P
I think that has always been the case though. I'm sure many of you work in a field that most people wouldn't be able to work in not because of lack of effort towards the job, but lack of caring to learn and understand what is needed to be done.
The internet is not a hindrance to most people because they would have never cared to learn more than what is necessary. But to those of you/us that are interested in more than what the summary of the associated press says, it has allowed us to easily access that information.
So basically, if you were lazy before the internet, you're going to be lazy during/after it. If you were very proactive in learning before it, you will be during/after it. How many of you have conversations that are short exchanges of words? Most people can't tell me to shut up enough lol
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
All intelligence enhancing technologies make us "stupid". Printing decreases the need (and hence the ability) to memorize. Calculators damage our ability to do unaided mathematics. (Although if I never see another table of proportional parts it will be too bloody soon.)And so on. The real question is are we "smarter" with the aid of these crutches than we are without them? Is a literate person with a book better able to recall quantities of information exactly than someone with memory alone? Is a person with a calculator better able to do mathematical calculations than someone with a pencil and paper? Joni Mitchell out it: Something's lost and something's gained by living every day.
The people who will want to read George Orwell will still read George Orwell. They may choose to do so online in Google's library. People who do not like to read at all, will still not like to read. And they may choose to not read on Google's entertainment portal for the functionally illiterate.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This thread screams for a reference to King Thamus of ancient Egypt who once made the same arguments against the development of writing. He argued that writing would dumb humans down.
Read Plato's "The Phaedrus" for more on this.
http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.htm
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Right there in the summary:
"preferring instead to process byte-sized information quickly, regurgitate 140-character 'tweets', and skim thought?"
See, if that's how you use the web, then your attention span was no great shakes before and won't be anything afterwards.
But what about those of us who take *BIG* bites of information, hate Twitter as we hated chat, and read every single word of every single page, including the copyright and rights information in the footer? For us, the web is one big library, and it makes us smarter every day.
But idiots will use the web idiotically, and, being idiots, will assume that everyone else uses the web idiotically too. Then they blame the web for making us idiots. Speak for yourself!
this article has some points, but consdering i cannot use my brain to make a phone call, process radio waves...hmmm.. i have to have some tech to do that
It's even worse. They think we, the users are stupid. They think we believe everything they serve us.
But please, someone explain, how stupid am I supposed to be to think that forums and newsgroups don't work. That they don't provide information and knowledge exchange.
You are geeks, you know what I am talking about. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE, THAT THE ONLY REAL PLACE TO GET TECHNICAL ANSWERS IS SOME FUCKING ***SEXCHANGE PAGE!?
Just try, search for something technical. That stupid page will be in top five. And that's not sponsored... right...
Google is evil. Information shall not be server by only one, the mighty truth teller. I think we need open source, p2p search engine. Sorry to say, but we need it more than linux or anything.
I've heard the imminent death of the internet predicted many times, but not the imminent death of humanity due to the internet.
Like any tool, I rather doubt that it will have any impact whatsoever on cognition. First of all, if you look back 20 years, the spellcheck was Public Enemy #1 - it was going to make spelling worse, students stupider, etc. If you go back to the 19th century, the exact same things were being said about the pencil and eraser. After all, if you can remove what you've written, then people will be less likely to do it right the first time. Right?
Lastly, I find statements like this profoundly disturbing - all of humankind will adapt? I'm sure all the people in the world WITHOUT internet connections will be sad to hear that their being left behind in the next great step of human evolution - the gHuman.
Face it, the internet is simply an information retrieval and storage mechanism.
"The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system"
Actually, it is perfectly measurable. I also would not say it is itself a computing system. This man is... either daring to dream or exaggerating for effect.
IMO, the internet has less of an impact on us in terms of being lazy or "small-soundbite-oriented" as much as we are affected by the "global consciousness" of being able to communicate worldwide in a matter of minutes. This has benefits and drawbacks, as others have stated. Some benefits are that we have much better visibility into alternative options for technology and other mechanics of life. Some drawbacks are that groupthink tends to spread much more quickly and people tend to be a bit more arrogant in thinking they're right on something because they can now find that niche of people who agree with them instead of having nobody in their local community that does.
