[HN Gopher] People mistake the internet's knowledge for their own
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People mistake the internet's knowledge for their own
Author : nabla9
Score : 195 points
Date : 2021-11-22 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
| bitwize wrote:
| "Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! _Estas usando
| este software de traduccion in forma incorrecta. Por favor,
| consultar el manual._ I... don 't even know what I just said, but
| I can find out!" --Wheatley, _Portal 2_
| lordnacho wrote:
| As a coder I don't think I can do anything without the internet.
| Even if one specific site (maybe there are two actually, SO and
| GH) were down, it would wreck my day and many of yours.
|
| My style of coding is very intimately connected to having access
| to online resources. I regularly search for things like how to
| concatenate strings or the syntax of a for loop in some language.
| I also use the internet for higher level things like how memory
| management works on some system, or how something like an ECS
| architecture works. I also spend a lot of time looking for the
| right components to put into my own systems, so if GitHub were
| down it would bother me.
|
| Basically I'd be useless without the internet. The coding tools
| themselves, all the examples of how to use them, and all the
| actual knowledge about how everything works is on there.
|
| Perhaps the only thing that's actually my own input is the
| judgement about what things are important, which sources are
| reliable, and which people are authorities.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The best thing about the world now is that I can develop
| software for purposes I know nothing about using tools I know
| nothing about.
| tpoacher wrote:
| This is partly not your fault, however; the manner in which
| documentation is provided (or not provided, to be exact) is
| also complicit.
|
| E.g., there are languages where the offline manual covers 99%
| of all your needs. I include bash and c, octave, matlab in this
| category.
|
| Then there's languages that feel the offline docs are best left
| ad an afterthought, and focus most of their effort either
| towards funky online documentation websites, or effectively
| relegate it all to stackoverflow.
| jolmg wrote:
| > Basically I'd be useless without the internet. The coding
| tools themselves, all the examples of how to use them, and all
| the actual knowledge about how everything works is on there.
|
| I know it's sometimes easier to google particular questions and
| that some projects lack documentation, but many if not most
| programming tools include very good documentation in the same
| package. And many include their source too.
|
| I think saying you'd be useless for lacking online access to
| that knowledge is an exaggeration.
|
| Not being able to pull new dependencies is more problematic, in
| my opinion.
| air7 wrote:
| Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1168/
| planck01 wrote:
| That also holds for me, which I suppose makes me a slow coder.
| I imagine that coders like Thorvalds or Carmack don't have
| these issues and that's why they are fast. In my head its like
| typing. I 'type' with 2 fingers and always looking. They 'type'
| with 10 fingers and blind.
| tomrod wrote:
| I think most of us operate these days like this. This allows
| for consistent breadth. While you may have deep expertise in a
| specific language, coding paradigm, or other technical area,
| the shared resources of the Internet allow you to operate more
| efficiently and broadly. Your "depth" in this breadth space is
| by having an efficient operating model that weeds out spam, bad
| input, and similar gaps when the "broad" knowledge base is
| incorrect.
|
| I believe this is the real reason spam-answer/grifting sites
| are so bad. They pollute this shared commons of freely
| available information. From a policy recommendation I certainly
| hope these free resources are kept in place, timely, and free
| from spam/SEO farming.
| ghaff wrote:
| Pre-web, you basically had a lot of reference books, used
| external libraries very judiciously (and there were relatively
| few of them anyway), and generally kept software stacks pretty
| simple. And, yes, probably took a lot more time.
|
| More generally speaking, most people today would be incredibly
| frustrated getting information about anything generally if they
| were plopped down 30 years ago. When I was a product manager
| back then, we paid consulting companies large sums of money to
| get the most basic competitive information faxed to us because
| you couldn't just look it up.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| There was also the glory of the MSDN library cds. Those were
| a marvelous invention.
| kaetemi wrote:
| I learned C# 2.0, when the offline MSDN was still a thing.
| That language environment I can still work in with ease,
| from memory, without consulting online resources. Good
| offline documentation (and good library design) works
| wonders.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of the programming I did was pre-Windows. But, yes,
| MSDN was a pretty remarkable developer resource at a time
| when developer resources were pretty fragmented/hit and
| miss.
