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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.
The full headline reads "Does Google Actually Make Us Dumber? That Study — And Many Others — Were Just Called Into Question."
I have no idea. Let me use Google to find the answer.
#DeleteFacebook
If you've got a better way to understand the world than science, let's hear it. Otherwise STFU.
Is it possible that a lax review policy is also a contributor to the less than rigorous science they publish.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Internet is not much different than scribes writing books in Middle Ages. We always preferred to store information outside of our brain - books, encyclopedias, and now to internet/wikipedia. Internet just enabled quick and free access to information.
So yes. It's best new feature is ignoring one random keyword from your search and coming up with uselessly unrelated results.
We used to have to remember things, like phone numbers, conversion rates, and temperatures to cook things. Today, all of that memorization space doesn't need to be used. If you can pose the right question to a search engine, generally you get the right answer.
It seems that critical thinking is what is being changed dramatically here. Us humans like a good story to help us contextualize what we are learning. The internet is now full of contextualized summaries of everything under the sun. A good portion of what people call "Fake News" is categorized under this.
This is completely changing the way that humans process data now that most people have a second "brain" in their hands. It makes people good at the higher level of working on individual problems native to their studies. What suffers is the human soul. People need connections, not rules and laws.
Are people dumber? People "know" a whole lot, but without context its fairly worthless.
--
True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. - Socrates
I've actually read some of the best counter arguments here on /. which often gives me a new perspective or position to form an opinion on a subject. Best of all, people here get called out for not citing sources or just plain being stupid.
How do these errors in scientific studies relate to Google making us dumber?
There is a terrible gap in this summary indicating that this leads to that, without any explanation of how it happens. Perhaps because it is assumed that we are using Google search to find these studies, and then being mislead about the information presented? There are at least two problems with that thinking: First, a Google search cannot show us the paywalled studies; we may get an abstract or a third-hand comment about the study. Second, being given misleading information does not make us stupid.
Intelligence is not related to the data we store. We may be told that Google searches make us stupid, and that may be true or false, but storing that information does not change our IQ at all. We all have many wrong bits of data in our memory. What you are reading right now may be totally wrong, but it won't make you dumber than you already are.
However, you can avoid negative results from misleading information by storing it in your memory in a different manner: When a wiki tells you, for instance, that 'global warming' will result in this or that by the year 20nn, you can store that information with a tag such as 'this source suggests xxx will happen, and they have a pretty good argument to support the theory'. In this way, you are not accepting the theory as fact, but as a proposition from a source that you tend to respect. Never allow yourself to fully believe or disbelieve any proposition except that which you are reading now.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I think the problem is using the world "science" next to the word "social". It should be "social studies" or "emotional groupthink" or "mind studies" or something along those lines.
Whatever the dictionary says about science, the word as used today means "hard sciences" to most people. Psychology, whatever level of validity it may have to it (if any, I have doubts), does not meet any of the criteria sensible people would expect of an actual science. It should not be used in the same way real science is, should never be admissible in court, shouldn't be used to evaluate candidates for a job, or be built into any government effort.
Like sociology, economics, sports and religion it should be talked about loudly, with strong emotion, a lot of alcohol and preferably an environment that can handle a brawl with no more than 1 hour of cleanup afterward and limited access to weaponry.
This is going to be hard to suggest, but these results are actually good news. I used to be in the field of psychology research, so I know all the dirt on how these studies work and the techniques researchers have to do to get published. The fact that over 60% of the findings replicated is very surprising, for a lot of reasons.
1. Top journals publish flashy research. Rather than doing technical research on the mechanisms of empathy, a study showing "fiction reading increases empathy" is more likely to be published in Science, and for a grad student, get you a grant/job/life. Building up more incremental research with stronger theoretical foundations is a lot harder to get published.
2. There's a lot of competition. People want grants/jobs/life and so they have to publish. But anyone can steal your ideas. One of my greatest ideas was stolen as a grad student, which is why I pretty much left the field. It's easy for someone with a bigger lab to do the same study, find similar results, and then publish it. So you have to get your ideas out quickly and you really can't share many of the flashy ones, because this could happen. So this creates a perverse incentive not to replicate the most flashy findings, because they are the ones that give you all the glory.
3. People make it very hard to replicate their research, because once someone gets a program of research, that is their gravy train. If I have a great finding that gets me a great paper and a top-level job, I need to keep up that research to get tenure. All those replication studies are necessary for my job, so again there's an incentive not to replicate other labs' research.
