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How Good Software Makes Us Stupid
siliconbits writes "The BBC has an interesting article about how ever improving software damages our ability to think innovatively. 'Search engines' function of providing us with information almost instantly means people are losing their intellectual capacity to store information, Nicolas Carr said.' This sadly convinced some journos to come up with wildfire titles such as 'Google damages users' brains, author claims.'"
Right, and having a dictionary and thesaurus on my desk in easy reach is stopping me from learning new words.
Die in a fire.
So the shitty slashcode may be doing us all a favor then? Visit idle and become a supergenius.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Quote: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" ( http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/09/1332252 )
In a way, this also gives a hint on how to explain the Dupe-Phenomenon.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
"Never memorize what you can look up in books." - Albert Einstein
As quoted in "Recording the Experience" (10 June 2004) at The Library of Congress
I will not mourn that which I never had to lose. - Unknown
We had to walk up hills and solve complicated equations in the snow to search the internet. And we liked it, it built character.
Get off my lawn.
...Oh. Wait. Yes we have. Calculators. Google must have caused me to forget about that.
In fact with the ease of obtaining new information, the way its presented in bite-size paragraphs will make us actually more intelligent.
And with the way technology rapidly develops, you have to kind of think "What next?" and start imagining/thinking.
All the software developers I know always have google on to help them when they forget syntax or whatever - doesn't make them less intelligent - it just means that they're using their brain for more than just remembering things.
Not sure if TFA is accurate or not, but I do know that my research skills have vastly improved since the Internet became a daily part of my life (I'm 26). This isn't just because there is more information available...I mean I am able to sift through the crap and find what I'm looking for much quicker than I used to.
That's worth something...right?
Living With a Nerd
The "intellectual capacity to store information" and the "ability to think innovatively" are controlled by two completely different cognitive mechanisms.
The only way to manage the ever growing amounts of information in the world is to offload part of the processing to some kind of AI. Likely, this is the beginning of a long progression.
Is this bad and horrible or insanely great? (Pun intended.) Who knows? I suspect it is a logical progression of our evolution.
.: Max Romantschuk
The article described a simple experiment where a puzzle needed to be solved using a computer program. One half of participants were given a 'good' program - it gave hints, was intuitive and generally helped the user to their goal.
The other half took on the same puzzle, but with software which offered little to make the task easier.
There is a research lab near me that does this sort of thing. I've talked with many people that walk out of this place. They are there for the small amounts of cash they receive in exchange for participating. If one of the computer programs made the puzzle easier, that allowed them to finish and collect their cash faster.
The motivation is not to complete the puzzle, the motivation is to collect the cash. To accurately compare the two methods, you will need to find a group of people who are interested in learning how to solve a difficult puzzle and divide them into the groups. Good luck finding such a group, however.
I sat down the other day to watch a movie and was actually paralyzed with too many choices. I have blu-rays, DVD's, Netflix streaming, Hulu, YouTube, hundreds of cable channels (including many on-demand), and about a zillion other ways to watch TV and movies. But lately, this has become too much. I'm beginning to feel like I have *too much* choice (something I never would have thought possible). Back in the day, my choice was pretty limited. I would go into the local video store and maybe discover something special or just rent a blockbuster--whatever. Now I have a sea of possibilities and it's overwhelming.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
He noticed a depreciation in memory from writing things down...
It has hurt us SO much
What about the people who have to write the good software?
Summation 2
I really wish someone could convince Mr. Carr to go die in a fire, anyone looking at the details of the studies he used will realize that the conclusions he comes to are huge jumps away from what they actually mean. Still, I guess if you write a book about how technology is killing us it is best to do a little fear mongering to raise sales.
"Search engines(TM) function of providing us with information almost instantly means people are losing their intellectual capacity to store information,
Oh, please. Before we had the internet, we had reference books.
The key to getting things done is not in memorizing sheaves of information but knowing how to look things up and synthesize.
Display some adaptability.
More like how having a spell-checker makes people never learn how to spell most words. And even with a spell-checker then you see them writing "should of" or using a wrong near-homophone (homophone, surprisingly enough, doesn't mean "sounds gay";) like "eat, drink and be marry" because if the spell-checker didn't put a wavy line under a word it must be the right one.
Or like already the use of calculator means a lot of people in the western world are effectively innumerate. They can't actually even tally up whether a 5 Euro bill is enough for two packs of X at 1.99 each and one of something else at 0.95. (And I'm only using Euro as an example because here the VAT is already _included_ in the price, you don't have to calculate how much the VAT would be on top of the price. So really, they just need to add.) Or they can't even notice that a special offer of a six-pack of something at only 5.95 Euro isn't actually an improvement over a price of 0.95 Euro per can otherwise, unless you told them to calculate and they pull out their calculator.