| rfrey wrote:
| Oh, man. The feeling of those 6 binders arriving at the
| office with this year's edition.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > And, yes, probably took a lot more time.
|
| But it was less stressful, because you didn't have daily
| standups and biweekly sprints.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| >Pre-web, you basically had a lot of reference books, used
| external libraries very judiciously (and there were
| relatively few of them anyway), and generally kept software
| stacks pretty simple. And, yes, probably took a lot more
| time.
|
| As a new developer, this is what I am doing and focusing at.
| Not be reliant on the internet and it works. Because I have
| several books and for example I can read Mozilla MDN offline.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > ... and for example I can read Mozilla MDN offline.
|
| Mozilla MDN is pretty much the last thing I'd prioritize
| for offline reading, since it's relevance is tightly
| coupled to the availability of the network.
|
| I might prioritize offline resources for Raspberry Pi and
| other computing platforms, that make more sense without the
| Internet.
|
| But above that, maybe a few books about growing food in
| one's own garden. :-)
| Graffur wrote:
| So what's the difference between looking it up in place A
| (books, offline MDN) or place b (stackoverflow, blogs,
| online MDN)?
| exdsq wrote:
| I think it'll build better debugging skills by the time
| you're more senior and/or working on more novel problems
| that might not be on SO yet.
| lordnacho wrote:
| What did you when you got stuck on some small thing that
| wasn't obvious from the docs? Say some interaction between
| two concepts?
|
| Nowadays I've always discovered that I'm not the first person
| to ask.
| IncRnd wrote:
| You thought it through, investigated the issue, came to a
| conclusion, created a hypothesis, and tested a solution.
| Now, the cycle seems to be read a problem ticket, see what
| other people have done, copy code, close ticket.
| vizzier wrote:
| I can't help but feel that this type of workflow just
| took a huge step forward in https://copilot.github.com/
| too. A solid recognition that thats how most people code
| distilled into a product that automates that lookup by
| cross referencing information on the worlds largest code
| platform.
| cj wrote:
| A step forward, but also potentially a step backwards
| compared to the "harder" workflow (the one without all
| answers on stack overflow).
|
| Just a small example, I imagine there are a lot of JS
| developers who know that they need to create a new
| function using "=>" or ".bind(this)" if they need access
| to "this" within the function... and if they don't,
| things break, without really knowing why (even though
| they know the solution).
|
| TLDR: the best developers I've worked with go beyond
| "knowing the solution" to "knowing why the solution is
| the solution". Understanding "why" something is the way
| it is becomes difficult when something like Copilot
| autocompletes the correct answer.
| rkhassen9 wrote:
| And tbh, you beat your head against the wall until you
| managed to find the solution...somehow.
| ghaff wrote:
| And sometimes just find some other way to accomplish what
| you needed done.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| When phones still had IR blasters, I got stuck for 3 weeks
| straight on a IR library that needed to imitate the
| sequences coming from a TV remote. Code was "done" in 2
| days, the rest was spent in front of a TV to have my
| sequences get recognized.
|
| Literally went to the library to read books on IR and make
| sure I understood what the doc was saying. Asked around to
| find people who worked on these kind of sequencing. Went to
| a small repair shop and bribed the tech to give me hints on
| how remotes work.
|
| It was fun in retrospect, maddening and incredibly taxing
| at the time.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Now you import isEven(), burnout because of all those crappy
| third parties and look for a job in go. And in 10 years when
| it will have overinflated like java and become a piece of
| garbage you'll rinse and repeat.
| benlivengood wrote:
| In the 'old days' there would be a shelf of programming books
| nearby and man pages on useful operating systems. It was
| slower, but fairly similar in principle.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| i wish there were a good way to interview candidates that
| reflects this as being the way to being a high performer
| nneonneo wrote:
| Hah, I've answered enough questions on SO that every once in a
| while I end up having to consult SO just to copy some code _I
| wrote myself an answer_. I guess in these cases I directly
| offloaded my own knowledge onto the Internet :)
|
| The "own" snippet that comes up the most often for me is a
| binary-search implementation of integer cube root in Python - I
| know how to do it but the edge cases trip me up enough times
| that my pre-written answer is faster than trying to write it
| from scratch.