:P
It's definitely interesting and has far-reaching implications, though I'm firmly in the "oh, poo" camp on thinking that the internet is suddenly making us more stupid. If we ARE becoming more stupid, it isn't because the internet is making us lazy via its mechanics -- rather, it's much more likely that it is making us more stupid because of mob mentality and that there are so many new people online who are so freakin bad at communicating a coherent sentence.
Hold on, let me Google my response.
I think it's actually quite the contrary.
Does a high level language make you dumber than a low level language? I think it makes coding easier but it also raises the bar in terms of what you can get accomplished. Same with calculators, same with everything.
it's just an 'enabler' that raises the bar on what you can accomplish. The more sophisticated your tools are, the more sophisticated the product you can create is.
"It's not the tool, but how you use it". Not that huh..a gf said that to me...ever
How could anyone possibly come up with the stats to prove this (oh wait, I suppose they could Google it). At the very least, the numbers would be skewed because now more people have access to computers than ever before whereas in the past it was only educators and the scientific community that made any real use of the internet. This would naturally cause the baseline of intelligence for the pool of users to drop. Any real meaningful measure of the effects of using online search engines couldn't be done for at least another 5 - 10 years.
From The Danger of Google History in a Time of War by Mark Levine
The way I see it I have only so many brain cell left and I'm saving them for internet porn. Which thanks to Google I don't even have to remember the URL's for.
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
— Alfred North Whitehead
no comment
Nah.
Gutenberg saved us from the 2nd wave of the Dark Ages.
Cheap intellectual fodder to play with leads to innovations afterward. That's why the **AA Daleks who annihilate you if "Oops, You Copied Again" are so dangerous.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You can already "sort of" do it, but it's still pricey. I'd give it another 7 years before someone streamlines it enough for it to hit the public consciousness.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Nah. I still write long
[signature]
But y'know, the people are changing.
Just with the attitude to computers, computer-guys are at least uneasily respected from afar now, instead of being utterly ostracized as satirized in Revenge of the Nerds.
Someone above me mentioned "learn, child!"
Well, "Google Classic" might be a bit forbidding, but the portal sites are completely stuffed full of clicky things.
"3 ways you can get a disease from the sand in your shoes!"
I never would have thought of looking THAT up. But since it's a clicky, down the blue-linked road I go.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The basic premise of the article is that we rely on a technology instead of our memories, and that makes us stupid. I say it just gives us the choice to remember less, and many have taken that choice.
As I got better and better and programming, I noticed I got worse at doing math in my head. Yes, I still *can* - but when faced with a match problem, my brain reminds me of the several devices just in my jacket that can do that calculation for me - and it's really hard to chose to do it the hard way.
But there's a balance we must each find when given new "powers". Do we use them to do more, or do less with the same effort? I'm also a musician, and long before the internet saw music technology like sequencers allow people to compose much better music than they could have without them. Some of us wrote better music, some of us just wrote more crappy music in less time. OK... most of us.
The trick to not giving in to the temptation of new power too much, is to recognize that it's never *quite* as good as the old power - it's just a bit easier. We have pills that can make us "happy" much easier than living a truly fulfilling life; but they don't make us quite as happy as doing it the hard way.
Google is a good way of find information quickly; but it's not as good as simply being knowledgeable. If you ever doubt this, ask your Grandma to use Google to find out something she knows nothing about. The results will help you put this trade off in perspective very quickly.
Actually, you refreshed a devastating point about Google I haven't seen thus far:
That it increases data permanency, and in the current climate, the recorded mistakes are more dangerous now. It went from "I got a warning when I was partying in the southwest" to "You were held for two days in Illinois for Disturbing the Peas, aka Damage to Crops."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You actually still have to memorize stuff, because the new Short Attention Span Theater effect means they don't even wait for you to look it up! My compromise has been to memorize the "first answer" and once someone proves they really are interested, to look up the other two answers.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't know if you're SubtleTrolling, or trying for a +2.6 Sneaky mod.
Assuming you understood his sentence, you then
(Did you even look?)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Acquisition of knowledge, no matter the source, can not produce stupidity..."
Wikipedia and the use thereof refutes this.
'Tis why Cyborgs are the future, and not just the evil Trek kind.
You get a great swirl of "fuzzy" and "sharp".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Okay, I'm a bit late to the party but here it goes...