No, I'm serious. There actually are such special offers that sound like you could save a lot, but are actually more expensive per unit/gallon/inch/whatever. And they actually work. Because enough people can't do elementary arithmetic any more, or it ranks up there with anal rape for the kind of force or threat of harm you'd need to use to make them do arithmetic.
We had a good century or so of building up literacy and numeracy... and now it's sliding right back.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The article starts off by talking about taxi drivers, which reminded me of this incident.
This isn't just a software issue; it applies to any tool that has replaced a skill. You could say the same about matches replacing firelighting skills.
We will never be "the same" as we were yesterday. Our great-grandparents probably didn't go to school. Our grandparents probably did but left as early as they could. Our parents almost certainly attended school and got some qualifications. We are required by law to attend school and almost certain will leave with a raft of skills - not a SINGLE one of which will be Latin.
My great-grandparents probably did not have electricity, or bulbs, so they could not study at night without breathing in carcinogens from a fire hazard. My grandparents were evacuated from their education into villages and towns to avoid undirected "batch-dropped" bombs. My parents never saw a computer until they already had children.
Humans do not stay the same. The skills my parents need are different to the ones I need and always will be. I *do not* need to memorise lots of phone numbers because I have multiple SIM cards and online backups that do that for me. I don't even KNOW most of the numbers I dial regularly. My grandparents probably had a 4-digit phone number when they first used one, and barely knew anyone they could phone. My great-grandparents did not have biros to write with, and I don't write with one now (I can't remember the last time I had to write anything down, except on computer!).
Stop complaining about "drastic changes" that the human body or mind has to undergo. It's ALWAYS in flux, my daughter will not learn the same language that I've spent my life learning. If we're talking critical changes, then things like planetary legacies, etc. are infinitely more important than "our children may use a calculator instead of their fingers" or any of the things mentioned in this article.
Humans are a flexible, adaptable, learning machine. That's what makes us so fantastically successful (relatively speaking to other mammals our size). Our brains will automatically adapt to what they need to learn to support modern life. In this case, probably long-term memory will eventually make way for improvisational and logistical skills. That's not a BAD thing.
Having software that thinks for you makes you vulnerable to stop wanting to make the effort to think for yourself. I work tech support, and you'd be amazed the amount of people in that field who lost the simple ability to make the logical deduction that "if a problem can be caused by part A or B, and swapping out a functional part A doesn't solve it, part B must be at fault." Some agents will fight you tooth and nail that part A might still be the problem even after swapping out three fully functional part As, yet are unable to explain you why they believe so when pressed to back up their argument.
I used good good software. Now I stupid.
Wouldn't a more standardized system leave some whim to experienced drivers, but mostly provide a more intelligent routing service? Besides, if the driver doesn't speak English, they're golden. Since it's London, that's likely anyhow...
It makes us lazy, not stupid. It's not possible to lose intelligence already gained.
did you forget to take your meds?
Having an online thesaurus has embiggened my vocabulary mammothly!
No sig today...
Apparently Slashdot post titles can't heed the lament in its own summary.
The corollary to Mr. Carr's assertion is clear: In order to become smarter, we must write terrible software.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
the kids will just google the answer.
Now, in addition to thinking random thoughts (which the mind/brain tends to do), I can read up and learn about on these subjects which earlier used to be just thoughts, and in that sense it makes me more learned.
What this encourages though, is a more unsteady thought pattern, with related and seemingly 'random' web searches about this thought stream.
I'm considering taking up meditation to encourage a 'calmer' mind that doesn't jump around as much between thoughts.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
So this has improved my relative intelligence.
I had chemo (and had issues before).
The logic circuits still work but I only remember pointers to information. So search engines let me turn that pointer into the full fact on demand.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The author obviously couldn't be bothered to look up the word "abstraction". You know, that concept that constitutes one of the foundations of what we call progress.
Sort of. You do however need basically to know what to look for. Einstein would know what book to pull out to get any bit of physics he didn't remember offhand, and had enough knowledge to know if some reasoning you throw at him is valid or you're pulling his leg. (Well, ok, maybe not about Quantum Mechanics, or not at first;))
Joe Sixpack googling for something will land a few million hits, the first couple of pages will be mostly completely unrelated stuff and/or woowoo from some snake oil vendors. And he just never learned the things that would help him distinguish which is which. Having google and no knowledge of his own won't make him Einstein, sorry.
E.g., try googling for, well, just about anything quantum, and see how many bullshit quantum-chi-crystal pendants you find, "ZOMG, uncertainty means we create the universe when we look at it" apologetics for magical thinking, keyword/link spam sites, etc, you find.
