Slashdot Mirror
A Battle of Wits On the Net's Effect On the Mind
An anonymous reader writes "There's a fascinating duel going on between two Harvard-associated authors, Steven Pinker and Nicholas Carr, on the topic of the Net's influence on the mind. In a New York Times op-ed, Pinker criticizes Carr's argument, as laid out in his new book The Shallows, that our use of the Net is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers. The Net and other digital technologies 'are the only things that will keep us smart,' writes Pinker. In a response on his blog, Carr tears apart Pinker's argument, claiming that Pinker's examples should actually make us even more worried about the possible 'ill effects' the Net is having on our minds. Carr concludes, 'We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors — important skills, to be sure — but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.' Behind the debate is the deeper controversy over whether the human brain is fundamentally adaptable ('neuroplasticity') or genetically locked into patterns of behavior ('evolutionary psychology')."
Next topic, please.
Slashdot's role is to provide a mostly uninformed but passionate argument between a few straw-man positions based on little evidence, but Pinker & Carr beat us to it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am extremely good at searching, skimming through the web. I always find relevant results faster than my coworkers.
But I have to force myself to read a complicated paper properly. I can skim it 100 times and will still not have understood it. If I force myself to read it once properly, I gain much more, but it is harder to concentrate on (trained mind).
Most people have never been, are not and will never be deep thinkers able to contemplate beyond the moment, that's not what most people are by their nature, they are mostly very involved with the current and cannot bother to think at all beyond an established routine.
Then there are those who are thinking and contemplating and imagining regardless of the surrounding environment. The Internet gives us ability to get information very quickly and to test our points of view through many people, sort of like peer review of the thoughts.
I vote that the Internet makes smart people smarter and that those who are dumb benefit from ability to get to information quicker than they ever could (if they ever could before, because those who are impatient and not very deep will not bother to look for information through other, slower means.)
You can't handle the truth.
Ok, so what was radio's effect on the mind? TV? Telephone? c'mon... Not at all trying to troll, but this is the problem with the religion vs. science debate (at the least the problem with those who argue that science replaces or will replace religion and that is the way it should be). Science really insists that we ask and answer the right questions. Well, guess what we don't really know what the right questions on.. we handle that on a little bit of faith. Oh there's the scary F work ;)
I liked Bob Lewis' commentary on Nicholas Carr. First he says IT doesn't matter, then the cloud is everything (er, um, IT matters after all) and now, IT matters but it's evil.
Lewis lumps Carr into those who throughout history have proclaimed that X (where X=radio, movies, talkies, television, calculators, computers, video-games, cell-phones...) will be the ruination of society. And somehow society continues. I'm getting a bit tired of Carr and his ever failed proclamations.
From the books by Pinker that I have read, he is a fascinating writer with a gift for clear explanations.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/self-proclaimed-experts-predict-ruination-new-technologies-ignore-them-489?page=0,0
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
That one dude who said people skim too much on the internet... what's his name? Yeah whatever. Anyways I think he has a point. Ever since I started reading slashdot I can't seem to focus on important details. Kind of like BP's execs and their oil rig's safety mechanisms.
into "distracted, shallow thinkers", but it sure as heck makes life more interesting for us.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't know about the attention problems created or not created by the Net, but I can say that the internet is making me dumber in one aspect, and that is spelling and grammar. In the old days most news and information was filtered through professional organizations, and irrespective of the veracity of such reports at least the grammar and spelling was usually close to perfect.
These days I am exposed to so much bad spelling and grammar that it is having an effect on me. I increasingly find myself not even noticing spelling errors, which bothers me.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
...recent achievements in North Korea.
I have seen it in myself just recently.
Having been a fairly intellectual person, in the past 5 years or so I have noticed a distinct lack of patience, memory, and attention, and also find it hard to really sit down and get into something - at least until Ive forced myself to and have done it for a while, then I dont even think about it. Quite often now I sit at the PC here intending to browse the web for something relevant to my interests and just have no idea what I want to search for, so Ill instead browse the recommended lists on youtube, or randomly browse wikipedia. Ill let the internet tell me what to pursue instead of thinking for myself.
Its a dangerous tool. In some respects, in the earlier days, its enabled me to push my personal boundaries, but if youre not careful, it can lead to reliance. Its like an addiction, with all the negatives that a narcotic might have. Im not entirely sure what to do about it, short of ditching it completely - but then again, my JOB is the internet as well!