| firecall wrote:
| That happened to me recently!
|
| I Googled a problem and then found my own answer from years
| ago!
|
| Old me was much smarter apparently! :-D
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I've fought with this on and off. It is true that my work tends
| to be as internet dependent as anyone's, but I've experimented
| with an offline-first type of workflow.
|
| I think it's entirely possible to work offline first and
| foremost. You'd need the documentation for everything local.
| Operating system, programming language, libraries, frameworks,
| etc. Mass storage makes this more practical now than ever.
|
| A lot of projects don't provide very downloadable documentation
| which would make it harder and, of course, you'd miss out on
| knowing when the documentation is lying.
|
| The biggest problem with it is probably nothing intrinsic, but
| the fact that you'd be swimming upstream doing it.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| And sometimes it is knowing what you don't know that makes one
| a good developer.
|
| Leet code interview question where I could just find the answer
| in 5 seconds with a google search, might actually be good
| interview questions if they just let me use a google search.
|
| You still have to know what to look for.
|
| Being good at word problems in math I think are the only place
| where "being a math whiz" is what it takes to be "able to
| code". How you setup your equations to solve a simple algebraic
| word problem, can make solving the word problem super simple,
| or more complex.
|
| My kids do Singapore math, and holy crap does it force you to
| think about other ways to approach solving problems, a valuable
| skill.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| > My kids do Singapore math, and holy crap does it force you
| to think about other ways to approach solving problems, a
| valuable skill.
|
| Do you have any resources yo share? about Singapore math in
| English?
| PebblesRox wrote:
| The name is misleading - Singapore Math is an English-
| language-based math curriculum popular among homeschoolers:
|
| https://www.singaporemath.com/faqs/
| [deleted]
| asdff wrote:
| I usually turn to SO in hopes of a quick and easy answer, but a
| lot of the time your specific use case isn't going to be well
| covered as the stackoverflow threads sometimes have some
| bespoke requirements from the asker.
|
| What I find is that it can be faster to just look at the
| documentation that comes with the tooling. Usually a good stack
| overflow answer is just regurgitation of something that's
| already covered in the documentation that the asker clearly
| didn't read a lick of. When you start using a new tool, just
| skimming the documentation end to end can but you at such an
| advantage and set you up to get working with the tool in the
| correct way with a decent understanding of some of the caveats
| that might be at play with your particular use case (which is
| rarely something that can be gleamed from a terse stack
| overflow answer). Even just a pdf covering a language can be
| handy to thumb through the chapters and revisit common patterns
| like for loops that can vary in different languages, once again
| its easier to trod down a familiar pdf textbook than it is to
| try and trench up something relevant from google search these
| days.
| jmchuster wrote:
| It's coming at the problem from different directions. The
| documentation gives you the general bottom up approach, but
| lacks details and examples. SO shows what it should look like
| at the end, and adds details on edge cases that the
| documentation just glosses over. But you can never find
| exactly what you want, so you combine those two, a working
| end result, then modified using the documentation, to get
| what you want in the end.
|
| If you already have a working pattern that you're just
| modifying, you might get away with just looking up
| documentation. If you already have a strong foundation and
| know exactly what you want to do, then you're just looking up
| the syntax.
|
| Maybe another analogy might be, learning vocab to better
| express your thoughts, vs looking up the exact spelling of a
| word you already know.
| asdff wrote:
| Personally I've replaced a lot of my stack overflow usage
| with hacking along with test cases and using the
| documentation to help develop those tests. Imo, its a lot
| easier to figure out how something works by figuring it out
| with your two hands fiddling around vs hoping you find
| someone who writes well and understandably about this
| specific niche thing on stack overflow. Sometimes on stack
| overflow the answer is a very lazy "just install another
| package" vs developing a solution with the base tooling
| that's probably more performant anyhow, if a little bit
| more verbose.
| forinti wrote:
| It's inevitable, really. Things have became so complex and
| dynamic that you can't hope to have all the reference material
| you need at home.