4. The sample sizes are way too low for the type of research being done, which is why false positives are very likely. fMRI research uses sample sizes that are 20-40. My dissertation used 30 participants, because it was all I could afford. To make great generalizable conclusions, I'd probably need 100 or more. So should I stop doing research? No, I should publish it and others should replicate it, or not. By replicating it in slightly different conditions, it increases the external validity of the findings.
So long story short, 60% replication is a good number, and should be how science goes. It's not the researchers' fault or the fault of psychology as a science, since studying complex systems is very hard. It's just the fault of a broken system that equates a published paper with truth, rather than one piece of evidence.
This is why no one takes the social scientists seriously.
Maybe you don't but we base most of our regulatory policies on the social sciences so it's pretty safe to say they get taken quite seriously. And they should be because you want those topics studied in a scientific manner.
It is doubly why we shouldn't waste government research money and subsidized student loans on trite BS like this.
If you want to claim the money isn't being spent wisely or that there isn't enough scientific rigor in the research then I might not agree but at least it's a rational position to take that you might be able to defend. Saying we shouldn't have student loans for people studying economics or education or law or geography or anthropology is essentially saying we don't need those professions and shouldn't bother conducting research in them which is blatantly absurd.
Most of the crap peddled through the liberal arts isn't credible, reproducible, and is nothing more than make work for people who couldn't hack it elsewhere.
Mathematics and natural sciences are considered "liberal arts" and there is quite a lot of crap there too. See string theory for an example of a physics model that has had lots of money dumped in with a lot of useless, wrong and dead end results to show for it. There is nothing about the social sciences that is incompatible with conducting quality scientific inquiry. It's not clear to me why you seem to have such distaste for social sciences other than some vague dislike for subjects which are inherently messy and not easily reducible to nice neat formulas.
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.
Before humans invented writing, we had fantastic memories. People could recite huge poems. We can't do that anymore because we no longer waste our memories to remember everything word for word, not when we can write things down. Instead we use our brains for more important things - like figuring out what search terms we can feed to Google to get our desired result.
Same thing with Google, it has replaced an OLD skill that we used to use as an approximation for intelligence. The skill was not a measure of intelligence, it was a way to figure out how intelligent you were. The skill is no longer useful, and is therefore no longer an accurate way to estimate intelligence.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There really is a difference between lose and loose, to and too and two...and so on, English isn't phonetic. "bonics (not necessarily E) don't get it for me, personally.
And when they use a spiel checker, they rape what they sew. Sometimes automation makes it easy to not-learn. If you can't write or speak correctly, how in heck can you think properly?
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Hold your horses. No one is saying to ditch Science.
The OP's point was hat we should stop replacing the Cult of Religion with Cargo Cult Science. A famous scientist even wrote about the dangers of it.
Science does NOT have all the answers -- and never will.
The problem is that pseudo-skeptics are not interested in learning a different approach -- their mind is already made up.
There is a lot of blind faith that ONLY Science can arrive at the truthiness of something -- gee, what does that sound like? A cult: "My way is the ONLY valid way."
You are totally ignorant that there are TWO ways to approach knowledge and Truth:
* Science is Linear approach to Truth.
* Intuition is the Non-Linear approach to Truth.
It is obvious you are not married and don't understand the first thing about using intuition. Do you actually understand ANYTHING about "Leaps of Intuition" ???
Just because YOU failed to understand how to use a different system does in no way discredit EITHER system -- they BOTH have their uses. BOTH can be used to arrive at false answers. But keep shooting the messenger and ignore the message.
The problem is NOT with Science -- it is with closed-minded Cargo Cult Scientists that thinks Science is the ONLY way to understand the universe, and that it has ALL the answers.
Science does NOT have all the answers -- and never will.
Science is a system, not a container you hold stuff in.
Intuition is the Non-Linear approach to Truth.
A person's intuition might serve to form hypothesis, but it is not a system like science is.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
All aspects of civilization that reduce our need to be intelligent to thrive make us dumber as individuals - after normalizing out the increase in total intelligence caused by reduction of stunting due to nutritional deficiencies. This has been long known. Do you teach someone to run by giving them a crutch at birth? or a mobile chair?
But, we are not just individuals. A large portion of our genome actually encodes our society by giving us communication skills, skills to read people, wants, etc. We are an organism as a whole too. The idea that we are no longer evolving is blown apart when you look at the evolution of the larger organism.
Our society is being made smarter and more capable by these advances. The sacrifice in individual intelligence is thus being more than compensated for.
And look what happened in that wee rant... I'm doomed!