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.'"
News To Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, and having a dictionary and thesaurus on my desk in easy reach is stopping me from learning new words.
Die in a fire.
Because we've never heard this one before... (Score:1, Insightful)
...Oh. Wait. Yes we have. Calculators. Google must have caused me to forget about that.
I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact with the ease of obtaining new information, the way its presented in bite-size paragraphs will make us actually more intelligent.
And with the way technology rapidly develops, you have to kind of think "What next?" and start imagining/thinking.
All the software developers I know always have google on to help them when they forget syntax or whatever - doesn't make them less intelligent - it just means that they're using their brain for more than just remembering things.
Cognition Understanding Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
The "intellectual capacity to store information" and the "ability to think innovatively" are controlled by two completely different cognitive mechanisms.
It's the only solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to manage the ever growing amounts of information in the world is to offload part of the processing to some kind of AI. Likely, this is the beginning of a long progression.
Is this bad and horrible or insanely great? (Pun intended.) Who knows? I suspect it is a logical progression of our evolution.
Not the conclusion I would make (Score:5, Insightful)
The article described a simple experiment where a puzzle needed to be solved using a computer program. One half of participants were given a 'good' program - it gave hints, was intuitive and generally helped the user to their goal.
The other half took on the same puzzle, but with software which offered little to make the task easier.
There is a research lab near me that does this sort of thing. I've talked with many people that walk out of this place. They are there for the small amounts of cash they receive in exchange for participating. If one of the computer programs made the puzzle easier, that allowed them to finish and collect their cash faster.
The motivation is not to complete the puzzle, the motivation is to collect the cash. To accurately compare the two methods, you will need to find a group of people who are interested in learning how to solve a difficult puzzle and divide them into the groups. Good luck finding such a group, however.
Plato said the SAME THING about books (Score:5, Insightful)
He noticed a depreciation in memory from writing things down...
It has hurt us SO much
Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the people who have to write the good software?
Look It Up (Score:5, Insightful)
"Search engines(TM) function of providing us with information almost instantly means people are losing their intellectual capacity to store information,
Oh, please. Before we had the internet, we had reference books.
The key to getting things done is not in memorizing sheaves of information but knowing how to look things up and synthesize.
More like... (Score:5, Insightful)
More like how having a spell-checker makes people never learn how to spell most words. And even with a spell-checker then you see them writing "should of" or using a wrong near-homophone (homophone, surprisingly enough, doesn't mean "sounds gay";) like "eat, drink and be marry" because if the spell-checker didn't put a wavy line under a word it must be the right one.
Or like already the use of calculator means a lot of people in the western world are effectively innumerate. They can't actually even tally up whether a 5 Euro bill is enough for two packs of X at 1.99 each and one of something else at 0.95. (And I'm only using Euro as an example because here the VAT is already _included_ in the price, you don't have to calculate how much the VAT would be on top of the price. So really, they just need to add.) Or they can't even notice that a special offer of a six-pack of something at only 5.95 Euro isn't actually an improvement over a price of 0.95 Euro per can otherwise, unless you told them to calculate and they pull out their calculator.
No, I'm serious. There actually are such special offers that sound like you could save a lot, but are actually more expensive per unit/gallon/inch/whatever. And they actually work. Because enough people can't do elementary arithmetic any more, or it ranks up there with anal rape for the kind of force or threat of harm you'd need to use to make them do arithmetic.
We had a good century or so of building up literacy and numeracy... and now it's sliding right back.
Stamford Bridge, please. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article starts off by talking about taxi drivers, which reminded me of this incident [bbc.co.uk].
This isn't just a software issue; it applies to any tool that has replaced a skill. You could say the same about matches replacing firelighting skills.
Humans evolve (Score:5, Insightful)
We will never be "the same" as we were yesterday. Our great-grandparents probably didn't go to school. Our grandparents probably did but left as early as they could. Our parents almost certainly attended school and got some qualifications. We are required by law to attend school and almost certain will leave with a raft of skills - not a SINGLE one of which will be Latin.
My great-grandparents probably did not have electricity, or bulbs, so they could not study at night without breathing in carcinogens from a fire hazard. My grandparents were evacuated from their education into villages and towns to avoid undirected "batch-dropped" bombs. My parents never saw a computer until they already had children.