|
| We used to have these little folded cards with the complete
| syntax of Pascal or C and that would be enough. Nowadays, you
| don't even know all the languages and libs that are in a given
| stack.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about the situation is you have a wide variety of
| knowledge types. Notably some knowledge can be verified pretty
| easily and some knowledge (or claims) is quite hard to verify,
| it rests on experiments, hard gain expert knowledge or the
| testimony of single individual.
|
| Programming information tends to be easily verified so
| organizing it's skill around filtering google, stackoverflow
| and so-forth is fine. The resulting program can be tested
| fairly easily.
|
| Uncritically taking in other sorts of claims can be very
| problematic.
| mandevil wrote:
| As someone who started working for pay before SO and GH (damnit
| I'm old) what I remember is that syntax errors took longer to
| figure out (and more trial and error), but the biggest
| difference to me is honestly that it is so much easier to find
| the right library. Back in 2005 I was coding up pretty much
| everything from scratch myself every time (I even remember a
| heroic attempt at an XML parser in C++! Backwards linking and
| processing directives and everything) because finding the right
| library to use was such a pain in the neck. If it wasn't in STL
| or Boost, it was like it didn't exist. Maybe it's that I'm
| older and more experienced (and know not to try and write your
| own XML parser because of all the complexity inherent in that),
| or maybe it's that SO and GH facilitate library discovery (with
| SO providing the pointers and GH providing the actual code) so
| much better than what came before (SourceForge etc.).
|
| I'm not sure, but I suspect it's that it was the technology
| improvement more than it was my improvement.
| carlmcqueen wrote:
| When I worked for a major financial institution in a data
| science / analytic group there were a lot of very, very smart
| math types who couldn't code. They'd ask how I'd gotten my code
| working and I'd never lie, that many parts of it I'd fixed
| using SO. This was 2012-2015 when a lot of the machine learning
| wasn't in helpful R packages or python libraries pre-written.
|
| Many would ask to see the page I'd read and I'd show them and
| they would ask how I got my code working from an example that
| had nothing to do with what our task was.
|
| I think there is a lot of value to looking at a SO answer,
| generalizing it and making it work in your code and doing it
| quickly. Knowing which SO articles are junk and which ones are
| gems is something many take for granted but is actually
| something close to having the right 'gut' feeling.
| musingsole wrote:
| This is very similar to academics and published papers. Most
| other labs aren't really working on things that similar to
| another lab, and so techniques have to be modified and not
| just directly lifted.
|
| Some point to that as an aspect of the replication crisis,
| but it's really just the nature of identifying and
| abstracting common elements out of specific goals.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Absolutely true. A lot of people think "cut-n-paste" is how
| people get code written, but the truth is you almost never
| find a snippet that is exactly what you want. It might be
| trivial like changing the name of the variable, or it might
| be some very small piece of a snippet you need, but the
| superpower isn't being to search for things, it's making
| sense of them and being able to reason about how to adapt it
| for your own case.
| albrewer wrote:
| SO is a great place for finding that one little code snippet
| that plugs a hole in your understanding of a problem. Many
| times you're 3 layers deep in a dependency chain of problems
| solved, and the question addresses some totally unrelated
| problem, but the question's answer uses that special argument
| to the framework's / language's library function in just the
| right way where it unlocks your understanding and lets you
| continue on your merry way.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| This is particularly true when you're thinking "is this use
| of X a horrible hack or a performant best practice?".
| Someone laying out and linking to the guarantees on offer
| by X in a completely unrelated use case will clarify
| everything.
| xmprt wrote:
| Not only do you need to find the snippet which is hard
| enough as it is, but you also need to understand the
| snippet and often take out a line or two from a 20 line
| snippet which do what you need.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| The internet is a reference (at best).
|
| Legal textbooks are the best example of a reference I've
| seen: the index is grouped by legal concepts and terminology,
| and is impenetrable to non-lawyers.
|
| Like jargon, it gatekeeps; but that's not its only purpose.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| If I ever have to solve something especially weird and use a
| stackoverflow result, I leave a comment above the weird code
| linking directly to the stackoverflow answer. And usually
| some extra context if the stackoverflow question isn't a
| perfect replica of our situation.
| soperj wrote:
| I do this too, just so I can refer back to it when I
| inevitably forget what exactly I did.
