Does Google Actually Make Us Dumber? (buzzfeednews.com) 128
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.
Does Buzzfeed actually make us dumber? (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is yes.
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No. Buzzfeed is largely an entertainment website with occasional bursts of actual journalism such as the above article. Exposure to it doesn't make you dumber.
What makes you dumber is choosing to get all your information on a story from one source without ever fact checking anything to see if they're telling the truth. If you do that, it's your own damn fault when your 'knowledge' turns out to be a pile of BS.
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" some scientists told BuzzFeed News they do not agree with how the replications were done. Still..."
Real journalism doe not attempt to contradict experts and fear monger. Yes but...that's not journalism.
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Back in them olden days the average Joe didn't have access to multiple sources.
However what is affecting peoples ability to learn about what is going on, is the media's attempt to simplify the information too much. The headline seem to be the article now. Vs just a title to we know what we are going to read about.
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Dumber, or more dumb? Maybe there is a website I can check to be sure.
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Yers. Derfinitely. But I feedz empathy fer thum after readin ther fikshuns.
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Simply put, with computers we are more readily able to produce more effective simulations, think of them a continuous calculations, rather than one offs. The problem is they become impossible to replicate because we are achieving greater detail, so errors have crept in that have not been eliminated. With regards to psychology, we are still stuck who purely how you brought up and ignoring you cerebral genetics, how your brain actually genetically functions. There is a shift, for example, the difference betwe
Don't cut the headline to be clickbaity (Score:3)
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Misleading headline is misleading... I was really confused when I read the summary and it had nothing to do with the headline until you click through to the article. Editing fail there slashdot...
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Editing fail there slashdot...
Or a win, since it's a slashvertisement.
Does Google actually make us dumber? (Score:5, Funny)
I have no idea. Let me use Google to find the answer.
Re:Does Google actually make us dumber? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea. Let me use Google to find the answer.
Because of google we probably have fewer things memorized- but we are capable of doing so much more by googling an answer. Google enables our embetterment.
Re:Does Google actually make us dumber? (Score:5, Insightful)
“Never memorize something that you can look up.”
Albert Einstein
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Definitely. As a STEM educator, the one "weird trick" I see that students can use to drastically improve their performance is simply memorizing key definitions and formulas. Problem-solving involves lots of guessing and checking ("trial-and-error"). Having key ingredients of their guess committed to memory speeds up the guessing process, which means you can arrive at the correct answer more quickly.
Is rote memorization not the best way to learn a material? Sure, rote memorization isn't. But memorization of
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Definitely. As a STEM educator, the one "weird trick" I see that students can use to drastically improve their performance is simply memorizing key definitions and formulas. Problem-solving involves lots of guessing and checking ("trial-and-error"). Having key ingredients of their guess committed to memory speeds up the guessing process, which means you can arrive at the correct answer more quickly.
Back in school and university, I noticed I start to remember the values of key constants simply because I kept using them, even though they were always available in the exams. I think in /. we'd call this caching, and it's much better than simply memorizing things. Your memory/cache manager will remember things that come up often while you do the actual work, so you don't have to pre-select what's relevant. Of course, this also means you should keep your mind on the job.
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It's not "Never memorize anything, ever " you moran!
It's “Never memorize something that you can look up”.
Re:Does Google actually make us dumber? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you consider the possibility that the verb "memorizing" does not actually mean, "the act of having remembered something," but rather "the act of attempting to remember things?"
Also, you leave out consideration of the fact that the brain is a dishonest narrator about what you remember accurately! If you remember that a fact is indexed, and where it is indexed, and you value looking it up more than trying to go by memory, then you'll be more likely to just look up the number and have it right. But when you go by memory, you've got some avoidable errors.
So memory is good, memory is important, but that doesn't mean that the act of trying to memorize things is useful. And other intelligence studies have actually found that people with high general intelligence tend to forget details that they consider unimportant at a higher rate than the average dummy. Having a good memory is good, but having a good memory only of the most important bits is even better. Save some storage space for something else, remember where the index is stored, forget what is on what page, or what all 17th digit of pi is.
