Google making you dumb

[!Luck]

http://www.theatlantic.com/education...stupid/380944/


I thought that not using huds sometimes improves your poker playing ability. In general sense, tech sometimes makes you less creative if temporarily more powerful.

[MadMojoMonkey]

This just in: Humans use tools, and - in so doing - forget what it was like before they had those tools.


Seriously, though:
It's nice that they brought up Aristotle making the same point, but funny how they missed the irony in the prediction that the invention of the alphabet would make humans lazy.

It seems to me that it boils down to:
What is the cost-benefit analysis of spending the time to memorize something vs. time saved having memorized it?

It's tough that it's not usually obvious at the start what is worth memorizing or how much time it will save.

It's also tough that new technology dramatically changes how we do things and how long it takes to do them.


It's a good life skill to know how to change a flat tire. However, I have met a few people who have no freaking clue and were relieved as anything that I was there to help. That doesn't signal the decline of civilization... it just means that our civilization is complex enough that we don't all have to have all the life skills in order to be functional in society.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Also:

I was dumb already.

Please don't take away my Google.

[!Luck]

I think MadMojo, this is more about balance, which is tough to find if you aren't even trying to look for it.

[BankItDrew]

Balancing requires effort, which decreases the amount of effort that can be dedicated towards other things.

[MadMojoMonkey]

I think MadMojo, this is more about balance, which is tough to find if you aren't even trying to look for it.

I agree.

It's also something that you can't help but find, in a way. I mean... balance has a patient time frame.
It also seems to be that balance for one is imbalance for another.. and that unfair balance is a thing.
E.g. cuteness or vulnerability can balance for ineptitude.
Balance also seems like a matter of perspective in life. E.g. revisionist history.

The article is about balance, but it's comical in it's perspective. It argues that having technology enslaves you to that technology, which is a preposterous notion, except as a metaphor. Even as a metaphor it's thin, because it's clearly emotional displacement. I.e. people who are not focusing on what they're doing can't blame the tool they're holding.


Mostly, I poke a bit of fun, because I think this article had a slant of, "Kids these days... They just don't match up to kids in my day."
Which has been reported in every form of recorded history.

It's hard to take a claim seriously when it has that kind of track record.

[Savy]

It's a good life skill to know how to change a flat tire. However, I have met a few people who have no freaking clue and were relieved as anything that I was there to help.

I bet there are wiki guides on how to do it.

I actually do lots of things miles better than the majority of people in the generation before me because when I want to find out how to do something I am capable of using the internet and getting the combined knowledge of people who are actually interested enough to post about said task on the internet.

[surviva316]

http://www.theatlantic.com/education...stupid/380944/


I thought that not using huds sometimes improves your poker playing ability. In general sense, tech sometimes makes you less creative if temporarily more powerful.

When conservatists speak of things that are new about our world, they tend to point out a few ways that the change hurts us, completely ignore all the ways that it improves our world and lazily conclude that we were better off in the good old days. You have to weigh the bad with the good if we're going to come to any value statement about technology's affect on our cognitive potential. As such, I don't give a sopping cunt about a string of case studies to prove that technology "is not as positive as we might think" (which, Jesus Christ, is about as tepid as a thesis could possibly be).

Inn uther knews, beeing abel 2 spell correctlee iz the leest usefull end most over-emphisized skill inn the world. If spelling were to become non-standardized overnight, we would all be perfectly fine as an intellectual society (communication would become slightly less efficient, but things would be so close to unchanged, that it is very very very very very easy to outweigh that bad). So when 1 of the 3 case studies is about how we're not spelling as well without spell check, I give even less of a sopping cunt. When the other two case studies involve Innuits hunting caribou and an over-reliance on calculators (an obviously silly point if the author's willing to consider the good along with the bad he highlights), then I'm really left with a flaccid member in my hand, lazily lulling side to side.

[surviva316]

Putting aside the value statement (whether Google is good or bad), I do agree with a higher level point this article makes. The existence of Google should make us seriously reconsider what useful human intelligence is and foster less rote forms of learning.