| marvin wrote:
| A highlight of my development career thus far is when I
| was able to fix a build that happened to be broken on a
| colleague's machine, which had stumped three other
| developers for multiple hours spread across a week.
|
| I don't remember the line of reasoning or detailed
| investigation that led to the solution, but I found
| something in a build configuration file that looked
| suspicious enough to warrant a search for an exact phrase
| in the code. It turned up a StackOverflow answer, where
| three lines had been cut and pasted into the build file.
|
| There was some specific change in a library or binary
| upgrade that had broken the thing that this particular
| change was meant to fix, and the problem was solved by
| removing the lines in question.
|
| The commit comment for these three lines was "merge
| hmmmm", which was also the only local documentation I
| found that I could have used to cross-reference with
| anything else.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I used to write code like this for a long time but I honestly
| felt like I was never actually internalizing anything. So at
| one point I just turned autocomplete off, stopped searching
| immediately and _forced_ myself to remember and I think it 's
| had a hugely positive impact.
|
| When I had to actively memorize I paid way more attention to
| what I was doing. I think the online search multitasking is
| honestly very bad for sustained attention and very passive. As
| an alternative I started to look up library code directly and
| just read and I feel like I learned more about how python
| worked in a few weeks than I did in months or so of just typing
| things into google.
| Hextinium wrote:
| I feel like there is a inflection point of having the time to
| be able to study a new language vs just brute forcing your
| way through with SO. If you know you will be using python for
| long enough then it would be worth reading the docs, else
| just SO all the way.
| bitwize wrote:
| > So at one point I just turned autocomplete off, stopped
| searching immediately and forced myself to remember and I
| think it's had a hugely positive impact.
|
| https://youtu.be/h1t14GnnQhc?t=20m15s
|
| INAZUMA KICK!!!
|
| n.b. I program like this too, just plain Emacs and I try to
| remember API and package names before consulting Dr. Google.
| The IDE trying too hard to help me is hugely distracting.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think how you learned to code does sort of shape your
| coding.
|
| I'm very much from the opposite camp. I learned to code in C
| in vi and didn't really have anyone to ask other than the
| manpages and the K&R book, I'm pretty sure I didn't even use
| syntax highlighting.
|
| I do think this has shaped my programming even later to where
| I stubbornly stick to boring but stable programming languages
| like C, C++ and Java, and these languages I've used for in
| some cases almost 25 years and where I virtually never have
| to look anything up. It's not like I haven't dabbled in other
| languages and paradigms, like python and haskell and
| whatever; but it's not those languages I use when I need to
| build something. I just don't see the value in constantly
| learning all this flavor-of-the-month stuff. When the dust
| settles, most hyped upcoming programming languages become
| footnotes when the history of programming is written.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| >and many of yours.
|
| I'm fine with the built in `man` command, and of course offline
| documentation for almost everything. It's actually kind of
| weird that our first instinct is to waste internet bandwidth
| while we probably have a copy right with us.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| > I'm fine with the built in `man` command, and of course
| offline documentation for almost everything. It's actually
| kind of weird that our first instinct is to waste internet
| bandwidth while we probably have a copy right with us.
|
| Exactly, yesterday I wanted to to have DNS over HTTPS and if
| you're going to search for it, you have to do a lot stuff.
| When there's the manual and literally and says that you need
| to add two lines and uncomment the specified comment.
|
| I'm happy with man.
| ratww wrote:
| Sometimes I code without the internet (on vacation, on trains
| and planes, etc) and it's not too hard.
|
| The major difficulties are indeed around the things you
| mention, but one solution for that is having a few large
| projects open in another IDE window so you can search for
| functions, idioms, algorithms, patterns.
|
| I guess I got used to it because I started coding
| professionally before Stack Overflow. There was Expert Sex
| Change, but it sucked, so I avoided it like the plague. It was
| mostly C#, so the combination of Static Typing + Intelisense
| also helped me not needing internet. Before C# I coded in Perl,
| so seeing other people's code wouldn't help anyway ;)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Perhaps the only thing that 's actually my own input is the
| judgement about what things are important, which sources are
| reliable, and which people are authorities._
|
| This is more or less what I got out of the 2nd half of my
| higher education. Plus I got a ton of reps in, so to speak, to
| really refine my judgement and ability to research. It's the
| old adage about learning how to learn, teaching one to fish,
| etc. I'm sure this all applies to many fields, but especially
| one like ours that changes rapidly. Thanks to this education, I
| feel like I can switch careers pretty easily.