I stopped reading after this guy droned on too long about whatever it was he's complaining about. A quick trip to wikipedia proves him utterly wrong.
Things never stay the same and neither do our minds. I have a harder time focusing than some older folk, but I can deal with a thousand times more information at a fraction of the time. You take some you lose some. You have to prove that this is truly a negative trend, not like this would challenge the core humanity.
I can't speak for anyone else, but while I do skim the news on Google and Slashdot, I also often delve.
When I saw an article, for example, on CDOs and their role in the 2008 collapse, I spent a couple hours diving into the depths of credit derivatives. Ultimately this led to studying the 1987 S&L collapse and to compare and contrast the two situations. It was very enlightening and all the research was carried out via the Internet.
Is the Internet the cause of facile perusal as he implies?
Is it the the motivating force behind my deeper study?
I would suggest it is neither, or both. It is a means for both skimming and deep traversal. While one might argue that Twitter or Facebook facilitates and hence encourages interruption, one could as easily argue that Wikipedia or The Bureau of Economic Analysis do as much to encourage deep consideration.
I might suggest that there is another cause for his observation: Perhaps he is looking at popular media and its place on the Internet. I think it is reasonable to claim that The New York Times has become more oriented toward trite sound bites during the explosion of the Internet. To this, however, I would ask; correlation or causation? Has the Internet made the New York Times shift, or has mass media been shifting toward bland wire stories and hot-talk editorials independently?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
We are framing the debate incorrectly. Rather than ask what its effect on the individual human being is (an interesting question but not the centrally important one), we should be asking what is the overall effect on "intelligence resident on Earth" of the combination of humans + computers & the net.
Because clearly, humans + the net of computers is becoming a collective intelligence.
The intelligence and knowledge, is no longer located within an individual person, but rather within the distributed knowledge and communication infrastructure as a whole. We have made our environment, our tools semi-intelligent, and it is becoming irrelevant to ask how much does a person know about the world. The most salient question is, how capable is that person of learning continuously, and how much epistemology do they know and practice; in other words, are they capable of continual theory modification without excess belief commitment, and can they use a principled approach to assessing the credibility and consistency of information in an only semi-coherent sea of information from multiple sources. If they can do these things, they can become a zen master of much of human knowledge; they can become an instant semi-expert in any field that does not require automatic (body) knowledge. Make no mistake. The relevant competition (and co-operation) that will take place going forward will be between these "renaissance person" dialectical minds, enhanced by the net's collective knowledge.
What will that be like, we ought to ask, and yes, also, what will it be like for those who cannot adapt to, or for economic reasons cannot plug into, the presence of an intelligent environment.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
like what robbIE's patentdead PostBlock devise does, either touting or discrediting information prior to investigation, &/or based on advertisers' whims, & now even those pr 'firms'.gov get to 'moderate' content too. tell 'em robbIE.
Have we fully come to terms with the devastating effect that the written word has had on our minds?
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name :-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory. In the ages before writing prodigious feats of memorization were essential for cultural transmission, and evidence shows that Australian Aborigines have carried traditions down intact across tens of thousands of years. What literate person today could even dream of carrying out such immense tasks of memorization?
Information technology has always affected how we use our brains, and exploiting new capabilities is inevitably associated with allowing older modes of mental information processing and storage to languish. No doubt similar cries of alarm were issued at every earlier information innovation.
In other news, there has been a devastating loss in flint-knapping skill, which takes many years of practice and apprenticeship to perfect. This skill has been essential to the human race for almost all of its existence, having been replaced only in the last few percent of the species history by new-fangled metal-working technology. We won't know for another 4000 generations or so if metal will have the longevity as trusty old flint.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Man in Black: I challenge you to a battle of wits.
Vizzini: For the Internet?
Man in Black: [nods]
Vizzini: To the death?
Man in Black: [nods]
Vizzini: I accept!
Isn't the very fact that we are discussing this issue via the internet disprove Carr's argument? Is this not a deep thinking issue, or does the topic that he picked to write his entire book on a shallow baseless bit of info that no one will take the time to thoroughly discuss?