Humans do not stay the same. The skills my parents need are different to the ones I need and always will be. I *do not* need to memorise lots of phone numbers because I have multiple SIM cards and online backups that do that for me. I don't even KNOW most of the numbers I dial regularly. My grandparents probably had a 4-digit phone number when they first used one, and barely knew anyone they could phone. My great-grandparents did not have biros to write with, and I don't write with one now (I can't remember the last time I had to write anything down, except on computer!).
Stop complaining about "drastic changes" that the human body or mind has to undergo. It's ALWAYS in flux, my daughter will not learn the same language that I've spent my life learning. If we're talking critical changes, then things like planetary legacies, etc. are infinitely more important than "our children may use a calculator instead of their fingers" or any of the things mentioned in this article.
Humans are a flexible, adaptable, learning machine. That's what makes us so fantastically successful (relatively speaking to other mammals our size). Our brains will automatically adapt to what they need to learn to support modern life. In this case, probably long-term memory will eventually make way for improvisational and logistical skills. That's not a BAD thing.
More like laziness (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't store information before (Score:4, Insightful)
So this has improved my relative intelligence.
I had chemo (and had issues before).
The logic circuits still work but I only remember pointers to information. So search engines let me turn that pointer into the full fact on demand.
Re:Hardly Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to cache important stuff otherwise I/O will cripple your cpu...
Abstractions anyone? (Score:1, Insightful)
The author obviously couldn't be bothered to look up the word "abstraction". You know, that concept that constitutes one of the foundations of what we call progress.
Sort of (Score:5, Insightful)
Sort of. You do however need basically to know what to look for. Einstein would know what book to pull out to get any bit of physics he didn't remember offhand, and had enough knowledge to know if some reasoning you throw at him is valid or you're pulling his leg. (Well, ok, maybe not about Quantum Mechanics, or not at first;))
Joe Sixpack googling for something will land a few million hits, the first couple of pages will be mostly completely unrelated stuff and/or woowoo from some snake oil vendors. And he just never learned the things that would help him distinguish which is which. Having google and no knowledge of his own won't make him Einstein, sorry.
E.g., try googling for, well, just about anything quantum, and see how many bullshit quantum-chi-crystal pendants you find, "ZOMG, uncertainty means we create the universe when we look at it" apologetics for magical thinking, keyword/link spam sites, etc, you find.
On a good day, you might get the Wikipedia link at the top, because, well, google at some point went "fuck it" trying to sort what is relevant and just artificially upranked Wikipedia. Which half the time still need some filtering abilities of your own, because it'll be a page full of [citation needed] and "original research" signs that still won't help _you_ much decide if you should trust it or not or where to go for more authoritative stuff, often enough will directly contradict other Wikipedia pages it links to, etc. And occasionally will contain such vandalisms as that Iron is mined from monkeys, that the bridges in Ancient Rome were made in Japan, or that didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes. (I swear to the FSM, all three are actual things I've learned on Wikipedia.) Without any knowledge of your own, how would you know whether to trust that or not?
And that's actually on a good day. On a bad day you won't even have that Wikipedia link.
Counter Point (Score:5, Insightful)
Google being quick at finding information does not make us know less. People know as much as they want to put the effort into knowing. Google can help them find more to know.
Well, I doesn't really say that at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't read anything that said we were losing our capacity to think innovatively. In fact, the article makes a point of the showing what might be considered the opposite - that the brain patterns demonstrated when Googling and surfing the internet were associated with making sharp decisions. What the author of the study articulated was a theory that this was in conflict with concentrated calm retention of knowledge like reading a book or memorizing a million and one routes through London.
What the article didn't expand on was why this might be very bad. Unless you think that someone is going to take away your GPS or the Internet then it doesn't matter any more than inventing the written word put story-telling as a means of retaining history out of business was a bad thing. Surely that train of thought would rely on the notion that something very very bad was going to happen to the world and at that point I fear that the skills you would need were lost generations ago by the vast majority of people. Surely the author is not suggesting that the fact that the vast majority have almost certainly lost or at least have diminished the patterns of thinking that supported primal hunter-gather life was necessarily a bad thing for our evolution?
Well that would be until Skynet takes control, anyway.
Re:Hardly Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
I have had two types of exams at a uni. Some where Exams where you had to bring everything in your head and some where exams where you could bring a whole ref library with you (some where even carried out in a library).
The latter were 10 times more difficult than the former because the prof could actually give you a problem that forces you to think and use what you have learned instead of checking if you have managed to memorise the material.