On a good day, you might get the Wikipedia link at the top, because, well, google at some point went "fuck it" trying to sort what is relevant and just artificially upranked Wikipedia. Which half the time still need some filtering abilities of your own, because it'll be a page full of [citation needed] and "original research" signs that still won't help _you_ much decide if you should trust it or not or where to go for more authoritative stuff, often enough will directly contradict other Wikipedia pages it links to, etc. And occasionally will contain such vandalisms as that Iron is mined from monkeys, that the bridges in Ancient Rome were made in Japan, or that didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes. (I swear to the FSM, all three are actual things I've learned on Wikipedia.) Without any knowledge of your own, how would you know whether to trust that or not?
And that's actually on a good day. On a bad day you won't even have that Wikipedia link.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Google being quick at finding information does not make us know less. People know as much as they want to put the effort into knowing. Google can help them find more to know.
Well, if it helps, some people still seem to think that spelling something the same as everyone else is a sign of an unimaginative mind ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Correlations and causations, etc.
You have certain amount of allocated pointers in your head for information. If you can't store the information in the pointer, you have to use raw storage, which, in turn, takes space from potential pointers to various information storages. If, instead of remembering somewhat worthless information, you can merely allocate the information's whereabouts to the pointer in question, you'll save a lot of space. If you have to store every trivial bit, your brain will soon become encumbered with trivial, worthless information-- leaving little to no room for large bits of new information. The most efficient way to use your brain is to store as much as you can without hindering basic logic as pointers to large information databases (bookshelf, google, acquintances..), and leave the rest of the room as a playground for thought. (Imagine a defrag with 1% free space in comparison to that with 90% free space). [citation needed, right?].
-j
Wasn't this also a concern when written word was developed? That people would be dumber because they did not have to remember the stories passed down over the generations?
I didn't read anything that said we were losing our capacity to think innovatively. In fact, the article makes a point of the showing what might be considered the opposite - that the brain patterns demonstrated when Googling and surfing the internet were associated with making sharp decisions. What the author of the study articulated was a theory that this was in conflict with concentrated calm retention of knowledge like reading a book or memorizing a million and one routes through London.
What the article didn't expand on was why this might be very bad. Unless you think that someone is going to take away your GPS or the Internet then it doesn't matter any more than inventing the written word put story-telling as a means of retaining history out of business was a bad thing. Surely that train of thought would rely on the notion that something very very bad was going to happen to the world and at that point I fear that the skills you would need were lost generations ago by the vast majority of people. Surely the author is not suggesting that the fact that the vast majority have almost certainly lost or at least have diminished the patterns of thinking that supported primal hunter-gather life was necessarily a bad thing for our evolution?
Well that would be until Skynet takes control, anyway.
One time you actually could have gotten away with a wild unhinged headline, you punt. Pussy.
I'll have to step up then:
GOOGLE KILLS BRAINS!!!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Maybe we lose some ability to store, but gain some ability to analyze more data, more complex environment?
The sad fact is that making something convenient *does* impact people's ability to use less convenient methods. That can be a problem when the less convenient method is unavailable, or has other benefits. With respect to the first point, there's a lot of information that hasn't made its way into Google yet - e.g. legal case histories, medical records, lots of historical archive material. Some of that information is subject to privacy concerns and should *never* be on Google or Wikipedia. If you want to use those sources effectively, you have to develop skills like using the local classification system (e.g. Dewey/LoC or domain-specific) and indexing methods, skimming pages quickly to sort out the wheat from the chaff, etc. You get better by doing, and if what you've been doing is honing your Google skills instead then you simply will be less productive in these other environments than someone who is used to them. S2BU if that turns out to be part of your job, and you might be surprised how often it is.
With respect to the second point, I'll give another example. One of my work-study jobs in college was to develop a bibliography on African education. One of the critical skills in that job was to read the bibliography in one book to find other titles and authors, but that's more to the previous point. The other thing that really helped was to go to the shelves to find one book I knew about, and then *look around* to find others that might be of interest. Try that on Google. The kind of search they offer is too focused, or perhaps not focused properly, to allow that kind of browsing. I get the same experience every time I use an old-fashioned paper encyclopedia; I find all sorts of other information "along the way" that's utterly useless in my current search but more often than not comes in handy - even if it's only as a conversational gambit - some other time. Those are secondary benefits that I don't get by using the major online sources, though I get some by wandering through low-profile blogs and other sites. To the extent that some people never stray more than a link or two away from Google (or Slashdot), that's a loss and it's sad.
The web can broaden our horizons (TBL's initial vision) or narrow them. Sadly, the current directions we're taking tend more toward the latter.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I'd like to see (or participate in) a study to determine whether Googling on everything but a specific focus area can help concentrate mental faculties on that area. Something like Joe Haldeman's excellent short story "None So Blind".
to irrelevant 'stuff that (doesn't) matter(s) (at all)'. anything to take/keep your eye off the 'ball', which currently may be surviving the ongoing corepirate nazi illuminati holycost. best to leave it alone/continue to pretend?