I spend most of my online time debating philosophy and theology on youtube. YouTube! Supposedly the most shallow attention deficit form of media. I've been geared toward philosophy and deep thinking since childhood. If nothing else the internet give me access to peers who are willing to discuss intellectual topics, which are few and far between in my everyday life. No one wants to talk Religion at the bar, no one in my personal life is willing to take the time to learn about Quantum Physics. The internet gives me output for my deep philosophical thoughts I wouldn't otherwise have. Technology is a tool, it doesn't fundamentally change human nature.
our use of the Net is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers.
Our education (or lack thereof) is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers. A constant deluge of advertisements, commercials, billboards, 30 second sound-clips, etc., isn't helping. Critical thinking is a skill, not a talent -- as such, it is learned. Blaming an inanimate pile of wires, servers, and routers on that is absurd.
The Net and other digital technologies 'are the only things that will keep us smart'
Human intellectual capacity hasn't significantly altered in over 16,000 years. The internet is not, in the span of one or even five generations, going to change it.
'We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors -- important skills, to be sure -- but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.'
That training has nothing to do with the internet. It is the byproduct of paradigm shifts in how we socialize with one another. The internet may have enabled that, but by no means is it solely or even largely responsible for it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Who can do any 'deep thinking' while raising children? Unless you find a way to ignore them...
In my experience, most people abhor the "more attentive modes of thought" and avoid them at all costs.
Those few who like such modes of thought actively create opportunities to engage in them.
The net caters to both groups.
That is all.
Only a matter of time before they start calling each other mindless faggots, and thus, Carr will be the victor.
More like a battle of half-wits. Both positions are equally incorrect.
Shallow, superficial thinkers are going to use the Internet in shallow, superficial ways. Facebook and Twitter come immediately to mind but there are a myriad of ways to waste time on the Web. Deeper thinkers will use the Internet as a resource, a way to find information rather than for entertainment purposes alone. And it can't be denied that the ease of access to information is what has made the Internet the truly revolutionary thing that it is. It's changed everything. Yes, it's true, a lot of the information on the Web is not very good but most people have come to the realization on their own. If anything, that has actually created a larger group of skeptical, critical thinkers than ever before.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Slashdot is here to provide tepidly intellectual nerds some dick grabbing space so they can pretend to be more knowledgeable than Harvard professors on topics outside of their expertise.
Here are Pinker's credentials:
Pinker... graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.
Where are yours?
This makes their disagreement a rather more subtle one that the media reports would have us believe. And, actually, far more subtle than either of those op-eds addresses.
The actual disagreement isn't about whether evolution establishes mental modules, or whether experience can modify the brain (both of these are well-established as being true; and both Pinker and Carr would broadly agree with these statements). The real disagreement is over assertions like when Carr says:
We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors - important skills, to be sure - but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.
One can easily grant that we are probably training ourselves to be good at fast skimming, scanning and message-processing (search engines, email, etc.). However Carr seems to be generalizing from this to assume that we are therefore spending less time on contemplation and deep thought. Pinker seems to disagree (implying that deep thought has always been a difficult activity and is probably given as much practice/attention today as it ever was). But neither one provides much evidence. In both cases they point to more tangential evidence.
Obviously an op-ed isn't the best venue for a detailed analysis of scientific literature, but the fact that there is no slam-dunk evidence presented in either leads me to believe this question is still very much unsolved. In this sense, neither of them should be quite as confident in their stated opinions.
At a minimum, we as readers shouldn't draw any deep conclusions from the flimsy evidence those two op-eds present. What I'm really concerned about is that the vast majority of readers will use the two op-eds purely for confirmation bias. Neither one presents a highly convincing case, so readers will simply focus on believing the tidbits from the article that supported their preconception.
I used to be retarded. Then the Internet came. So did I. I also got more smartarded.
He has the same type of argument than those which deplore the loss of a certain type of skill among the populace (like hand writing, buggy driving, water bearing, and I pass many other). The bulk of the population don't need to have deep introspection. The bulk of the population is acquiring the SKILL they need to live and work. If it is tilling , so be it. If it is skimming article on the ent, so be it. Now if lamarckian evolution was a reality I would be worried, but it is not. Therefore it isn't as if an individual could not learn to dvelve and not skim, even if the rest of us does. What he sees as a loss, is indeed a gain for the average population.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Yes the internet includes spacebook and myface, but it also has Wikipedia and tons of other useful sites.
Kind of like a library.
Or are those bad too? Or are they only bad if you have social interactions while you're there?
The whole argument is retarded. Dumb people are dumb and smart people are smart. Information and socializing doesn't change that. I'll never understand how instant access to all the information in the world is somehow bad for you.