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I try to live by that phrase, but I keep forgetting it. I refuse to memorize it because I can always look it up in a book of quotations.
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"You made that up."
Socrates
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True. We have replaced the relatively worthless skill of memorizing facts and figures these days with the more advanced skill of searching and crafting searches to get what we want. This is in general an improvement - memorization is a basic skill, but being able to find information is a much more useful skill.
An example where we have grown dumber is the
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Eh, here, I think you are at fault. I always give them 34 cents before I hand them the b
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I have no idea. Let me use Google to find the answer.
Because of google we probably have fewer things memorized- but we are capable of doing so much more by googling an answer. Google enables our embetterment.
Knowledge is gained through experience and memory of same. If you do not fill your brain with useful information, but rely on Google, your catalog of knowledge is limited. The consequences are that your brain has few memories of past experiences in life. It is those experiences that help you make correct rapid decisions.
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Re:I don't know if the internet makes us dumber... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [caltech.edu] 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.
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Do scientists cheat? (Score:2, Troll)
A study in the 1980's suggested that 48% of them do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The two Federal scientists who collected the evidence and helped NOVA produce the video were reassigned to desk jobs in outer Mongolia.
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A study in the 1980's suggested that 48% of them do https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] The two Federal scientists who collected the evidence and helped NOVA produce the video were reassigned to desk jobs in outer Mongolia.
But ... I learned on Slashdot that scientists are all pure of heart, have no biases or agendas, are driven only by data, and never cheat!
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You underestimate just how tenacious human beings are. Civilization may collapse and billions may die due to global warming, overpopulation induced famines, someone releasing a genetically engineered disease or any of a thousand other apocalyptic scenarios, but there will still be small groups of humans here and there, running their own little post-apocalyptic subsistence farms.
We're the fucking cockroaches of the mammal kingdom.
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Does Slashdot actually make me dumber? (Score:2)
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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-le
Well said (Score:2)
I would add that since I moved to California I have become less and less literate. I know this to be true. Yet, most of the (Californian) people I know think I'm amazingly literate - that I speak and write well, and understand pretty much everything I hear or read correctly. What hurts the most is that the type of "high level" communication (written or oral) is about that that might be expected from the of a brain-addled 7th grader, not people with a post-graduate education.
Following up... (Score:3)
And look what happened in that wee rant... I'm doomed!
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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.
Wholeheartedly Disagree (Score:2)
"Failing to replicate isn't definitive proof that a finding is false, particularly in cases where other studies support the same general idea."
Failure to replicate using the exact experimental guidelines is fundamentally a mark of a failed experiment with bad results. The hamstering about other studies proving it without the exact same methodology is just feel good bullsh1t and is a pox on the scientific method.
This is why no one takes the social scientists seriously. It is doubly why we shouldn't waste gov
Re:Wholeheartedly Disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Why the hate? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The problem is that some fields are perhaps 95% BS (I'm looking at you psychology and economics) . Can we, as a society justify paying for 95% BS? Couldn't people just do these things in their spare time?
Let's start by doing some actual science and shit and prove with evidence the % of stuff in "social sciences" that are BS. You hand wave 95%, I ask you to prove it. Lead by example so that the number you suggest (and the suggestion thereof) is not BS itself.
Additionally, you need to provide an objective measure of what's good and what's BS in social sciences. One's opinions or beliefs on what is BS are inherently subjective, not the type of thing one should rely to dictate fiscal policy.
crisis of the application of science, not science (Score:2, Informative)
The crisis isn't really in research: it's neither surprising nor problematic tha
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The actual crisis is in the rush of modern society has to use scientific results as the basis of decision making.
I don't really see the problem with that. The thing is, you're presenting it as a bad option, but you're failing to account for the other option, which is making the decision on even less information. That's even worse.
Science is the best tool we have. Sometimes it's wrong, but it's more likely to be right than whatever other criteria you could use for making a decision.