My current job is to produce economic research and reports, based on dozens - hundreds actually - different sources. Much of the info is first-hand, but Google and the internet in general are invaluable tools, and they've made accessing databases, government/industry statistics, and most importantly news ridiculously easy. It's safe to say that without the Internet my work would take at least 5 times as much time and my reports wouldn't carry nearly as much info.
That said, yes you can - and will - be be totally drowned (knocked out even) by the sheer volume of information coming down the intertubes: contradictory figures, conflicting evidence, interesting info published by anonymous sources on little-known websites, hordes of self-proclaimed experts claiming to know better, etc.
Even if the information you are looking at is factually correct, the constant feed of new data and the multiplication of diifferent can make it insanely difficult to get the "big picture". Much, much more than 20 years back for instance, when all you had were the 3-4 reference books and researches written on the matter, all by well-identified authors. If these sources were inaccurate, then tough luck - but at least you could lay the blame on them.
My technique to cope with source multiplication and inaccurate data is to divide my working time:
1-Gather as much info as possible and save it locally for later use. Start writing the rough draft of my report, look for new information as needed.
2-When actually writing my findings, I don't want to be even near the internet. I'll base myself on what I have saved locally, and I won't try to update anything. Conflicting data appears at this stage, but by then I have usually already made up my mind on which sources are trustable and which are not.
3-Final checking is done against the sources I trust. If in doubt, call up an expert in the field to see what s/he thinks. If something new has appeared in the meantime, it is quite easy to shoehorn it into the report.
So does Internet make you stupid? No - just temporarily sick from information overload. But it's up to the user to step back and decide he has enough correct data to work with.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Genes: Are neuron aggregates making us stupider? I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to store and retrieve arbitrary information about the world in minutes or seconds, rather than across tens of thousands of generations?
Geeze peeps, this could have been said about books and writing when it first started. Remember genes -> intelligence -> books? This is just an extension to the books part.
Genes -- stores a lot of information
Intelligence -- stores a lot more information
Books -- stores even more information, more easily, i.e. "offline"
Google = Teh Internets = fast indexing and searching of books, so to speak. This is just an upgrade to books in that series, not a 4th term. Indeed, a cyber-world with people using implanted chips to access the Internet directly mentally would again be an upgrade, not a new 4th term.
I can't think of a new 4th term at this point aside from a techno-rapture or a way to perform infinitely fast computation, or at least a (believed to be unlikely) finite model > Turing machine but infinite.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That's greater than Turing machines and less than infinite.
Gotta love modern BBS systems requiring programming ability to use what should be WYSIWYG, as in other Internet BBS systems.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Given this discussion, I'm also wondering if you're going for the +2.6 Sneaky mod.
(Copy first line of quote;
(Paste into Search Engine;
(Paste answer back to this post.)
http://www.nlc.edu/~jwicklein/TipWeek13-fac.htm
"Better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to open your mouse and remove all doubt."
---- Mark Twain
Time spent: 30 seconds tops.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
When asked "What is your favorite food?" or "Who is your favorite author?", do you have to choose to either lie to the Social apps like MySpace or do you lie to your bank which uses the same questions for password reset "security"?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Slashdot actually have some pretty insightful thoughts and comments at times, especially at the top +5 Insightfuls.
However, the system is also prone to herd-think. Such that, when the populace is not ready for an idea, no matter how brilliant it is, it will be buried down there with the garbage, or just ignored.
Sometimes, profound thoughts shine through though, but never before the populace is ready for it.
Never have I seen +5Âs which are just copyÂn paste, except for obvious long-term jokes etc. So I think the former poster is a bit harsh in his judgement, itÂs more colours than the black and white picture. Although a mass of people is not the best judge of brilliant pieces, it is a process that provably works to some extent.
T's r JIT datums->enable paradigm trans. 3 R's repl. by scanning, twitting, & #tricks. Age of Aquar. meets I-You interface.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy where people mindlessly irrigated their crops with electrolytes because they had learned through advertising that electrolytes were good for you. There aren't any user visible quality filters separating good results from respected scientific journals from bad content from some bozo and his blog who has figured out how to game the search algorithms to get traffic to his high CPC keywords.
It's kind of a Gresham's Law applied to search results - bad search results overwhelm the good results.
You can't really put the blame on Google, how do you cost effectively assess the reputations of the millions of content sources out there? This is a democracy, messy but open to everyone.