It's probably the best thing that's happened to humanity and if you think it's harming people, well, you just don't get it.
Erm... Neuroplasticity is a recognized /phenomenon/. Nobody doubts that it happens, as it's the foundation of learning in infancy, and has been shown to remain somewhat into adulthood. Total neurological rigidity would mean that we were unable to learn at all (I.e. Even rote learning).
Evolutionary psychology, however, is a school of thought within a field. It doesn't necessarily preach neurological rigidity, just that the nerurological plasticity would need a function in keeping with natural or sexual selection.
I think that the author may mean 'Synaptogenesis may stop in adulthood, and that some evolutionary psychologists support this argument', rather than 'Neuroplasticity is making the internet make us smart (?) or evolutionary psychology is making the internet make us dumb(?)'?
Yes, there are a lot of question marks. His statements were really dumb.
When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
When cognitive psychologists fight, nobody notices.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
At least, not Is it enough just to know the information, and will the average netizen know how to manipulate that information?
tl;dr
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
So intelligent people get everything ready-made and have stopped thinking and thus are becoming dumber while those stupid dumbasses who can't think for themselves have means to enlighten themselves and become smart.
So eventually we will reach a state of equilibrium. Cooooool.
Hundreds of thousands of Grammar Nazis would beg to differ with your assumption.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Reading and Writing found to be bad for attention, deceptive and morally corrupting
SPARTA, Greecean Lands, 389 B.C.E. Spartan philosopher Demosnstentes announced today that his extensive research has revealed that the use of ink and papayra and similar technologies leads to severely negative and morally corrupting results.
"Reading causes you to be separated from the moment and events in front of you," said Demosnstentes. "Often, it presents a false or sort of virtual reality, which does not actually exist and confuses the reader. As well, it has a clearly destructive effect on the memory, which can be seen in reader's inability to perform simple tasks, such as reciting shorts texts such as the Illiad and Odyssey, or the names of all their ancestors."
"Moreover," he continued, this artificial reality separates individuals from actual reality, and other individuals, leading to individuals who are unable to focus on the real world and general moral corruption. "Reading is clearly bad for the soul," Demosnstentes declared in the Spartan town square while advertizing his seminars for young men. "Youth have even been known to be so mezmerized by this new, destructive technology that they spend all night reading, and then ignore their duties the next day."
What can be done? When asked this question by this reporter, Demosnstentes replied "I dunno. Perhaps we should burn all the papyrus and return to relying on our memory."
Just look around at the "discussions" on slashdot. You'll find people who have that 95% accuracy arguing with people who have spent YEARS working in a specific field.
It isn't about what facts you can find. That's nothing more than trivia. And that depends upon the facts being correct in the first place.
To phrase it another way, the first 95% gained in the first 5 minutes is worth less than the next 4.9% gained in the next 55 minutes.
When you go in for major surgery, do you choose the doctor who hasn't specialized in that and spent 5 minutes reading about it? Or do you go with the one who's done 1,000 of those operations with a 99.9% success rate?
OK, I'll bite:
Sure, if you want to be crazy certain that you are asking the exact right questions, then yes: faith is the only place to find such certainty. The rest of us science folks will just have to make do with testing and questioning our questions, our formalisms, our criteria for evaluating questions, our values, ... just like everything else. :)
And like all tools, its usefulness has everything to do with the user.
I'm sure there were dickwad cavemen who wondered if the invention of the bow and arrow would make for lazy hunters and you know there were guys out there that thought nailguns were for pussies and real men should use only framing hammers.
Man, I gotta tell you, think of how far society has fallen with our "right now" attitudes as of late. I mean, if women were still spending 6 - 8 hours doing laundry by hand they wouldn't take so much for granted. But no... we had to invent washing machines and dryers and make that an instant gratification process.
This fucking internet has made me so lazy. I used to spend HOURS in law libraries. Now I just look shit up on Westlaw and have more time to, oh I don't know, actually write a brief and put all my thoughts together.
Lazy ignorant barbarians aren't going to change. They'll find the most useless means of using any given tool. Intelligent people will exploit it and use the additional time for something useful. End of line.