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That's a false dichotomy. See, I'm not saying that individuals shouldn't use all available science to make their decisions, I'm saying that society shouldn't do so.
collateral irritation (Score:2)
is the problem the "science" or the peer review? (Score:3)
Is it possible that a lax review policy is also a contributor to the less than rigorous science they publish.
nothing more than an evolution (Score:3)
Is stupid making us google? (Score:2)
https://www.thenewatlantis.com... [thenewatlantis.com]
I'm getting old and can't remember shit (CRS) , I use a search service when I can't remember something, or am curious about something I don't know.
I don't use google search though...
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Pretty simple answer (Score:2)
Yes.
Next question?
Google search is getting dumber all the time... (Score:5, Funny)
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How is your Google-fu? (Score:3)
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
misleading information does not make us stupid (Score:3)
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.
What? (Score:2)
Maybe it's google's fault I'm too stupid to understand, but how does:
"There seems to be difficulty replicating the results in a number of psychological studies"
=
"Google makes us dumber"
?
Is the OP asserting that since it's easier to link to unproved sources, we're getting shitty information as true?
Because I'd see it another way: first, the journals mentioned like Nature aren't exactly shoddy - they're long term credentialed journals in the field. I'd argue that these studies would have been published pre-
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Maybe... I'm too stupid to understand
Me too. I always read that modern "science" was based on the methods of Natural Philosophers that were contemporaneous with Isaac Newton, and their system of publishing directly to each other through "open letters" published in the journals of the Philosphic Societies that they were members of and where membership granted them rights to be included in the publication. This had value because the regular publishers acted as gatekeepers, but couldn't ever be expected to understand new discoveries, or to place
This is actually good news! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Your points are generally true of science, not just psychology. Prestige publishing, short term grants, and review by insider committees cause many problems.
Science should have metrics such as number of papers published, impact factor of the journals you publish in, number of citations, and phds graduated. There's something missing in those metrics, though. None of them relate to anything outside of science. Applied fields such as psychology or (my field) physics should be able to show quantitatively how
Google Is as Google Does. (Score:2)
It is like a box of chocolates.
Well, if you have to ask that question... (Score:2)
Analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Google,does not make us dumber. (Score:3)
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.
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The proof is in the pudding. (Score:2)
It really is, you know.
Picture this, if you got an answer to everything you had on your mind, would you have anything on your mind at all?
One of the core essentials of development, and even human development (developing ourselves, bettering ourselves, expanding our horizon of knowledge), is being able to ask the right questions. The moment we stop looking for answers, we become complacent, lazy and non-seeking.
This is one of the things that I noticed already with Altavista, yes - pre google times, this is t
Both Yes and No - Depending on Definitions (Score:2)
Google allows someone to quickly find information related to their interest. If someone is interested in learning something generally productive, searches for that thing on Google, and absorbs that information, Google can be said to have aided in making that person more informed or "smarter". If Google also directs that person to areas where discourse on that topic are had and the user can then gain analytical insight, then Google has again aided in making that person "smarter".
But what if the subject is al
If the title is a question... (Score:2)
No, Google doesn't make us dumber (Score:2)
Google's success and dominance are merely proof that the majority of us are dumb. Google didn't make people dumb - they just took advantage of people's pre-existing dumbness.
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They used to know they were ignorant. Now they're all at the Dunning-Kruger peak.
The world is much smaller these days. Now everybody can visit Mt. Stupid whenever they want! You can even spend your whole life there. Utopia!?!
There is no question that people are more ignorant relative to their perception of their knowledge level. Nevertheless, they probably do have more knowledge now. But do they sense any danger in that??
civilization makes us dumber, civilization smarter (Score:3)
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.
Ask Betteridge (Score:2)
He said already No many years ago.
Let's see... (Score:1)
Does Google Actually Make Us Dumber? [lmgtfy.com]
Back to school (Score:1)
Keep coming back to the schools are making us dumber. Not teaching what they used to.
Google questions first _before_ you post! (Score:2)
Geeze, all these newbs on /. never even try to answer the question themselves. Honestly (shakes head )