|
| I make no mistake about it. I don't feel like I know what I
| know without the help of the Internet; I feel like I'm just
| some bloke who is good at sussing out what's important and how
| to apply it to my job. I think this is a skill that is missing
| from a number of my colleagues though.
| IncRnd wrote:
| It used to be that senior or staff level coders would
| intimately know the platforms, languages, and algorithms they
| used.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| I believe this predates the internet.
|
| I can't remember the study now -- perhaps fellow HNers can -- but
| there is a study where they asked a group of people to take a
| side in a debate. The debate was structured so that it sounded
| like A was the intuitively better choice, and when polled almost
| everyone agreed the group would support A. One plant was armed
| with excellent arguments for B, and when presented with these
| arguments, the group switched to supporting B. When asked later,
| they thought they had supported B the whole time.
| wirthjason wrote:
| The easy access of facts on line is a good thing. This kind of
| "knowledge" is shallow, assembling the parts together to
| synthesize new knowledge is the important step. That part isn't
| easily found online.
|
| This reminds me of leaning math. At one point "doing math" meant
| calculating numbers, like memorizing multiplication tables or
| performing long division. I was always relieved when the teacher
| said we could use a calculator on a test. But at some point I
| came to realize that math is not calculating. Math is about
| relationships between numbers and their general properties.
|
| Googling facts is akin to using a calculator. Extracting meaning
| from that jumbled pile of facts is knowledge.
| nice_byte wrote:
| To offer a counterpoint, doing a basic calculation in your head
| is faster than reaching for a calculator - remembering 7*3=21
| is faster than punching it in on a keypad. It's the same with
| facts -- having some fact committed to your own local memory is
| much faster than searching a global computer network for it
| every time.
|
| For somputer systems, the speed at which data can be accessed
| has a transformative effect on the algorithms that deal with
| it. I think this is the case for humans as well.
| ducharmdev wrote:
| The caveat here, of course, being that memory limitations
| require us to prioritize what information should be kept in
| memory vs in storage.
|
| Take LRU caches for example: it doesn't do us much good to
| devote that valuable memory space to information that isn't
| being recalled very often.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Googling facts is akin to using a calculator.
|
| An important distinction is that calculators tend not to lie or
| make honest mistakes when producing facts.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah. There are serious epistemological problems to go with
| externalized knowledge.
|
| Knowledge isn't just the ability to produce true statements, it
| isn't knowing what things are or what things will be, it's
| knowing why things are and why things will be.
|
| If I keep guessing coinflips, I don't have knowledge of the
| answer 50% of the time even though I can predict them that
| often.
|
| Knowledge has an aspect of understanding why things are, not
| just that they are, and that aspect becomes incredibly weak
| with the "look up facts on wikipedia"-model of external
| knowledge.
|
| The JTB-model of knowledge is probably incomplete, but it's
| arguably less wrong than a model that doesn't contain
| justification.
| pphysch wrote:
| The JTB model is wrong or at least misleading. Definitely
| outdated.
|
| Our best modern models for both biological _and_ artificial
| intelligence indicate that concepts or knowledge* emerges
| from networks of sensation /facts/data.
|
| * Specifically referring to "system 1" cognition, which is
| what the article is ostensibly targeting.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well the JTB was the standing model for some 2300 years, so
| even though there are a few corner cases it doesn't quite
| cover (Gettier etc), those are corner cases indeed. It
| doesn't invalidate JTB any more than Einstein invalidated
| Newtonian physics.
|
| The question is what we mean when we say knowledge. I don't
| think modelling is a good way of answering that question.
| Of course there is going to be a connection between
| perception and knowledge, how else would the knowledge
| enter us? But David Hume could have told you that.
| pphysch wrote:
| Knowledge doesn't "enter" us, that's the point. It's an
| emergent property of (many, many) memorized & networked
| sensations, which do enter us through our various sensory
| organs.