Ah, so that's why Amazon now sells board games by the inch? :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Variations of this argument date back at least 25 years, when it was it was seriously proposed that the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) interface being popularized by the Macintosh would mentally cripple us, and that we should all stick with command-line interfaces. No, seriously. I strongly suspect a similar argument was made when the automatic transmission was introduced in cars, or the Dewey Decimal system and card catalogs into libraries. ("You should just read all the books and know what's where!")
It was bollocks then, and it's bollocks now. These are enabling technologies -- people get more done. I have 3000 books in 17 bookshelves (the vast majority non-fiction) and have new books from Amazon arrive almost weekly; I read heavily, but I also use Google and other on-line tools heavily. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
And driving cars damages our cardio ability. I won't hold my breath for people to start biking to work.
So iTunes is just Apple's way of making us all a bit smarter by being *terrible*. Whew. I was confused on that one!
Just like books destroyed our ability to memorize, slide rules destroyed our ability to calculate, and that newfangled mechanical music technology--what are is it called? yeah, harpsichords--destroyed our ability to sing.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Supposing that this theory is correct... wouldn't it be self-limiting? If you look at its effects on society at large, and realize that society at large has a certain capability to create things, and one of these things is software (and by extension other things that fall into the realm of this theory) then wouldn't our ability to create these things diminish as the effect grew larger? That should become visible in some sense as a general downward trend in the speed of progress. Except that's not what's happening. I'll start worrying when we start backtracking. In other words, when the people who made Google can not only not progress the Google product further but cannot even understand how Google works anymore.
But I'm going to guess that is not going to happen.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
What would make us stupid is not to take advantage of available resources. And having more resources open doors, not close them. Same could be said about electronic calculators, is not about doing the math, but what you do with the results. You can always do the math by hand or memorize something, but you are not forced because what matters is what you do with that.
But yes, somehow Internet makes us stupid, but not in the "why remember what is online?" way. Is a meme machine, worse than old radio, worse than tv. Viral is the new culture. No thinking needed, just behave like, do like, or just like, whatever you already saw on internet. Is a good thing for marketing campaings, you just put something that seem cool enough and people buy it, no critical thinking involved, just accept what the mass/social media orders, That is the real danger of internet, not the "external storage" part.
Its not software, but the modern user interface which troubles Mr. Carr.
In the pre-computer eras you spent relatively long periods of time on a single intellectual task like reading. Modern computers allow to "graze" many intellectual activities and reading sources quickly. Mr. Carr suggest this grazing activity is decreasing our intellect.
Cheap and convenient ebooks may return some of use to more sustained reading.
The ability to store information by writing them down debilitates our memorizing skills.
Just imagine where we could have been if writing was abolished 4000 years ago!
you only need to follow a few simple rules to increase your profit and maintain market share:
- embrace extend and re-market, or extinguish
- patent the crap out of everything; sue for infringement
- sue competition to bankrupt them
- lock-in with EULA, lock-down with DMCA
- implement proprietary systems for everything; interoperability to be limited or broken
- collect demographic info for targeted marketing or sales
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The Super Constellation aircraft used by all our Chiefs of Staff, since Gen Douglas MacArthur III had special window on the roof to let the navigator take star shots and sun shots
Now with this new fangled GPS, this valuable skill is completely lost. Now people need a stupid voice in Brit accent speaking from a plastic box to get them from Kalamazoo MI to Tuscaloosa Alabama.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Plato said the same about writing in Phaedrus:
"for this discovery of yours [writing] 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"
Back then, writing was a new technique, like Google nowadays.
I suspect this is merely an exacerbation of the axiom that "half of everyone is dumber than average". Nothing new except that the effect has become more pronounced. That in itself may merit some consideration, but because I believe it averages out (there are people who can take advantage of the situation just as there are people whom are taken advantage of) I highly doubt this will prove to be catastrophic to humankind.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Myself, I'm still upset at the devastation that that upstart Gutenberg caused to Medieval Mnemonics!
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
If this is being stupid, then I want more.
You see, I am human being, with limited cognitive capacities, limited free time, limited resources.
Not having to deal with such "important" things as remembering phone numbers or massive amounts of data allows me to direct my time and memory for other things.
Ah, and I can leverage my freed time and freed cognitive abilities with the search powers of google to discover even more. I've now searched and read philosophers and historians. Something a few years ago this would have been less simple: more costly to get the info and less time to do such thing. This by the way, encouraged me to by their books.
Yes, I do not know the year that Nietzsche or Wagner were born, but I do have an idea that they were contemporary to each other. Guess what: having been exposed to their ideas and their music is much more important than knowing the details of their birth dates. Which by the way were [goes way and googles for 20 secs] 1844 and 1813.
I've gained a lot with my new found stupidity. And lost very little in return.
