How Good Software Makes Us Stupid 385
siliconbits writes "The BBC has an interesting article about how ever improving software damages our ability to think innovatively. 'Search engines' function of providing us with information almost instantly means people are losing their intellectual capacity to store information, Nicolas Carr said.' This sadly convinced some journos to come up with wildfire titles such as 'Google damages users' brains, author claims.'"
Hardly Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
"Never memorize what you can look up in books." - Albert Einstein
As quoted in "Recording the Experience" (10 June 2004) at The Library of Congress
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Informative)
Do you not mean "Meet your demise in a sea of flames"? Clearly, your claims of not suffering from a degraded lexical range are mere fabrications.
I prefer "Perish in a conflagration," myself...
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Informative)
>>>embiggen a cromulent vocabulary.
IIRC my college English professors taught the big words actually interfere with communication rather than enhance it. i.e. Follow the KISS principle. Anyway this article sounds stupid. As Einstein once commented, "What is the point of memorizing information when you can look it up in a book?" He thought it was more productive to focus on actual thinking rather than rote repetition.
Re:More like... (Score:3, Informative)
I can't speak for other supermarkets, but Tesco are sneaky about it. A lot of the time, two equivalent products sitting next to each other on a shelf will have the cost per weight/volume in different units - one might show cost per litre whereas the other shows cost per 100 ml.
It's not the world's most difficult task to convert (thank fuck for the EU-mandated metric system), but you do have to engage your brain in order to make a direct comparison.
Re:More like... (Score:3, Informative)
>>>heck of a lot of people with calculators in 1990 and even in the 80's
Earlier than that. Sears and other stores sold millions of calculators in the 70s. They used simple processors like Intel's 8008 or 4004 or Commodore's 6502, and lit-up with red glowing LEDs (great for night work). They needed a 9 volt battery to operate and died rather quickly, because the glowing LED drained power quickly. (Not like today where calcs run on watch batteries for years.)
Re:News To Me (Score:1, Informative)
Dude,
You aren't supposed to use "embiggen" and "cromulent" in the SAME DAMN POST.
You are suppose to just use "embiggen," thus giving someone else the opportunity to respond that your word is "perfectly cromulent."
People like you, who mess up the script, really ruin it for the rest of us.
You deuche.
Re:Not total bollocks (Score:3, Informative)
May I suggest that you RTFA? It was about the specific methods people use to find information, not the information itself, and even explicitly calls out Google as a culprit. That's the context in which I was responding, so stop being an asshole.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
You ought to learn a bit of the history of English. It would help you understand the examples you gave.
"cough" is spelled that way because when spelling was standardized, that was how it was pronounced. It has little to do with bad ideas about Greek. (try it - a fake german accent helps) Same with words like knight and through - yes, even the 'gh' was pronounced.
You can have standardized spelling - or you can have spelling that makes sense. Pronunciation changes, so take your pick.
Swam, swum, swimmed. How a language deals with tenses (past, present, future) can change over time. Adding 'ed' is the new way. The old way(s) were different. The more often a word is used, the more likely it is to retain it's old form. Most rare words have already changed to the new way. Some are in transition, spelled is the new way, and spelt the old way. Both are considered correct (for now). English_irregular_verbs [wikipedia.org]
T
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
You're just flat out wrong about double negatives. Double negatives in English did not negate each other until the 1700s when people like Samuel Johnson made that rule up out of thin fucking air.
Going back through Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Old English period repeated negatives are used as intensifiers. This 'double negatives cancel each other out like negative numbers being multiplied' is a fabrication of the 18th century. Chaucer wasn't breaking any rules with his multiple negations.
Moreover, there are a number of languages where multiple negations still function in the same way they did in Old, Middle, and Rennaisance English (including some dialects of Modern English).
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Informative)
Tell me and I will forget,
Show me and I will remember,
involve me and I will understand.
That said exercising your brain may be fun and give you that spandex in the morning feeling but push comes to shove a person is likely to die from cancer or alzheimer's so what's the point after all?
- Dan.