[surviva316]

As an example of the above, I think grade school math tests should maybe place less and less emphasis on deriving perfectly-accurate-right-down-to-the-ones-digit when it comes to arithmetic, and place more and more emphasis on the ability to make quick and intuitive guesstimates. If you need the perfect answer upon which the water supply of the East Bay area will rely, then you best break out the calculator. If you're at a retail shop and trying to figure out in your head if you can afford a T-shirt once you account for the sale price and your coupon, then you just need a quick and reliable ballpark figure.

I'm sure my fellow poker players can really get the above point: when do you ever actually break out the pencil and paper and do long division right down to the final decimal place? When you're at the table, you need quick mnemonics to make vague apple-to-kinda-apply comparisons; when you're studying and want to get the numbers just right, you have like 5 tabs open with different tools that instantaneously spit out perfectly derived data.

[MadMojoMonkey]

When conservatists speak of things[...]

It is dehumanizing to devalue a person's opinion based on other people's opinions (even if the other people have similar opinions on similar topics).

When you do this you assume that an actual person's opinions have no nuance from the larger group.
Also, you inject an adversarial tone into the dialogue.

Was that your goal? To me, it shuts off the possibility of honest, open exchange of ideas, and characterizes the conversation as a debate.

I find debate to be the least useful form of disseminating information. Neither side of the debate is allowed to change their stance, all arguments are premeditated, and balance means that all opinions have equal factual footing.


I'm generally in agreement with your analysis beyond the introduction.

***
Too much? Just a monkey getting his diaper in a bind?

[surviva316]

It is dehumanizing to devalue a person's opinion based on other people's opinions (even if the other people have similar opinions on similar topics).

FWIW, I meant to say conservativist. I meant nothing political by what I said, so if that's what got your diaper bound, then I'm sorry for the mixup.

Also FWIW, I did include the qualifier "tend to." It maybe woulda been slightly better to say "There's a strong tendency among conservatists ... ", but I don't know and it doesn't seem important enough to dwell.

I don't really wish to qualify it any more than that because I really do mean to make a massive, general statement in this case. There is an extremely prevalent approach to a wide range of conversations where simply pointing out one downside to a new technology/solution/policy is enough to convince a large segment of people that the world would be better off without it, and this effect kills so much discussion on the spot.

This article makes a value statement on the effect of Google on our intelligence,[1] and it seems pretty fucking silly for any value assessment to be made without considering an entire half of the equation (ie: the good). It annoys me that this article (and many arguments of its kind) would convince anyone, and I'm lumping anyone that it might convince into the group of conservatists--this due to the fact that they're all too easily convinced of the badness of some new thing.


[1]Or at least its title purports that; if they changed the title to, "Our Relationship with Technology is Maybe Not Quite As Positive As We Might Think," then we likely wouldn't be having this conversation, due in no small part to the fact that no one would care to read it.

[MadMojoMonkey]

if they changed the title to, "Our Relationship with Technology is Maybe Not Quite As Positive As We Might Think," then we likely wouldn't be having this conversation, due in no small part to the fact that no one would care to read it.

That hits the nail on the head.

The problem is that having asked a question, the author seems compelled to state an answer, when an "I don't know, here's what I find confusing:" would be more honest, but less controversial.

If the focus is plainly feeding a controversy, then it bothers me.


***
I can be overly sensitive to political distinctions, I agree with your comment to that end.

The reason is that I am sensitive to prejudice and bigotry, and I find rhetoric which is dehumanizing should be called out. To me, this kind of rhetoric is the fuel of all international wars. I don't pretend to be saving the world in this conversation; I don't remotely believe that you are a capable warmonger.

So I, too, experience emotional displacement sometimes.
Mistakes are made.


Which brings me to this:

this due to the fact that they're all too easily convinced of the badness of some new thing

"They" are different from you, and you are implicitly "better" than them because you are NOT "all too easily confused".

This is textbook bigotry. You judge a group as inferior to yourself categorically.

Which is also feeding a controversy, so I'm not sure how ingenuous you are being in your critique.