I may have lost the details, but I have more time and resources that allow me to see far away. And the details are really here, at my fingertips.
This sadly convinced some journos to come up with wildfire titles such as "Google damages users' brains, author claims"
Don't blame them for their mistake. Google damaged their brains.
Jared Diamond, in "Guns, Germs and Steel" argues that an "advanced" society makes its individuals weaker re: performing on their own without the coddling of society. If you were released alone in the remote wild, how long would you survive? What would happen if the electrical grid in North America suddenly terminally failed? By the way, I used this page's built-in spelling correction to write this.
Birth is the leading cause of death.
Calculators. Google must have caused me to forget about that.
E.g. There's this story I've read several times so far, which is somewhat relevant to both the topic and the post above - but I've never really took time to memorize it's name.
Or the story itself.
And yet, I would be able to retell a very condensed version of it.
Or google for it and find it in less than 30 seconds.
Or link it here.
Google has not yet made me any smarter or dumber than I was before.
But it did provide me with a tool which allows me to augment the use of my somewhat photographic memory to a level that may appear nearly magical to a bystander.
Heck, now you can actually consider a line like "that movie, with that guy, who was in that other movie where he holds a bird, but in this movie he eats candy" a somewhat useful description.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'd rather have good software that makes me stupid than bad software that makes me angry.
Just sayin'...
I am old enough to remember the tabloid headlines that predicted pocket calculators would make us all dumb because no one would know how to do long division by hand any more. Well here we are forty years later and sure enough most people can't do long division by hand but it doesn't matter because they have access to a tool that do enormously complicated calculations in the blink of an eye.
I think that all tools, whether they are pocket calculators or internet search tools make us smarter by greatly expanding the things we can do. Google has become an extension of my brain and today thanks to the miracle of mobile internet I am almost never without instant access to an enormous library of information. Because Google remembers everything I don't have to. That doesn't make me dumber that makes me smarter because I can still find the answers whenever they are needed and I can use my brain cells for genuinely new ideas.
Did journalist not fit in the twitter feed or were they going for "journo sounds like urinal"?
Well I don't spell standardised the same way as you and I suspect you leave the 'u' out of "colour" too.
So much for that theory.
The London cab driver example is a very good one for focusing this debate on some empirical evidence. Because the cab drivers have had to internalize an immense amount of information about London roads and must constantly exercise mental navigation of those roads, the portion of their brains dealing with navigation, the hippocampus has grown substantially larger through these perpetual calculations of navigation. By eliminating the requirement to memorize this information, and allowing the cab drivers to rely entirely on GPS navigation systems, we are essentially replacing a skilled labor profession with automation.
The cab drivers themselves are reduced to automatons, mindlessly following the driving instructions fed to them via the navigation system. Because driving requires full attention, no other brain exercise can fill the gap. The hippocampus is no longer being exercised, and will atrophy.
So yes, this is a concrete empirical example of technology making someone stupider.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
What is the point of memorizing information when you can look it up in a book?
Q) What's the point of having 1st, 2nd and 3rd level caches, and DRAM when you can swap to and from a 1TB disk?
A) Latency.
That said, there is no point memorizing/caching useless information, or information which is not involved in much synthesis or processing, or information for tasks which tolerate high latencies.
So memorization is still useful and will always be useful. Of course if they ever start making better neural interfaces, we can artificially enhance our memories with fairly low latencies.
Basically you could associate brain patterns/sequences (thought-macros) with objects and tasks. So just thinking of someone (followed by a "start command sequence", "quick-recall-end"[1]) would get your e-brain to recall whatever it has on that someone (which you saved by associating the objects - videos, pics, text, structured data, with the thought pattern you get when you think of that person).
Of course, in a DRM infested world there would likely be many artificial limits and parasitic costs associated with such devices. These would be the cost of copyright laws. Humans would be more crippled than they would be otherwise.
Then the title would be "how bad laws make us stupid" ;).
[1] The "quick-recall-end" thought macro saves you time - you don't have to think of the "end command sequence" thought pattern (which would be required for more complicated/intensive stuff).
I question the assumption that the capacity for memorization is an accurate measure of "intelligence." INNOVATION DOES NOT COME FROM THE REGURGITATION THE IDEAS OF OTHERS! We know that there are some ways that the computer is superior to our innate thinking organs: perfect memory (perfect in remembering and forgetting) and high precision mathematics, for example. But there are also a great number of things we can do with our brains that computers don't do well: facial recognition, natural language processing and combining disparate ideas into unique solutions, for example. I propose that the latter is a more true measure of human intelligence and is the source of innovation
So what is wrong with letting the machines do their thing while we do ours, off loading those tasks and allowing more of our neural capacity to do what we do best? Its not a new idea. I proposed the computer, specifically a wearable computer, can act as a "third hemisphere" in my 1995 Masters Thesis. I'm certain others have made similar suggestions prior to that. Further, the current crop of smart phones have all the capabilities we in the wearable computing community were promising. I think sacrificing the ability to remember phone numbers is a small price to pay for the synergy of artifact and natural information processing.