Software may be making us less patient. I would definitely disagree about the idea that it is making us more stupid.
Re:Cognition Understanding Fail (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but both require training. If all you did was trying to memorize trivia, you wouldn't be that good at reasoning. If you google everything, then you won't be that good at memorizing things. The essential skill you're looking for is critical thinking, but critical thinking requires you both to actually know enough to reason from and the ability to reason.
If you ask me what the cause of WWII is, I'm not going to pull it out of some logical nowhere. I have to pull it a lot of facts about WWI, the great depression, political ideas of the time, the threat of communism and so on. The more facts I have, the more likely I have some relevant facts to use as basis. Of course you can say you can google it, but you can only google facts that you know are missing. If you don't even know the relevance, you lose them.
And on that topic, there's also a lot of useful metaknowledge that goes between pure facts and pure logic, like organizational theory, group theory, motivational theory, psychology, game theory and so on. People who know it will understand the actors, those that don't know it also won't understand why people do what they do. And you rarely manaqe to google your way into a decent understanding of it, it's more long term lerning for those able to memorize.
Re:News To Me (Score:5, Insightful)
First, I'll point out a recent Slashdot discussion [slashdot.org] on the topic, about a disagreement between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker about just how much the Internet is really "changing" our brains. Suffice it to say there is still plenty of disagreement among experts in the field.
What I think is missing from Carr's anecdotes and study results is a meaningful measure of intelligence with respect to "what matters". Of course, "what matters" is inherently a loaded concept, where everyone will have a different opinion. But the problem is that Carr is making sweeping statements about intelligence in general, based on studies of sub-components of intelligence. I'm sure having access to a very effective search engine makes us "dumber" at the "find useful data in a mass of disorganized crap" problem. But most likely this liberates our minds to focus on (and get better at) higher-level problems, like critically thinking about ideas, or solving real-world dilemmas (the research was, after all, just a means to an end). So was the overall intelligence of the person going up or down when they focused less on being good researcher and more on being good thinker/solvers?
The point is that every piece of technology will make us bad at the task that the technology replaces. But that's as it should be. The whole point is to liberate us from tedious or menial tasks, so that we can concentrate our intellect on those tasks that are hard (currently impossible) to automate. In principle this means that we are spending more and more time thinking about these truly challenging problems (and, thus, getting better at those kinds of "difficult thinking")... at the expense of getting worse at silly tasks that a computer can solve.
And, as you point out, this is a trend that has been going on since humankind first saw fit to build tools. From language, to books, to calculators, to computers, to the Internet... we have automated and externalized a whole bunch of tasks. And yet society keeps getting along, becoming more sophisticated and advanced with every passing generation. I think we're doing just fine.
Re:News To Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Books, slide rules, harpsichords (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like books destroyed our ability to memorize, slide rules destroyed our ability to calculate, and that newfangled mechanical music technology--what are is it called? yeah, harpsichords--destroyed our ability to sing.
3rd half of our brain (Score:4, Insightful)
What would make us stupid is not to take advantage of available resources. And having more resources open doors, not close them. Same could be said about electronic calculators, is not about doing the math, but what you do with the results. You can always do the math by hand or memorize something, but you are not forced because what matters is what you do with that.
But yes, somehow Internet makes us stupid, but not in the "why remember what is online?" way. Is a meme machine, worse than old radio, worse than tv. Viral is the new culture. No thinking needed, just behave like, do like, or just like, whatever you already saw on internet. Is a good thing for marketing campaings, you just put something that seem cool enough and people buy it, no critical thinking involved, just accept what the mass/social media orders, That is the real danger of internet, not the "external storage" part.
Re:News To Me (Score:4, Insightful)
The ability to *use* knowldege has nothing to do with knowing it. Critical thinking and sleuthing is far more important than knowing A goes into B.I have personally met individuals that *knew* their material and refused to accept the possibility that it had changed. In the Technology sector, this is fatal, as things often change very rapidly, in the course of weeks or months rather than years.
Finding information in a book is one thing, today, some information is far too dynamic to be of use by the time it reaches print.
- Dan.
I am all for stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
If this is being stupid, then I want more.
You see, I am human being, with limited cognitive capacities, limited free time, limited resources.
Not having to deal with such "important" things as remembering phone numbers or massive amounts of data allows me to direct my time and memory for other things.