[MadMojoMonkey]

I'm not specifically against all bigotry, either. I mean, if you say, "People who rape kids are bad." Then I agree with you. Rapists are evil fuckers, and child rapists more so.

Again, I'm not saying that bigots are categorically bad... that's hypocritical.

I'm saying that I'm sensitive to bigotry, because there are so many non-prejudiced reasons to hate anyone that there's no need to be lazy about it.

[surviva316]

I was actually going to make the rapist analogy until you made it yourself. It's closer to that. Rape is bad, and so rapists are bad insofar as they rape people.[1]


Having African ancestry isn't bad, and so people who have African ancestry aren't bad insofar as they have African ancestry.

My point is: being too easily scared by anything new is bad, and so people who are too easily scared by anything new are bad insofar as they are too easily scared by anything new. The footnote in the rapist example doesn't apply here, so I wouldn't automatically dislike someone for being too easily convinced that new things are bad. Unfortunately, though, being too easily convinced of new things being bad is all-too-common of a characteristic among people and has adverse affects on discussion, so I would love to disparage that characteristic in general terms so people can see the fallacy in it and distance themselves from that quality, at least in the cases where the fallacy applies.


[1] They might be perfectly worthwhile members of society outside of that (Roman Polanski? Oh no wait, that's only going to incite spoon to threadjack this mother), but the rape alone can be enough of a dealbreaker that people aren't interested in looking beyond that.

[MTCashman]

I think Google helps make you smarter, I learn alot of about things I had no idea about from browsing

[wufwugy]

You can say whatever you want with statistics. I've come to the opinion that any time the media uses data, it's not just wrong, but wrong wrong. Scientists have a hard enough time understanding the conclusions that can be reached from any set of data. It's not like a journalist is going to get it right.

Our education system is hardly adaptable. Most of what we're taught and what we consider important to learn is not important at all. Half of the time I'm studying I spend fuming because I'm trying to memorize something that in the real world I would just look up. The point of problem solving is to solve actual problems, not solve problems that you can already find the answer to in seconds with tools everybody owns.

Ofc as long as a flawed system is subsidized, it won't change, but that's already been hashed

[Savy]

Our education system is hardly adaptable. Most of what we're taught and what we consider important to learn is not important at all. Half of the time I'm studying I spend fuming because I'm trying to memorize something that in the real world I would just look up. The point of problem solving is to solve actual problems, not solve problems that you can already find the answer to in seconds with tools everybody owns.

Knowledge is a fantastic tool to be able to utilise when problem solving. Having certain stuff memorised is actually massively more important than you are giving it credit for. I do mostly agree with the notion though.

Also being able to search for and find information is a massively under-taught skill from my experience.

[wufwugy]

Knowledge is a fantastic tool to be able to utilise when problem solving. Having certain stuff memorised is actually massively more important than you are giving it credit for. I do mostly agree with the notion though.

That's true, but I don't think we do a good job of determining what kind of knowledge is important.

I have a professor who said "people should know who George Washington is". I disagree. Only a small handful of jobs have use for that knowledge, and the state funding to teach that is really just a bunch of waste. Most of what people do at work is learned at work or in free time. People say STEM is different, but I don't agree. I think STEM appears so complicated because people don't learn it on a need-to-know basis with application in mind

Make somebody an accounting apprentice and give them six months to learn what's necessary and they'll do it. But try to teach somebody how to be an accountant through school and it'll take a decade and they'll still find that most of what they learned wasn't specific enough to many accounting positions

[kingnat]

As an example of the above, I think grade school math tests should maybe place less and less emphasis on deriving perfectly-accurate-right-down-to-the-ones-digit when it comes to arithmetic, and place more and more emphasis on the ability to make quick and intuitive guesstimates. If you need the perfect answer upon which the water supply of the East Bay area will rely, then you best break out the calculator. If you're at a retail shop and trying to figure out in your head if you can afford a T-shirt once you account for the sale price and your coupon, then you just need a quick and reliable ballpark figure.

I think i may have posted this before long ago on some other thread, but whatever...

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathemati...uary-iap-2008/