The motivation is not to complete the puzzle, the motivation is to collect the cash. [...] Good luck finding such a group [of interested problem-solvers], however.
So what you're saying is that the subjects form a quite representative subset of the population, and thus the result is invalid? ;-)
Kidding aside, I think you are saying the first bit (about representativity), and thus the interpretation of the observations should bear this in mind: i.e. for people who don't care much about learning information but want to use it in service of some goal, they won't remember the information (or won't remember it very well) but they will achieve their goals.
I blame the advent of automatic scorers in bowling. It used to be that you had to add the scores up mentally, write the answer, which was then projected on a large screen so that everyone could see how bad you were at math. Nothing like public peer pressure to make sure you add correctly.
Today, the machine adds everything up and shows cute animations after every ball. (Looks like a Saturday morning cartoon).
Now get out of my bowling alley (goes back to spraying magical disinfectant in shoes).
Well, that's insightful and all, but that's not really what I had in mind.
For a start I'm not even talking about people breaking the rules to sound funny or witty or for archaic flavour, but stuff like seeing yet another lemming write "the right to bare arms." What, did someone forbid him from wearing a t-shirt or short sleeves? Where do I join the protest against that injustice?
It's not making it any clearer, and you tend to find it's not even used as a written pun either. I've actually had wannabe grammar nazis "correct" me when I wrote the correct form "bear arms". But the lemming playing smarter-than-though thought "bear" only means, well, the furry kind of animal.
And then you get stuff like "barring" because the spell-checker suggested that, which leaves me wondering it they really meant "barring responsibility" or "bearing responsibility." Sometimes it can be a bit ambiguous.
Second, don't confuse _style_ rules with grammar and lexical rules, although sadly the style is mistakenly lumped under grammar. Rules against double negatives or telling you to use the passive voice or whatever, are really style rules and most are really just debatable recommendations. Breaking those is ok. Not knowing basic spelling or sentence structure, now that's the kind of offense I was talking about.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What about these people that drive strictly according to their GPS nav instructions? I've seen otherwise very smart people do this and become a danger on the road as they try to catch exits or merge lanes when the GPS devices tells them instructions a little too late. These people seem to tune out the SIGNS that are posted and have been reliable for decades.
Citation? I think you're getting mixed up with the no-no about split infinitives, because in Latin infinitives are a single word.
From the Dutch "kuch".
Follows German Schwimmen.
The real reason spellings are bizarre in English is that the printing press was introduced when the language a) varied considerably from place to place and b) was in a state of flux, hence the written forms froze while the pronunciation was very much a moving target.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I work in IT Security, there are a number of security principles you learn, and some of us have technical backgrounds.
I have highly technical folks that use specialized tools and their brains to audit systems. Some of those folks are specialists in Web Servers, OS, and Databases. However even if you think you know a lot about the tech you work with they don't have to know every hole in Apache, IIS, Websphere, etc if they know how to use a tool with plugins written by dozens or hundreds of folks.
There is just too much to know everything about a few things, much less everything about every product someone might have in their environment.
Once you are diagnosed with vulnerability X, the security and Operations folks need to be able to quickly get up to speed on the issue, understand it and how to remediate it before some bad guy owns your equipment.
The ability to Grok things before they kill (adversely affect) you will continue to be as useful to us with our Google, spell checkers and calculators as it was to cavemen.
I'm a huge fan of Getting Things Done, and it's directly responsible for a lot of positive changes in my life. One of the core tenets of "GTD" is to habitually, obsessively enter the things you need to remember into a "trusted system" where you can find them again easily. Whether that's a notebook or index cards or a Franklin planner or an iPod (my pick), the important part is that you can trust it to store the things that are important to you.
By some definition, my iPod and its planning software (yay Omnifocus!) has made me dumber. I know longer remember most of the stuff that I need to accomplish. Instead, I check it often to find stuff that I could be working on. I don't have to recall the three unrelated things I need to pick up next time I'm at the local home store; I consult my iPod and check them off as I put them in my cart. Neither do I make an effort to remember that my daughters' piano lessons are at a certain time - my calendar is much better at remembering that stuff. I forget all the things I need to talk to my boss about, but I can pull up that list in about 5 seconds.
