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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
"I'm armed with Google and have a Masters Degree in speed reading." <--- Every internet know it all
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Define "smarter". Natural intelligence + easily accessible and disposable facts does not make one more or less intelligent. The problem is the old school definition of intelligence was tested through the ability to recount facts. It was not a reliable indicator of the level of intelligence of an individual. Whether gathered from a book or a search, facts are not always useful without the ability to understand, interpret, and deduce what is not represented by the facts.
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.
Which results in "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.". If you are absolutely certain about anything, it is time to figure out why you are so certain.
The issue is, with 24/7 access, your brain opts not to internalize the information, but only the pointer TO the information.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." - Albert Einstein
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Read some random Youtube comments for a few mintes--you'll feel like a fucking genius!
Well it's a competitive world and knowledge is power. In most expert forums however, I noticed that Googling an argument is often not enough to win your point. It might impress a few novice but that's about it.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not saying it's bad to know your snakes. The reason I came up with the example, is because I was just reading wikipedia articles about snakes at the time. My point is that the information is really easy to understand (i.e. even dumb people are capable of doing it). The fact that you know about snakes isn't a bad thing. It is probably a good thing. But it is not indicative of high intelligence (relative to other humans).
Some information is indicative of intelligence. (i.e. the information that dumb people can't just easily get/understand from google or wikipedia).
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.
I think this is more of a situation for anyone who reads YouTube comments.
But having access to Google information is a great help to the average joe. Back in the good old days when I was programming before google. There were things that I just wouldn't be able to code. Say accessing a piece of hardware, or trying to communicate with something else. Just because I had no reference to it... So I just couldn't do it. Post Google, I am confident in the stuff I am working on, because if I don't know how to do it. I can Google it. I usually take the extra step, and understand it before I use it blindly. Then I can get much more done very quickly.
The problem that I see is how we define smart people. School is about Memorization and regurgitation, so the person with a good memory was considered the smarter person. However with Google, and instant lookup of information. The smart person needs to be more artistic and creative. But we really don't measure that much yet.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
At elite universities, it's pretty standard for all exams to be open book, because what they're testing is not something you can just copy from a book. But then again, I went to school before the internet became big.
You thought the Singularity would be about replacing you. It isn't. We will augment you. Welcome to the brave new world where your intelligence lives in both wetware and silicone.
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.
I have about 50 computer books at home that I haven't opened in 10 years. Prior to the excellent resources we have online I depended upon those reference books for many coding functions that are under my responsibility. I can't possibly memorize every single thing that I need to know for work. Depending on what you're asking me to do, I may squirm without Google too. I know what I need to look up. I could write you psuedocode that approximates what I want to google, but I can't remember every single nuance of every little API I use. I doubt anyone can.
> Doesn't bother me one bit if someone looks the facts up and presents that as part of their argument or statement.
That is the problem. Something finds something on the internet using Google and presents that as a "fact". And, then presents themselves as an expert on the subject because of that "fact".
But at least the reference manual was a reliable source. You may or may not internalize the information, but the information was probably correct. The "experts" you are relying on from the internet might not be anything more than someone who is passing on information that someone else posted on the internet, or just making things up themselves. When you take information from someone who is an authority and has actually applied that information and verified it for themselves, you're better off than just assuming you must know everything because you read something that some guy posted on the internet.
Direct quote from "The View" regarding her quack beliefs on vaccines and autism: "The University of Google is where I got my degree from."
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?