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Google 'Makes People Think They Are Smarter Than They Are'
HughPickens.com writes Karen Knapton reports at The Telegraph that according to a study at Yale University, because they have the world's knowledge at their fingertips, search engines like Google or Yahoo make people think they are smarter than they actually are giving people a 'widely inaccurate' view of their own intelligence that can lead to over-confidence when making decisions. In a series of experiments, participants who had searched for information on the internet believed they were far more knowledgeable about a subject that those who had learned by normal routes, such as reading a book or talking to a tutor. Internet users also believed their brains were sharper. "The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," says lead researcher Matthew Fisher. "It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet." In the tests searching for answers online leads to an illusion such that externally accessible information is conflated with knowledge "in the head" (PDF). This holds true even when controlling for time, content, and search autonomy during the task. "The Internet is an enormous benefit in countless ways, but there may be some trade-offs that aren't immediately obvious and this may be one of them," concludes Fisher. "Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the Internet may be making that task even harder."
Being smart and/or intelligent isn't the same as knowing a lot of facts. Google can help you keep a lot of facts at your fingertips. The smart part (or intelligent part) is being able to learn about complex things, applying things you already know to new situations, etc.
Google may ruin a game of Trivial Pursuit (or bar trivia or whatever) but it isn't a substitute for doing a good job planning a process, designing a machine, etc.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
How is this news? Do Yalies suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The internet, where anyone is 5 minutes of research away from being an expert, usually by managing to confirm whatever 'common sense' belief they had going in.
Granted, offline you also have people who take old misconceptions or simplifications, and will fight tooth and nail against anyone about them, even actual experts, but the internet seems to have really amplified the process. It probably does not help that over the last few decades we have REALLY devalued actual expertise on topics. The people most likely to get their ideas repeated are pop versions of their field, people who can create accessible and pandering content rather than dry but actually correct publications.
Before the Internet, we said the same things about people who relied on books for knowledge.
Also, xkcd.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
No, the tendency was to not think of one's self as the expert. That didn't make one dumb, that made one ignorant.
Now people think that they're experts even when they cannot demonstrate mastery of the subject without having access to resources. It's the difference between an open-book test and a more traditional testing technique.
I can't deny a certain amount of perverse pleasure from watching people with poor cell phone signal squirm because they are attempting to consult the Internet for an answer to something that's part of their responsibiltiy that clearly they cannot do on their own and aren't able to do so.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yale professors' ideas of being knowledgeable in a subject come from their experience lecturing students.
I've been getting paid to do programming for almost 30 years. Google has changed programming such that you no longer have to memorize the useless trivia that college professors lecture about.
I program in three programming languages on a daily basis, JavaScript, PHP, and Perl. Some days I barely touch Perl. But the difference between my programming style today and 15 years ago is that I never use books. I don't memorize the exact syntax or idioms of any language. Anything that I can find within 5 minutes on Google I don't bother to learn anymore.
As a result I can focus on improving my ability to program as a generalist, and I'm very good at what I do. If you asked me to write a bit of non-trivial code in anything but pseudo-code, I would very likely not get the syntax exactly right (unless you asked me to write it in C, which I learned before the days of Google).
Google allows us to not be smart at things that are a waste of our time to learn in the first place. We can have a much more broad knowledge of many subjects and use Google to drill down on specifics, rather than having the type of knowledge that professors crave, being completely pigeon-holed into one speciality where you have all of the trivial detail memorized.
Can I rattle off every type of tree structure, and tell you what tree is good for what problem? No. In the days of Google, that type of knowledge is useless. You ought to know when you need to use a tree structure of some sort and you can spend an hour or two making that determination, or if the decision is critical you can spend a day on it. Effectively, those weeks or months we spent in computer science/computer engineering classes learning all of these very specific attributes of data structures were a waste.
To generalize, consider everything you can easily find with Google to be part of your knowledge. Memorizing it would be a complete waste of time. But that very waste of time seems to be what these professors were measuring (and valuing!)
Which is the smart thing to do -- offload data storage to some external less mutable source that's available 24/7. Sure -- the source content could change/vanish -- but at least there are checksums and validation methods available. Inside your brain? Not so much. I don't really see this as an issue, more of a feature. Save your brain for managing the pointers and handling the data that's actually important to everyday life.
How is reading a book, and reading the same information on a webpage different. I'm curious how the location of the material makes a difference.
I gain a great deal of information from the internet, much more that I had access to when I was in college, 35 years ago. The question isn't the information, it is the ability to process it, so that when the resource is not available, you can still recall it, in a useful manner.
IMHO there is a continuous path between acquiring knowledge, to understanding, to mastery, to wisdom. Not everyone gets past Knowledge.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That's not unique to Google. Before Google, I'd look up stuff in reference manuals. If I didn't use it regularly, I'd forget it, but I knew where the books were. Google is just a more convenient version of that.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.