That's about the worst way to summarise the dispute that I could imagine. The two are not in conflict unless one takes ev psych to imply a kind of deep behaviouralist determinism (which I don't think many people would do - from the perspective of the ev psych perspective/model, there's a lot of noise in actual behaviour - selective pressures are not absolute) and one takes neural plasticity to the degree that .. no, there's really no way to promote it into the archetype needed, because it's a more low-level effect.
The dispute itself is interesting, but whomever posed it using those concepts as representing the sides should stop writing about psychology.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
At any time I'll have half a dozen pages open and will switch between after after reading just a few lines. I have no attention span whatsoever.
Anyone, no matter how educated, is capable of throwing together a bunch of buzzword-laden tripe for the sake of name-promotion and making pretensions of relevance.
Academics, though smart, are under perpetual pressure to publish and generate interest. It's how the game is played. Having earned a degree themselves, they are more practiced than anyone at filling pages with important-sounding but ultimately empty BS just to make the grade (or, in this case, get the exposure).
The literary world is overflowing with wrong statements made by very educated people.
Appeal to ethos can be a quick way to defeat one's own critical thinking skills.
a narcissistic idiot. Since he was fired and had to tuck his tail between his legs and take his blog elsewhere there is no editorial control over is writing and it get worse by each article.
I have a good friend who has all the traits of a deep thinker, but his life experiences and education have somehow blocked him (in my opinion). He often seems on the verge of philosophical thought, but it is all rooted in shallow pop culture and "contemporary arts" knowledge. He is very insightful and perceptive, but it comes across as sophomoric due to his lack of context. I wish he had gone to a real university and been exposed to a better range of scientific, philosophical, and literary knowledge, because then he'd be a much more entertaining beer partner... instead, he knows all about how the fine arts crowd tries to shock and offend in order to "make statements" but he has trouble articulating any statement worth making.
It is my view that we have some formative "sponge years" when we can really absorb a huge amount of knowledge, but after that we learn in a different way, making refinements or more subtle discernment around the rough span of what we crammed in while young. Not to say we cannot have some transformative learning experiences later in life, but they often have more to do with reinterpreting all the knowledge and experience we have gained, rather than just learning broad new areas from scratch. When we are young, we lack the experience to even recognize what these interpretations would mean.
So I think the Internet age may change the details of the shallow pop culture experience that opiates the masses, I do not think it will dramatically change the fact that some people escape it and learn to be successful thinkers, while many remain trapped. Whether they are drunk philosophers, monday morning quarterbacks, or armchair diplomats, they have basically been relegated to wasting their intellectual powers on rehashing pop culture.
The real danger is not technology, but a society which becomes oppressive and does not allow any children to opt out and pursue their own personal imperatives. If pop culture and conformity is crammed down the throats of everyone, we will lose many thinkers. It doesn't matter whether the medium is gossip mongers in the alley, box scores in the paper, or internet streams.
How about a grammar checker? Does one exist for Web browsers like we see in word processors?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Simple Question: Who is the 13th president of the U.S.? If I didn't have a computer with Internet, I wouldn't know. Why? Because I'm not going to go to the library. Go to some card catalog system, sort out the cards until I find a title that may have a list of presidents. Use the Dewey Decimal System to find the book and flip the page. Let's look at the internet way. Double click...type 13th president... enjoy.
Intelligence, IIRC, comes from two Latin words, inter and legere(sp?), basically meaning to choose between. Knowledge, for my working purposes, is declarative as regards the naming of things and technical as regards how things work. Wit or invention is knowledge used in an innovative way that captivates, perhaps instructs and, even, furthers knowledge by inventing new, lasting understanding. Declarative knowledge as I see it today is still largely a hold over from the Heroic age. Religions, especially the Mediterranean death cults, are big on declarative knowledge, especially as regards the lengthy recitation of Gospel. Homer's work (Homer was most likely not an historical figure), 'The Odyssey' and the 'Iliad', are examples of declarative knowledge accompanied by intelligence that displays wit or invention. In my world there is Bach then there is music, and, for me, Bach's works are, for me, today the outstanding example of intelligence, knowledge and invention as practised in the last hay days of the Heroic age. Robert Grave's book 'The White Goddess', while historically inaccurate, is an interesting and worthwhile insight into intelligence, knowledge and wit as practised for status and profit in premodern Europe. Lengthy recitations with invention, or witty exploitation of what otherwise might have remained a mistake, are the intellectuals equivalent of feats of strength.