I like to think that the principles of Wisdom of Crowds will kick in; that someone will come up with a feedback mechanism that can detect from how we interact with search results, on a mass scale, whether we're finding junk or the good stuff.
Why remember things when you can recent them?
Or the word of mouth rumour mills of yore...
You can't take the sky from me...
I set my filter to reward length. Mixed in with some of the funnier trolls, the long posts are often the rewarding ones because someone put the effort into it.
"Many years ago there was a book that criticized television, not for it's content but for the physical medium itself, saying that staring at a TV screen for so many hours each day, was in itself harmful."
Endagered Minds by Jane Healy is one such book on this topic. TV is worse than computer work because of the crushing nature of the flashy directorial cutting mixed with even flashier ads placed exactly to break your concentration.
"I've never been able to concentrate on something I read online with the focus of something that I read on paper. That may just be my age. But I have a very hard time believing that is true."
It is not just your age. Different types of studies have shown aspects of this, from the distracting nature of "click-scroll" to the effect on your blink rate, etc.
My own reason is that I'm an Underliner, which is somewhat harder to do online.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I for one, welcome my 2500+ year Elder Overlord.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"f you go back to the 19th century, the exact same things were being said about the pencil and eraser. After all, if you can remove what you've written, then people will be less likely to do it right the first time. Right?"
My Old School 5th grade teacher believed this. (She wasn't smart enough to be running a Double-Level Meta trick pretending to believe it.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Dilbert pointed out the flaw here.
If you spend all your time in the ethereal-level, then you risk frolicking in castles in the sky. The parody-manager likes to go to meetings to talk about New Initiatives, but has no clue that the is embroiled in eleven mathematical impossibilities within the first five minutes.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Did Twain really say "open your mouse"?
I don't know which is more impressive: Twain's ability to look ahead and write stuff that would first become sort of meaningful a hundred years after his death, or parent poster's fantastically creative skills with copy'n'paste operations.
and in typical ignorant style we blame the messenger.
Whoosh ;)
me make stupid? wtf? lol
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
(Well, $1.00 really, but it's the thought that counts. )
Basic arithmetic, also known as mental math, is extremely important. Whether it's in the form of making on-the-fly corrections or detecting that there may be something wrong with a given result, it provides a foundation for basically everything in society.
The goggles, they do nothing!
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
No, it's just making Nick Carr stupid. The rest of us are fine.
Why do I feel like someone made the same argument when books were invented?
It's called adjusting to your environment. Very popular in the evolutionary competetition of species.
Maybe being stupid makes us Google.
"Is google making us Stupid?"
Facts are useless, they can be used to prove anything.
1) Truth in history is better. 2) Who do you trust with picking which histories get erased 3)While honesty can be disturbing, such as Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). The first was SHOCKING, the second book ruined his career for merely publishing the honest survey responses of people. Fortunately this honesty brought about a certain honesty in discussing such issues openly that has helped lead to the sexual revolution in the US.
Most of the sexual revolution was not a matter of enlightening anyone, but a new culture and atmosphere people were born into. People bork into this era will be born into a more honest one, and people will take with the same grain or salt "Disturbing the Peas" as did the last generation took "got a warning". This (short) video discusses exactly the same issue with respect to at least one presidential hopeful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpBzQI_7ez8
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
You make google stupid.
Seriously how do you make someone stupid anyway?? This is a stupid retarded article.
when it comes down to it you have one forum of machines doing the work instead of a series of machines in your house doing the work- watching internet TV is no less intelligent than watching regular TV, and the calculator on your computer works the same as the one you hold in your hand.
This is the very crux of knowlege; the ability to have the AHA! moment when simultaneous possession of seperate facts collide into a brilliant rush of coursing thought. No matter how fast googling can provide it, the beauty lies in holding one, two, or more at the same time to advance to a conclusion.
Uhh.. yeah.
Concept was right. Skipped sanity checking for the loss.
I'll go mope over there for a while.
Just shows how fierce Snark threads can be.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
even worse, now with the acceptance of computers, I'm seeing less of us old-school computer-guys in this industry and more of your pop-programmer, don't want to know what a circuit board is, or even what language I'm using, just what code snipped to use here types.
not only do these people not respect extensive knowledge, I keep getting "Why would anyone care to know that".