The enormous payoff is that instead of spending my mental energy on trying to remember a thousand little things that would be crying for my attention, I can dedicate myself to the one task I'm specifically working on at the moment. I have a lot more free time now and I'm much better at juggling all my responsibilities. If I'm stupid for relying on something other than my mind to track all those things, then so be it. I can live with that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Any time you provide tools to automate a task, you lose the skills that went with doing the task manually. Those who have visited primitive people often remark how thy can "read" the countryside they live in, knowing all the time which way watersheds run, where suitable game can be searched for and so on. We have lost those skills, in exchange for other skills such as driving cars and surfing the Web. The question is whether we need those skills: Survivalists say we will miss them when civilisation crumbles. But most of us get by very well without them. Likewise, two hundred years ago every adult (male at least) knew how to handle, if not drive, a horse: they were so common that everybody contacted them. Likewise, people knew how to make a fire with flint and steel; matches made that obsolete for the city dweller, Now these are specialized skills; what have we lost?
If Google exists, does Joe Public need the ability to wade through literature? It doesn't make us "stupid" as the title says, it makes us lose a skill which we may or may not need, Of course, researchers need proper researching and referencing skills, which is why tutors quite correctly reject essays consisting only of Wikipedia references, But that kind of research may be a moderately specialize skill that only professionals need. TFA referred to the research showing that London cabbies have enlarged the area responsible for memorizing geography, and complains that sat-navs will make this obsolete. But this takes a year or more of study to achieve - to what end? Obviously, those who have invested that year will be upset if their investment is devalued; but we didn't ban cars because it put blacksmiths out of work. If machines can safely, economically, and efficiently do a job (not always true when automating), it is a very bad idea not to do so - and free people up for things that machines cannot do.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I'd pass the long queue of drivers cursing and swearing at me for passing them.
In reality, 5.95 euros for a six-pack of items normally 0.95 euros is a *savings* of 0.25 euros.
* The Lower Depths (1925)
From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken
Homophonic and homonymic (in translation) errors mostly happen with people who don't know how to spell that specific word in the first place.
And if you DO know how to spell it... well... spellchecker is just a safety net.
Cause you can still make beginner's-level errors by accident regardless of your ability to spell.
E.g. I've just made an "its-it's" error in my previous post. Noticed it as I clicked [Submit].
As for fraudulent "special offers" - that is not a math problem. It is simply a fraud.
People just don't expect to be tricked as most of those "special offers" actually ARE bargains of some sort or the other.
Don't worry. Humanity is not rapidly becoming ignorant.
You are simply bumping into the statistical averages more often as there are now more people than ever before.
And most of them are now living closer to each other than ever before.
Plus, the Internet has made the world a far smaller place.
No wonder you bump into more ignorant people.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I sense the approach of 50 bad bowl cuts and tashes
From Phaedrus, by Plato:
Socrates: ...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: ...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.
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html
Everyone thinks they can Google for a solution nowadays. Yes, sometimes you can but you sometimes can cause more of a headache for yourself. I'm a political junkie and blogs are filled with people who don't know jack about the issues, but know how to Google for key words in your arguments then search for what their favorite ideological sites have to say. The result is context-less shallow debates where a lot of these people end up doing more "search and post link" and less formulating constructive arguments.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Damn you EMACS!
Make America grate again!
When I can't pick something to read / watch / work on, I just refresh Slashdot and spend 30 minutes reading, commenting, and moderating.
God, I've wasted so much of my life on activities like this. If it weren't for the Internet, I would probably read some of those books I discovered on Amazon or watch more of those movies recommended by Netflix or get together with some of my Facebook friends. Oh, the irony.
... the next marketing campaign from Microsoft.
I'm not a human, but I play one on T.V.
Bah so if I read this article correctly, all those times I spent shortcutting the annoying puzzles I face in RPGs set me up to forever struggle with the same puzzles when presented to me until I actually try to figure them out! Its no wonder I still reach for the guide book. The positive of this article though is what I think many knew instinctively is confirmed; by challenging yourself with a task to determine the answer yourself, you actually remember that answer better. [Of course one would hope you formulated the correct answer in the process otherwise you would be filling your head with wrong answers.] I for one have always avoided the use of those blasted GPS navs because I lack the visualization necessary to understand how far 500 feet or 1/2 miles is when the voice tells me my turn will be X feet away. This of course keeps me driving the way I should be if I want to build a mental image of the streets I travel so I use google maps to find out where my destination is and then make my own map for getting there.
I'm also disappointed that guns have almost completely crippled our skill of bashing things in the head with blunt objects.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I use the internet so much, that I ... oh shit, I forgot what I was going to say!
Oh yeah, have you been dumpster diving outside of a very profitable high-tech company and come across a protoboard that is covered with very expensive looking ICs on it? And it's got things like a MIDI port, video connectors, and RCA-jacks so you know it does something most likely very cool? And you go to the library to look up the numbers that are on the ICs in the collection of data books from fifty manufacturers and you can't find anything?
Then 20 years later, in the same situation, you just type the letter/numbers printed on the IC into Google and you get the 200-page PDF file of the data sheet and a set of links to open-source fully-debugged applications, and a near-secret link to the manufacturer's special $20 offer of a complete in-circuit-debugging development system?
