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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.
...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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
You want to cache important stuff otherwise I/O will cripple your cpu...
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
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.
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.
Exactly.
I have had two types of exams at a uni. Some where Exams where you had to bring everything in your head and some where exams where you could bring a whole ref library with you (some where even carried out in a library).
The latter were 10 times more difficult than the former because the prof could actually give you a problem that forces you to think and use what you have learned instead of checking if you have managed to memorise the material.
Software may be making us less patient. I would definitely disagree about the idea that it is making us more stupid.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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!
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.
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.
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.
Looking around is what Amazon and Wikipedia are for. You're just talking about using the wrong tool for the job.
Too much choice? Man, you must really get confused at WalMart. Hell, when I was a kid we had three TV stations (in black and white), and that was all. Yet I still would like even more choices than the smorgasbord we have today.
Free Martian Whores!
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'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?