Ah, and I can leverage my freed time and freed cognitive abilities with the search powers of google to discover even more. I've now searched and read philosophers and historians. Something a few years ago this would have been less simple: more costly to get the info and less time to do such thing. This by the way, encouraged me to by their books.
Yes, I do not know the year that Nietzsche or Wagner were born, but I do have an idea that they were contemporary to each other. Guess what: having been exposed to their ideas and their music is much more important than knowing the details of their birth dates. Which by the way were [goes way and googles for 20 secs] 1844 and 1813.
I've gained a lot with my new found stupidity. And lost very little in return.
I may have lost the details, but I have more time and resources that allow me to see far away. And the details are really here, at my fingertips.
Re:News To Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent point made about memorization not being the goal, yet you still managed to say that it is.
sounds to me like he said memorization is not the goal, but it helps you reach your goal
Re:Cognition Understanding Fail (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the important factor to consider here is the difference between having a handle on a subject and being able to reliably quote specific information about that subject. To continue your use of WWII origins as a metaphor: there is a broad difference between having a handle on the broad ideas that depression, a poorly structured peace agreement from the last war, and populism drove the Nazi rise to power through a series of rallies, events, and demonstrations; and being able to reliably quote the date of the Reichstag Fire (February 27, 1933) or the Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938). Both of which I just Googled.
The fact is that we have limited amounts of storage in our heads and we usually try to fill it with broad pictures of information and events, relying on references for specifics. That (in my opinion) is where Google, Wikipedia, and other (more specific) Internet resources come in.
I think Google has made me smarter. (Score:2, Insightful)
I am old enough to remember the tabloid headlines that predicted pocket calculators would make us all dumb because no one would know how to do long division by hand any more. Well here we are forty years later and sure enough most people can't do long division by hand but it doesn't matter because they have access to a tool that do enormously complicated calculations in the blink of an eye.
I think that all tools, whether they are pocket calculators or internet search tools make us smarter by greatly expanding the things we can do. Google has become an extension of my brain and today thanks to the miracle of mobile internet I am almost never without instant access to an enormous library of information. Because Google remembers everything I don't have to. That doesn't make me dumber that makes me smarter because I can still find the answers whenever they are needed and I can use my brain cells for genuinely new ideas.
Re:Not total bollocks (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'm suffering more from overload than anything (Score:3, Insightful)
Too much choice? Man, you must really get confused at WalMart. Hell, when I was a kid we had three TV stations (in black and white), and that was all. Yet I still would like even more choices than the smorgasbord we have today.
Latency (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the point of memorizing information when you can look it up in a book?
Q) What's the point of having 1st, 2nd and 3rd level caches, and DRAM when you can swap to and from a 1TB disk?
A) Latency.
That said, there is no point memorizing/caching useless information, or information which is not involved in much synthesis or processing, or information for tasks which tolerate high latencies.
So memorization is still useful and will always be useful. Of course if they ever start making better neural interfaces, we can artificially enhance our memories with fairly low latencies.
Basically you could associate brain patterns/sequences (thought-macros) with objects and tasks. So just thinking of someone (followed by a "start command sequence", "quick-recall-end"[1]) would get your e-brain to recall whatever it has on that someone (which you saved by associating the objects - videos, pics, text, structured data, with the thought pattern you get when you think of that person).
Of course, in a DRM infested world there would likely be many artificial limits and parasitic costs associated with such devices. These would be the cost of copyright laws. Humans would be more crippled than they would be otherwise.
Then the title would be "how bad laws make us stupid" ;).
[1] The "quick-recall-end" thought macro saves you time - you don't have to think of the "end command sequence" thought pattern (which would be required for more complicated/intensive stuff).
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Insightful)
IIRC my college English professors taught the big words actually interfere with communication rather than enhance it.
That is often true. Longer words can be interesting, if they allow subtle distinctions in meaning, or practically useful, if they allow precisely defined terminology to replace vague descriptions. On the other hand, writing "he answered affirmatively" instead of "he said yes" doesn't really help anyone, and all that business-speak "utilise" instead of "use" nonsense needs to die.
Re:More like... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don' t know, sounds pretty gay to me. :)
I think you're exaggerating the effect of technology on math and basic literacy. The calculator is only useful if you understand what addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are to begin with, and how to apply them to your problem. If you just punch in a random sequence of numbers and operator keys on a calculator, it'll do exactly what you asked it to do, and calculate something - whether or not that tells you whether or not you can buy the 3 items in question for 5 Euro is completely dependent on the operator knowing what the appropriate operation is, and using it.