And you are entertaining the notion that the internet is making us stupid? You are out of your mind. The internet is a knowledge amplifier! Anyone who might think that the Internet is making people stupid fails to realize that most people are already stupid...and the internet makes all the rest of us more aware of that fact because it is so efficient at making us so much smarter.
Bad software probably does....
...
All of this points out what many have known for a while:
The most important knowledge-based skill is no longer memorization, It is research and indexing skills, i.e. making Google your bitch. But hand-in-hand with that, an equally important skill, moreso than ever before, is critical thinking, because on the Internet people can and do lie, and it's harder to tell the difference when a lie, propaganda, or faith masquerading as science can be presented with good layouts and well-wordcrafted bullshit. (cf. Wikipedia and vandalism).
People must internalize this: form and eloquence do not equal truth.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
You are making a search without knowing what you are looking for.
I'm talking about the cases when you or someone else know WHAT you are looking for but don't know the exact name of it.
On the other hand googling for images with "movie holding bird" returns just the image I had in mind.
Now, based on that it's a zilch to get to this.
And going to youtube with all that information (the actor, the movie title) brings us this.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Reminds me of a STNG episode...
"You are smart. Make us strong!"
Fonetic iz thu wey to go. Seriously, how much class time do we waste on spelling tests? There is no spanish spelling bee because they don't need one.
Table-ized A.I.
I think it's mostly relevant to the point being made, even if it's not really about software - it's about system assistance.
Like many Americans, I've mostly driven vehicles with an automatic transmission. Recently, I purchased a car with a manual transmission.
Driving with a manual transmission REQUIRES you to be more alert, to be more engaged in the driving process, to listen to and respond to feedback that the car is making. I THINK it makes me a safer driver (I haven't empirically measured the number of errors I made w/auto versus manual). It makes me more focused on the thing that's really important: driving. It's "harder", but as a result I concentrate more on the task at hand.
The analogy isn't perfect - does using vi make me focus on programming more than if I used Word? I think the analogy falls down if you end up concentrating more on the means than the end. The biggest danger to relying on tools as a substitute for brain power is when those tools aren't available.
Okay, so let's say Nicolas Carr is right, and we need something to help us concentrate deeply in the face of the ecosystem of interruption technologies.
Is there a technical fix for this? I'm thinking something like an X windows hack that will force you to stay inside your text editor for an hour.
The two are not directly related. Our current society is growing enamoured of info-bites, we get assaulted by tons of little bits of information that may or may not be of any value (See Twitter and Facebook for instance). What we don't necessarily learn is how to use that data in solving problems
As well Google may provide results but it provides no ability to determine the veracity of the information it produces links to, and a lot of the information on the web is just outright wrong.
Now I use Google to get notes on programming syntax when required myself, and its often far more useful than having a paper manual on my desk, but that is of limited utility. When I go to read about issues of a more complex nature, Google doesn't help me think.
I think what schools used to try to teach, even with all the memorization by rote that was pushed on students, was the ability to assimilate all that data and think with it. That doesn't seem to be the case as much these days, although I could be wrong I admit.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I did a quick google search and found no evidence for these claims!
I use Linux, gcc, emacs, xfig, latex, mythtv, mplayer etc. It helps me stay sharp...
Seriously, I like these programs, but there is always something to learn work around etc...
If you take the time to think about and investigate how and why it's so good then you're probably making yourself smarter than you would have been without it in the first place. The same argument can be used for good advertising, and probably other things too.
How idiotic. You don't somehow lose your ability to memorize information because said information is easily accessible. That's just insane. I think it's insane that they *expect* people to memorize all kinds of useless information that they'll only use once or twice. What is wrong with using the internet to learn something? Are books bad, too? Also, I certainly don't remember them asking me if I lost my ability to memorize information due to the fact that I use the internet to learn new and interesting things often (and I often memorize it if it's something that I'll use in the future, too).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Believing everything you read in the media is what makes you stupid. Including the BBC.
Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge. -- Erwin Knoll, editor, "The Progressive"
It makes you smarter.
Isn't it "how well" instead of "how good"...?
So you are saing that Microsoft has always put out mediocre software and has set new standards of mediocrity instead of excellence because they wanted to challenge us? Are you serious? Give me a break!
I really hope this article was originally chiseled on a stone tablet because otherwise it is terrible hypocritical.
"'Google damages users' brains" right...... and science textbooks stop people from learning basic science cause its all right there. one of the dumbest moral panics ive heard -__-
warning pointless sig
The ancient Greeks complained that writing would make people stupid because they wouldn't have to memorize as much. While we can't measure this sort of thing, modern humans probably do have poorer memory capacity than those ancient Greeks who complained about it, but the irony is the only reason we know about their complaints is that someone used writing to record their thoughts.