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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."
Sometimes being smart is knowing how to access the resources needed to do obscure things that aren't one's normal responsibiltiies. That said, relying on Google to point one toward the answers is not the best approach, at least for one's career, as answers on the Internet may be wrong or due to so many askers relative to answerers, might be hard to find.
When I was in elementary school we were taught how to use the library to find what we needed. Most people don't get the point of the lesson; it's not teaching children how to find books, it's teaching children how to find information. Lessons learned back then apply all of the time, even though it's much less common for me to look at a paper book for my information.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Facts? It doesn't even do that. It puts a lot of random noise at your fingertips, only a small proportion of which are factually accurate and not biased by the interpretation de jour.
The signal to noise ratio of search engines is nothing short of appalling, and it's made even worse in cases like Google by their deliberate skewing of results to reflect their vested interest, ie. advertising. The web exhibits swarm behavior, always reflecting the majority direction even when the majority are lemmings running straight at a precipice. It makes the majority of search results of very poor quality, and is generally unsafe as a source of factual information. Readers who are already well informed can often separate the facts from the nonsense in this torrent of noise, but uninformed beginners stand no chance at all.
It makes me shudder when I read advice given to newbies that their first port of call should be to "Google it". That should be their last port of call, when all else fails. The first port of call should be to objective authority in the subject area of interest, not to the erratic ramblings of the crowd which through lack of a thorough background spends much of its time virally spreading misinterpretations or even outright falsehoods.
In my anecdotal experience, I have seen a couple of places where the conversation goes something like ...
A: Do you know what you're doing?
B: Sure, I googled it last night, no problem
Crash
It seems that, more than reading a book or any other way, people overestimate how much they know after googling.
I don't think it's the material, I think it's the medium, and people just more superficially skim stuff on the internet.
I'm not saying you can't learn things from the internet. But for the lazy among us it's too easy to think you learned more than you did.
I suspect many of us have witnessed that, and in many cases done it ourselves.
Hell, I've even seen TV commercials by companies which basically say "just because you read a web page, doesn't mean you can replace a professional". Which means SOMEONE else is clearly aware of this. So it's not like this isn't something which has been observed for some time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
any more (or anyone for that matter).
What matters is how knowledgeable the cyborg comprised of me + net is.
There are two kinds of cases where it still does matter how well I can do on my own.
1. Where time is of the essence and I don't have time to hyper-learn.
2. When I have passed the "Warning: You are leaving the twitterverse" signs on the dirt track off the highway.
What's important in most cases today is how effective cyborg-me is at systematically formulating good questions then systematically acquiring, integrating, evaluating, and using knowledge.
Stop thinking what matters is how good a human individual is at doing something/knowing something. That doesn't matter that much anymore, and will matter less in the near future. I like maintaining my celestial navigation skills, but it's really just for nostalgic reasons.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?