If you handed most people with an elementary school education a pencil & paper, and said, "Go ahead and figure this out without a calculator," they probably could, but it might take them longer to figure it than you. You have to know what addition is, and how it works, to do it on paper or on a calculator - the calculator doesn't replace that knowledge, and won't tell you that division or multiplication is more appropriate when dividing a check and determining a tip.
Even with interminable vocabulary & spelling exercise, people will spell things wrong. If a piece of software makes their spelling even a bit better, great. Think of how bad it would be to read their writing without a spell checker.
There's a reason we use bulldozers & back-hoes to dig trenches and excavate foundation holes, instead of shovels: they're more efficient. Sure you can still do it with a shovel, but there's rarely a need to.
Gettings Things Done is for idiots, then? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a huge fan of Getting Things Done [davidco.com], and it's directly responsible for a lot of positive changes in my life. One of the core tenets of "GTD" is to habitually, obsessively enter the things you need to remember into a "trusted system" where you can find them again easily. Whether that's a notebook or index cards or a Franklin planner or an iPod (my pick), the important part is that you can trust it to store the things that are important to you.
By some definition, my iPod and its planning software (yay Omnifocus!) has made me dumber. I know longer remember most of the stuff that I need to accomplish. Instead, I check it often to find stuff that I could be working on. I don't have to recall the three unrelated things I need to pick up next time I'm at the local home store; I consult my iPod and check them off as I put them in my cart. Neither do I make an effort to remember that my daughters' piano lessons are at a certain time - my calendar is much better at remembering that stuff. I forget all the things I need to talk to my boss about, but I can pull up that list in about 5 seconds.
The enormous payoff is that instead of spending my mental energy on trying to remember a thousand little things that would be crying for my attention, I can dedicate myself to the one task I'm specifically working on at the moment. I have a lot more free time now and I'm much better at juggling all my responsibilities. If I'm stupid for relying on something other than my mind to track all those things, then so be it. I can live with that.
Re:More like... (Score:2, Insightful)
What is making people IGNORANT is bad education systems, bad teachers, unmotivated students and uninvolved parents. Same as at any other time in history. (Note, nothing can make the stupid smart. Stupid is incurable). Computers and other tools have nothing to do with it.
However we all know that the introduction of the plough made farmers lazy and good for nothing! Right?
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Insightful)
Synthesis is the goal, memorization helps you reach it. And, it should be said, some things are more important to memorize than others.
For example, it's important and useful to memorize the logic behind certain algorithms or certain concepts that are used in computer science because, if you have those fundamentals memorized, you'll be able to combine the basic concepts into more complex structures and create new and novel things. Not having the basics memorized will prevent you from doing any higher level thinking because you won't have the tools necessary to get there.
What isn't important or particularly useful to memorize is the detail of a particular implementation of that concept (e.g. making a dialog box pop up) - you can just look up how to do that, and not having it instantly available will not stop you from engaging in higher level thinking about a problem, it will just make your particular implementation take more time.
Tangentially, I think continuing to exercise your memory (even for trivia) is a GOOD thing because it sure doesn't hurt to be able to keep lots of stuff available for quick access and it keeps your brain in shape. 10 years ago I was able to remember arbitrary strings that were 30-50 characters in length pretty easily because I was in the habit of needing to do so from time to time; 5 years ago I realized I could barely remember a 10 digit phone number without struggling, and even worse, I was having a hard time remembering people's names, what we'd talked about just the day prior, etc. - and I realized that I'd been using speed dial and relying on my contact list, as well as just offloading the kind of trivia I'd normally try to memorize in detail to the web in the form of search engines. This scared the hell out of me, so I began dialing numbers manually, remembering people's email addresses rather than just typing their name, and so on. I'm now back to being able to remember much longer strings (though closer to 30 characters than 50 now, alas) and generally am having a much easier time remembering *important* things like details of conversations I had with people.
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not the first time technology has been_blamed/at_fault for reducing human intellect. When written languages were first invented it was said that having things written down would reduce the ability of humans to remember things. Why? Because before that all information was memorized and transmitted to others orally, now there was a crutch to lean on.
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Insightful)
The point being is that if you understand you also remember. Without the memory your involvement and understanding is useless because all of that will be lost to you.