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.'"
Journes, like, e.g., /. ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Quote: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" ( http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/09/1332252 [slashdot.org] )
In a way, this also gives a hint on how to explain the Dupe-Phenomenon.
CC.
hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure if TFA is accurate or not, but I do know that my research skills have vastly improved since the Internet became a daily part of my life (I'm 26). This isn't just because there is more information available...I mean I am able to sift through the crap and find what I'm looking for much quicker than I used to.
That's worth something...right?
Re:Hardly Stupid (Score:1, Interesting)
It is biology's moral imperative to minimize ATP consumption.
This man is arguing that we go against the instructions in our DNA.
So who is actually wrong? The entire universe's ability to grow life or this one brain with a big mouth?
I'm suffering more from overload than anything (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More like... (Score:4, Interesting)
What would you have whined about had you lived two centuries ago before English had standardized spelling? Or had you lived in China two thousand years ago, would you wail of the abacus making people unable to cipher?
Re:I disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes and no.
Google is great but just too easy to abuse.
Google Montauk Project and you find all sorts of interesting stuff that has every possibility of making you stupid.
If not you at least some people
The problem with search engines is that they are full of unverified data and a large number of people have never been taught the skills that are needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Many generations have been taught that if it is in a book then it is true and to them the internet seems like one very large book.
Very few of us seem to know how fact check. What is worse is we also have a group that believes that if a doctor, scientist, or goverment lab says one thing and a guy on a TV talk show says something else to trust the guy on the TV or Blog!
And do not get me started on the Bozo that once told me that I was a "happy villager" because I believed that if aliens didn't want us to know they where flying around they would be smart enough to turn their lights off.
Re:Cognition Understanding Fail (Score:2, Interesting)
The "intellectual capacity to store information" and the "ability to think innovatively" are controlled by two completely different cognitive mechanisms.
I agree. But doesn't one feed into the other?
All of the great scientists and inventors I have read about would study a subject as well as related things for long periods of time. Their minds would stew that information and then make the connections for that "A HA!" moment - usually when they're doing something completely unrelated; like sleeping in Linus Pauling's case. If their brains didn't have that information stored, it wouldn't have been able to make those connections.
Re:More like... (Score:4, Interesting)
As for effect calculators/computers are having on numeracy, I think you must have a very short memory
My $0.02 (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, in addition to thinking random thoughts (which the mind/brain tends to do), I can read up and learn about on these subjects which earlier used to be just thoughts, and in that sense it makes me more learned.
What this encourages though, is a more unsteady thought pattern, with related and seemingly 'random' web searches about this thought stream.
I'm considering taking up meditation to encourage a 'calmer' mind that doesn't jump around as much between thoughts.
Dupe... from oral to written conversion (Score:1, Interesting)
Wasn't this also a concern when written word was developed? That people would be dumber because they did not have to remember the stories passed down over the generations?
Not total bollocks (Score:4, Interesting)
The sad fact is that making something convenient *does* impact people's ability to use less convenient methods. That can be a problem when the less convenient method is unavailable, or has other benefits. With respect to the first point, there's a lot of information that hasn't made its way into Google yet - e.g. legal case histories, medical records, lots of historical archive material. Some of that information is subject to privacy concerns and should *never* be on Google or Wikipedia. If you want to use those sources effectively, you have to develop skills like using the local classification system (e.g. Dewey/LoC or domain-specific) and indexing methods, skimming pages quickly to sort out the wheat from the chaff, etc. You get better by doing, and if what you've been doing is honing your Google skills instead then you simply will be less productive in these other environments than someone who is used to them. S2BU if that turns out to be part of your job, and you might be surprised how often it is.
With respect to the second point, I'll give another example. One of my work-study jobs in college was to develop a bibliography on African education. One of the critical skills in that job was to read the bibliography in one book to find other titles and authors, but that's more to the previous point. The other thing that really helped was to go to the shelves to find one book I knew about, and then *look around* to find others that might be of interest. Try that on Google. The kind of search they offer is too focused, or perhaps not focused properly, to allow that kind of browsing. I get the same experience every time I use an old-fashioned paper encyclopedia; I find all sorts of other information "along the way" that's utterly useless in my current search but more often than not comes in handy - even if it's only as a conversational gambit - some other time. Those are secondary benefits that I don't get by using the major online sources, though I get some by wandering through low-profile blogs and other sites. To the extent that some people never stray more than a link or two away from Google (or Slashdot), that's a loss and it's sad.
The web can broaden our horizons (TBL's initial vision) or narrow them. Sadly, the current directions we're taking tend more toward the latter.
Re:More like laziness (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been working around this business for most of my adult life, going from phone jockey to the guy who wrote the manuals to the IT dept. To be brutally honest, a lot (though certainly not all) of that has less to do with people getting lazy about their job and more about employers dumbing down training and automating so much of the troubleshooting process so they can hire any idiot off the street. Soon you have a floor full of idiots and management can't be happier. Pay rates drop, distension disappears because you have made the use of critical thinking skills a punishable offense and the higher levels egos get rubbed because they are now the smartest minds in the building.