My question would be to what extent we in the modern world need to reinforce, with practice, lengthy recitations of declarative knowledge. It's not unlike considering the need to have physical strength in today's world. One could go further down that path and question whether technology will nullify or so enhance our physical attributes that the old ways will be irrelevant and lost to us. Knowledge, as a choosing, can't but be enhanced by the Internet.
Invention, wit, creativity, plasticity and debates as to nature versus nurture are a different kettle of fish. I don't think we've the knowledge to settle the debate. My own thoughts on the matter are unsupportable. An overview suggests that each of us needs to be plugged in. We're highly social creatures. Our success and failures, to a great degree, rely upon our highly social nature. I rely currently on a metaphor utilizing apoptosis (programmed cell death) to think about plasticity as displayed in invention. Cells carry out a programmed death when they don't receive communications from other cells to go on living. I use this as a metaphor to examine how each of us seek out communications that tell us to go on living. Although this is highly simplified, it's not unapparent in our day to day lives. Stretching the metaphor beyond tolerance permits a view of plasticity that runs somewhat parallel to the developmental programmes we call infancy, puberty and adolescence. In cultures where any one individual can't plug in they'll tend to innovate and invent. Puberty and adolescence are are periods of experimentation and innovation that when ended tend to leave one for the most part fixed as to type. There are, for the purposes of this post, conservative types and liberal types ,and, artistic types. Perhaps here genetic predisposition can be pointed to. Conservative and liberal types find a niche fairly easily, artistic types, high inventive, are often troubled and labeled with syndromes like bipolar and schizophrenic. While there are underlying physiological states for such diseases, and, genetic predispositions, such people tend to thrash about a great deal looking for ways to plug in even though they may be constitutionally incapable of doing so in their culture. Such people can be endless trouble to themselves and others and win Noble prizes too. People, like Bach, tend to exemplify a near Goldilock's solution to the problem of artistic natures, others, less so.
The above is a quick cheap shot at a complex, fascinating something or other.
ideopath @ play
See title
In the U.S. there has been a distinct lack of ability to speak anything other than the most primitive English. It started well before computers were common but it is a growing problem. Without fairly deep language skills thought is always second rate. It would be easy to understand if the people involved spoke English as a second language but what I am observing is that Americans that have had families here for generations are very limited in their speech and understanding. It is frightening to me.
The general practitioner will recommend a specialist who will evaluate the situation and determine whether it falls within his area of expertise.
If not, he will recommend the patient to a different specialist.
That's the difference between having a hammer and being a carpenter. It might take you 5 minutes to buy a hammer ... and years of using that hammer to become a carpenter.
... restrict your comments to 140 characters maximum. It's all I can handle lately.
Have gnu, will travel.
...fall asleep.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Writing facilitates deeper thinking, because writing allows more complex thoughts supported by more evidence, more thorough-going criticism, and wider circulation of ideas. The Internet is fundamentally a literary medium, which encourages all of the foregoing elements.
The recurring complaint that Twitter's 140 character limit is an indication of shallow thinking misses how frequently Tweets are used to post references to articles, essays, or longer pieces, themselves referencing longer works.
Literature works as a sort of inverted pyramid: you read the short, pithy statement first, then decide if you want or need to read the supporting detail and the related works. A book has an introduction; the introduction has a summary paragraph; the paragraph has a topic sentence. Dedicated academics read and write precises and summaries. Long books include references and bibliographies. One chooses the appropriate depth to which to read.
Yawn, fuck people that think knowing pointless trivia is a worth while skill. The "professionals" are just being pissy that the average google or wiki search can do in five minutes, what it took them 8 years and a doctorate to learn.
Logic and reading comprehension trump memorization any day of the week, which is all you need once you have a digital memory to keep all the little details in check.
I'd rather have a doctor work on me that has the place of mind to look up the latest information on my condition and the treatments than some ass-hat who is absolutely positive that the best way to do it is what he/she learned 20 years ago in medical school.
Proper research methodology involves absorbing as much knowledge as possible, then synthesising something new. In this world of information overload, skimming and sharing (including social media) help find all the pearls, which are studied more deeply. You then find a quiet place to think.
