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Does Google Actually Make Us Dumber? (buzzfeednews.com)
Another spate of high-profile and provocative psychology studies have failed to replicate, dealing blows to the theories that fiction makes readers empathetic, for example, or that the internet makes us dumber. From a report: At a time when psychology researchers are increasingly concerned about the rigor of their field, five laboratories set out to repeat 21 influential studies. Experiments in just 13 of those papers -- or 62% -- held up, according to an analysis published Monday. The eight papers that did not fully replicate -- seven in Science, one in Nature -- have been cited hundreds of times in scientific literature and many were widely covered by the media.
Failing to replicate isn't definitive proof that a finding is false, particularly in cases where other studies support the same general idea. And some scientists told BuzzFeed News they do not agree with how the replications were done. Still, the new findings are part of an overwhelming, and troubling, trend. The so-called reproducibility crisis has hit research in many fields of science, from artificial intelligence to cancer. Shoddy psychology research has received the most attention, with a 2015 report replicating just 36% of 97 studies. It makes sense that scientists want to publish data that is surprising or counterintuitive. "That's not a bad thing in science, because that's how science breaks boundaries," said Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist and executive director of the Center for Open Science, which led the replication project. But too few scientists, he said, recognize the inherent uncertainty of their splashy results. "It's okay if some of those turn out to be wrong," he said.
Failing to replicate isn't definitive proof that a finding is false, particularly in cases where other studies support the same general idea. And some scientists told BuzzFeed News they do not agree with how the replications were done. Still, the new findings are part of an overwhelming, and troubling, trend. The so-called reproducibility crisis has hit research in many fields of science, from artificial intelligence to cancer. Shoddy psychology research has received the most attention, with a 2015 report replicating just 36% of 97 studies. It makes sense that scientists want to publish data that is surprising or counterintuitive. "That's not a bad thing in science, because that's how science breaks boundaries," said Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist and executive director of the Center for Open Science, which led the replication project. But too few scientists, he said, recognize the inherent uncertainty of their splashy results. "It's okay if some of those turn out to be wrong," he said.
The answer is yes.
... but sciencism certainly does. That is, the faith that science can explain all that there is to explain, that allows for personal subjective truth at the same time demanding universal objective answers from a discipline (science) that cannot get deep enough into epistemological stack to answer said questions.
I have no idea. Let me use Google to find the answer.
Because of google we probably have fewer things memorized- but we are capable of doing so much more by googling an answer. Google enables our embetterment.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
“Never memorize something that you can look up.”
Albert Einstein
Does having a contact list on your phone rather than remembering everybody's 10-digit phone number and email address make us dumber?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Did you consider the possibility that the verb "memorizing" does not actually mean, "the act of having remembered something," but rather "the act of attempting to remember things?"
Also, you leave out consideration of the fact that the brain is a dishonest narrator about what you remember accurately! If you remember that a fact is indexed, and where it is indexed, and you value looking it up more than trying to go by memory, then you'll be more likely to just look up the number and have it right. But when you go by memory, you've got some avoidable errors.
So memory is good, memory is important, but that doesn't mean that the act of trying to memorize things is useful. And other intelligence studies have actually found that people with high general intelligence tend to forget details that they consider unimportant at a higher rate than the average dummy. Having a good memory is good, but having a good memory only of the most important bits is even better. Save some storage space for something else, remember where the index is stored, forget what is on what page, or what all 17th digit of pi is.