I'm feeling even more ostracized than before, only now it's in my own backyard.
Or maybe its time for me to switch career paths.
it does not look like it is making us stupid but rather it is making stupids intelligent. Stupids now just have to search for the most intelligent answer.
Incrementalism. You nailed it. We won't notice any SHCOKING revolution. it's all incrementalism. What would your great-grandfather say if you told him that people in 2008 can be traced to the minute where they are (GPS phones), who they are with, (friends phones), have every purchase recorded, etc. He'd say HELL NO! But it is here. It is a reality. There was no revolution. It's called incrementalism. It's not necessarily a bad thing if it is gradual enough. It's just badif it happens too quickly, like all the videocameras popping up everywhere. Out kids don't mind since they grew up with it in daycare, schools and when it hits the workplace, they won't mind, but we will. We will have become our great-grandpa. :)
The internet is far from making us stupid. I almost never read now but I use the web to get lessons on new computer programs, music, and various hobbies and studies. I use it constantly for communication with people I would have lost touch with. I write regularly to various authorities by email who I would not bother to write to by post. I check my health and ailments all the time. I trace friends and relatives. My life is full due to Google. My friends who are computer illiterate live increasingly isolated lives. . The Internet is the best thing that ever happened to civilisation, it has created the global village http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html predicted in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan. Reading based on words (as against reading images) is inefficient and will eventually disappear. The generation gap is due to young people abandoning reading and writing in favour of imagery. I am 77.
Just bring your cellphone/calculator dude.
Maybe we can build a calculator into our credit card.
-ahem- I was going for satire. Blaming Google for making us stupid is essentially saying that the power to bring more information more quickly to ourselves is somehow deleterious to our ability as humans to solve problems.
But this is precisely what the printing press did.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Can any of you say that?
I don't understand the article
When it starts subsuming fields that *require* more than just a easily searched for fact.
There are many fields where knowing the "how" and the "why" are vastly more important than knowing the answer to a specific question, and it can be very easy to take whatever answer Google decides to spit out on any given day as correct without knowing how it was arrived at.
Granted, it's all about context. If I wanted to know how thick a foundation to lay for a standalone garage in my back yard, I could google and hopefully come up with a reasonably good guess. If I'm erecting buildings for a living, I better damn well know how to calculate it myself.
Imagine having your contractor tell you "I Googled it!" when your foundation cracks the first time you park your SUV in your shiny new garage.
You want this one.
You must be new here.
If not Google, then something is making us stupid.
Last indication of this: on 0,5 l bottles of soda, they write the information: one bottle = 2 glasses of 250 ml.
Now, for people using the Imperial system, this may seem useful information, but my first reaction as a metric person was: "well, Duh!".
Nevertheless, this is continental Europe. Everyone here is metric. Everyone should have some idea that 0,5 l = 500 ml = 2x 250ml, so this information should be known to anyone.
Still, they put it on their bottles.
Just like libraries did before the Internet.
Google does not force concision. It only applies to those who pursue it.
Strength is irrelevant / Negotiation is irrelevant /
Freedom is irrelevant / Self-determination is irrelevant / We are the Goog / Resistance as you know it is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
Back in the days of USENET, before the September that never ended, lots of intelligent discussions on the internet. Some stupid stuff too, but erudite stupidity.
As people of moderate intelligence came online, the quality declined.
If the net is now flooded by short, staccato blips of stupidity, it just means that the idiots discovered how to get online. That's all.
The point of learning arithmetic (and math in general if you're not going into a math-intensive field) is to study deductive and inductive reasoning. Teaching "punch the numbers into a calculator" does not teach any sort of reasoning, it teaches blind faith in a machine.
For example, to teach addition correctly, a teacher will usually teach counting, and once the students can count to 10 easily enough they can take the next step of figuring out what happens when you take 5 apples and 3 apples and put them together. They start seeing math as the art of creating shortcuts to solve problems. That's an important skill for them to have long-term.
I am officially gone from
I'm not talking about mastering the complex ins and outs of calculus, or trig, or even geometry. I'm talking about kids who are in high school who must make a SIGNIFICANT pause in order to determine that 18+11 is 29.
This is not about forcing everyone to learn higher math. It's about kids getting out of elementary and middle school unable to perform basic calculations even WITH a calculator.
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