They are going to turn into Mentat type beings, where their 'cyber'-brains are hooked up in real time to sites such as wik. It will be like the matrix, with us being able to download any 'program' at any time we want.. having a full time mentat who does these things and passes it into you in real time would be awesome. It could be like a whole new industry(since AI technology would still be quute lacking and will stay that way for some time to come). Your own personal mentat(someone who is a prodigy at looking up data and finding information on the net(whether that be wiki, youtube, some updated and advanced future version of google maps/street view or your own private spy network etc). It's life support, prosthetic limbs, artificial hearts, ears, and eyes currently.. Next it will be all military grade upgraded limbs and organs, with a supplementary cyberbrain for real time information and computer like processing ability. This is like classic cyberpunk stiff.. the future is already here, or at the very least, it's just around the corner! If anything, it's only a matter of time.. you could say it's simply.. inevitable. The line between man and machine will continue to get more and more blurred. Maybe we will get a 'Neo' too! Just kidding. About Neo that is. The rest is fact, or will be when this future arrives.. remember, you heard it here first folks!
All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain..
The more connections in any system means greater complexity.
By analogy, we can think of the Internet as societies brain and society, in an abstract sense, an organism in itself. The more connections between neurons in a brain, the smarter it is. People are neurons, packets are synapses.
To me, the inception of Internet is a monumental stage in societies evolution, of which we are only just witnessing the beginning. I fully expect culture to develop in leaps and bounds over the next 20 years.
Doh!.. lol Right. The microwave is crippling people's cooking skills. Pulease..
Those decks take *so* long to shuffle!
Your model is nice and quite post modernist, but fortunately, only a very small percentage of human knowledge was produced by people with academic "credentials". Fortunately, this academic type of knowledge (biased opinions of professors interpreting the data of their own experiments, 'accepted' by their own peers) is self-recycling, while wisdom is still what is left when everything we learn is long forgotten.
I hope such "credentials" do not become the root of a new racism, where nobody but professors have the right of speech, while the rest of us just wonder in awe and wander endlessly scribbling comments to their blogs (or in /. in case the audience here is larger), in the hope that some of the latest fairy dust might fall upon us by fateful accident (or by "knowledgeable" moderation points).
I am not saying that the Internet is not the end all and be all of democracy, meritocracy, free speech, anarchy and free beer. I'm saying that we should not apriori deprive a poor third world kid (or a poor carpenter's son), who will never have either a chance for education and literacy, from her right to change her world for the better.
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I am an epic fail: I have no entry in Wikipedia
The whole debate is precisely about whether we are heading towards a new 'creature' or a frankenstein.
I am betting Pinker and others like the prospect of teratogenesis, it will certainly allow for a ton of academic papers. It's not called symbiosis, it's called leeching.
My problem with this debate is that they do not propose anything. Pinker says 'it's an evolutionary miracle, let it all self-regulate' and Carr just says 'beware of technologies baring gifts'.
Both take Internet as a given, a fact of life like the oxygen feeding our brains. Most of their arguments still apply to (or originate from) the never ending debates about the pros and cons of television or cellular phones.
What worries me most is that most issues that get media's attention are the debates and studies measuring the effects of the Internet on various skills, which by definition describe the potential for production, and not production itself. Where are the studies on the effect on e.g. writing skills? How are we to measure whether the Internet "makes people smarter" if we don't ask the subjects to actually produce something?
I'd like to hear not just arguments, but informed proposals for the use of Internet (and IT in general) in education. Are there ways to take advantage of the internet in order to:
- Increase the quality (and not the quantity) of pupils' output?
- Prepare them adequately for the real world?
- Actively foster the skills of self-moderation, self-discipline, compassion, mutual help and cooperation?
- Teach them to reduce or ignore data in the presence of uncertainty or lack of reliability?
- Teach them to transcend the choice paradox and find their own way through life?
I really don't care much that present education still validates only printed material as reliable. I don't believe either that it is possible to plan for the future. I believe there are ways to improve the present situation and I think we should dedicate some of our precious "deep thinking" time on relevant proposals.
The starting caption on the backside write up of this old game seems strangely appropriate:
THE WEBBIES WANT YOUR MIND...
TITLE: OLYMPICA
PUBLISHER: Metagaming
YEAR: 1978
MICROGAME 07
CODE: 3107
PRICE: $2.95
PACKAGE: plastic bag
GAME SCALE: Tactical
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Too long, did not read.
I've discovered artificial intelligence should I google what to do next? :D
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I was literally raised by the Internet.
“[It] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of ... work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.”
The "it" referred to is writing. These words are attributed by Plato to Socrates, but you could easily replace Socrates with Carr and writing with "the Net" and you have essentially the same argument.