Finally quality drops and the training dept begins to yet again lower standards. Wash, rinse and repeat. In the end you have a room full of shivering, gibbering, shit producing bio-IVRs who are too afraid that they will get canned for saying anything other than the text they see on the screen.
Old, discredited argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Variations of this argument date back at least 25 years, when it was it was seriously proposed that the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) interface being popularized by the Macintosh would mentally cripple us, and that we should all stick with command-line interfaces. No, seriously. I strongly suspect a similar argument was made when the automatic transmission was introduced in cars, or the Dewey Decimal system and card catalogs into libraries. ("You should just read all the books and know what's where!")
It was bollocks then, and it's bollocks now. These are enabling technologies -- people get more done. I have 3000 books in 17 bookshelves (the vast majority non-fiction) and have new books from Amazon arrive almost weekly; I read heavily, but I also use Google and other on-line tools heavily. ..bruce..
You don't need innovation in the USA (Score:4, Interesting)
you only need to follow a few simple rules to increase your profit and maintain market share:
- embrace extend and re-market, or extinguish
- patent the crap out of everything; sue for infringement
- sue competition to bankrupt them
- lock-in with EULA, lock-down with DMCA
- implement proprietary systems for everything; interoperability to be limited or broken
- collect demographic info for targeted marketing or sales
Half of everyone... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Interesting)
big words actually interfere with communication rather than enhance it
It's all about the audience - don't use "acetylsalicylic acid" or "non-steroidal anti-inflamatories" when "aspirin" or "pain-killer" will do. On the other hand, if the situation calls for it, the extra specificity and precision is critical. English has very few exact synonyms - we have the extra words because they add meaning. It's the reason Simon and Garfunkel can talk of "people talking without speaking" and "people hearing without listening", and just be contradicting themselves.
Re:Hardly Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry for the long answer to a fairly obvious statement, but it's written, and it's going out:
True, but to me there is a difference between memorizing (learning verbatim/rote) and just remembering something useful. I haven't memorized the size of the known universe, I just remember it. I didn't memorize the size of bears, I just remember it - and when I go to use something I haven't recalled in a while I may notice that it is a little foggy. I can place bounds on the values and possibly remember specific values after dredging it from the depths of memory, but I can definitely recognize the need for a refresh.
Anyway, the more you have to look something up, the better you will remember it. If it's something that you need to use frequently, your recollection of it it will become more and more solid with every lookup - though if it is complex enough, you will likely notice that it is hard to remember, and keep the reference extremely handy.
Re:More like... (Score:1, Interesting)
I actually used to edit for the school newspaper and we had a prolific columnist who was dyslexic. His articles ended up looking a lot like your post because he'd just hit yes for everything. We eventually told him to just give it to us as-is, and we'd fix it because he was almost-phonetically sane when writing, it's just that the spell checker couldn't even guess at the word he meant. Had to use a human "sounds like" test to spell check it before we put it to print.
- Pitabred
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Interesting)
For one of my courses back in the day, we were forbidden from using words larger than 2 syllables for a paper. The topics were picked at random - I wound up having to explain the discovery of electromagnetism, which was especially challenging because I couldn't actually say the name of what I was talking about!*
Aside from driving us insane, the goal was to give us an understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the written word and to become extremely thoughtful so that we would write with precision.
* "Waves that flow through space and cause many kinds of effects, where those effects often are the reverse of each other or could be made into each other" was what I came up with. The whole paper read as if I were talking to primitive screwheads about my boomstick.
Re:News To Me (Score:3, Interesting)
The ability to *use* knowldege[sic] has nothing to do with knowing it.
? ?
Only if by " *use* " you mean blindly applying canned "solutions" built by others.
However, that is not the type of use of knowledge that the GP was discussing.
Not at all. That, in my mind, is just another form of a 'ritual activity'. ( rote memorization or rote application, etc ) It's when you truly know how to think, to identify the real problem at hand ( not always apparent ) and plan an appropriate long and short term solution to the problem. You can search for operational characteristics of various technologies, consult with those that know it like the back of their hand then put the bid out for the path you have chosen.
In this scenario being "on the ground" and "knowing the technology" Will place you in the wrong pay bracket. It may seem sad to be paid more for knowing less, But you're really being paid more to think well, because that's a much rarer skill.
Now this is only one example, as search engines have many more facets to their paradigm. I for one, don't want to memorize phone books to find a realtor, or memorize every publication that critiques cuisine to find a good restaurant.
Also, Almost everyone confuses knowledge with intelligence. They are two distinct entities. Knowledge will amplify intelligence, but you don't need to know every thing in order to be highly effectual. Perhaps a degradation, if it's real, is just another example of evolution?
- Dan.