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')."

Comments

we were scooped on this one

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:we were scooped on this one

[girlintraining]

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.

Which is exactly why we have NASA engineers and some of IT's top minds making posts and comment submissions, amongst many others. I'd say slashdot's average post quality is a lot more informed than, say, 4Chan.

one serving of intellectual dishonesty, plz

[girlintraining]

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.

What do they actually disagree on?

[JustinOpinion]

In some sense the argument between Pinker and Carr is a variant of the classic "nature vs. nurture" dichotomy. Of course, both Pinker and Carr are knowledgeable enough that they do not cast it so simply. Both of them acknowledge that the basic framework of the brain/mind is established by evolution, but that considerable learning/modification can occur within that framework based on experience and training.

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.

Re:depends on a person

[Scrameustache]

those who are impatient and not very deep will not bother to look for information through other, slower means.

You can't fix "willfully ignorant" by providing convenient information. I've had arguments with people who were next to a running computer and they would NOT look up the info that proved I was right. Because they weren't arguing to get to the truth, they were arguing to get social status, to "win" an argument.

Re:Battle of Wits?

[ultranova]

The fundamental argument they are having is whether or not deep thinkers learn to be deep thinkers or if they are born to be deep thinkers.

Which is an idiotic argument since "deep thinking" simply means that you keep going over the same thing over and over again, refining the finer points, figuring out how it relates to other things you know and how its parts relate to each other, and following the new insights this reveals. "Deep" thinking is not different than "shallow" thinking, it just means that you keep thinking about something longer and understanding it on a deeper level - which, of course, means that you'll have less time to go over other topics.

Every human being thinks some things deeply and others shallowly due to having only limited processing power and time available. The Internet tilts the balance to the "shallow" direction simply because it increases the amount of incoming data, leaving less time to process any particular item, but this no more make you unable to think deeply than your eyes adjusting to dark make you blind in light - sure it does, for a few dozen seconds.

As for a solution, the sooner we can upload our minds to computers, or at the very least hooking them up, the faster we can start benefiting from Moore's law and adding more lobes to handle all the incoming data - which, of course, will also increase the amount of data produced. Argh.