|
| It is _virtually impossible_ to teach an abstract concept
| like "cup" without a) providing real, sensory examples
| of what you mean by "cup" or b) relating to analogous
| concepts that the student has _already_ learned through
| personal experience (like "bowl" with "handle") and is
| capable of communicating.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There is a point where we do not have knowledge, let's
| say when we are born, then we have perceptions, and after
| that we (may) have knowledge about the world. I will say
| that knowledge has entered us through perceptions. If
| something is not in my mind, I have a perception, then it
| is in my mind; and if I was unable to have perceptions it
| could not have entered my mind, then it has entered
| through that perception. All physical phenomena are to
| some extent emergent down to subatomic particles and
| possibly even further. It doesn't really have much of an
| effect on the subjective human experience which principle
| is more emergent, and the subjective human experience is
| the only human experience.
|
| It's very hard to teach someone who has no relationship
| with the world, but you don't need a large set of
| concepts to synthesize additional concepts. You can
| derive most of mathematics from a few simple axioms.
| Democritus concluded the world was made of atoms based on
| observations about how the world appeared to work, on
| encountering problems like Zeno's paradox. Knowledge, as
| well as language, is all about how things relate to each
| other. Words to meanings, causes to effects.
| svnt wrote:
| > It's very hard to teach someone who has no relationship
| with the world
|
| It is impossible, by definition.
| pphysch wrote:
| > You can derive most of mathematics from a few simple
| axioms.
|
| Yeah, nothing is stopping you from building towers of
| abstractions that are N degrees from any real experience
| or data. But those heavily-derived concepts are
| prohibitively difficult to teach and communicate, because
| each level in the abstraction hierarchy adds semantic
| noise. A major reason why classical, "pure" mathematics
| pedagogy is infamously ineffective.
|
| Ultimately, every great mathematician learned to count
| with rocks or apples -- not by internalizing Peano's
| axioms.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That is how it is commonly taught, but can it really be
| argued it's the only way it can be taught? Regardless
| which method is easier, why is it possible to interact
| with negative, irrational, or complex numbers without
| anyone having ever seen them, but not integers?
|
| There of course needs to be a common set of ideas to
| communicate, but I'm not convinced you need one
| particular set. In many cases, having some of the ideas
| means you can synthesize the rest. You could for example
| reason about numbers by drawing upon size rather than
| quantity. Then you basically end up with the Euclidean
| method, a mathematics of proportion that goes a
| surprisingly long way.
| pphysch wrote:
| Abstract quantities, even positive integers, don't exist
| in reality. Heck, even "objects" don't really exist,
| because "boundaries between things" don't concretely
| exist except in our perception and imagination.
|
| If there is any primal, axiomatic concept, it is
| "object"/"thing". From object you can derive quantity
| (many objects), from quantity you can derive quality (two
| objects are different), and so on and so forth.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You can reason about the same reality in various
| different terms, and the choice in terms shapes how you
| see the world. I don't think it's easy to argue that one
| concept is the true concept from which all concepts
| inevitably derive. You can just as easily think of things
| as parts of a whole as objects in an emptiness.
|
| In some languages the name for door is the same as the
| name for mouth, and a door is a bit like a mouth so it
| makes sense to relate them. All language is metaphorical
| like that, except not always as explicitly. When we say a
| thing is an object, we say that our concept of that thing
| shares similarities to the concept we have for objects.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Memory is the basis of any real knowledge. This we have known
| since for ever...
|
| Intelligent people tend to think that you do not need to
| memorize because everything is out there at a button-press
| distance. But they do not realize that what makes the
| intelligent is that they can memorize lots of things without
| effort.
| cgriswald wrote:
| > But they do not realize that what makes the intelligent is
| that they can memorize lots of things without effort.
|
| I play board games with my friends. We all know all the rules
| of the game, although we took varying amount of times to
| memorize these rules. Yet some of us come to dominate the
| game play. To the degree that there is correlation between
| the speed with which someone learns the rules and the
| percentage of time they win the game, I do not believe there
| is causation. How could there be? One would have to believe
| that once everyone has all the knowledge in the system, those
| who memorized that knowledge faster still have an edge
| _because_ they memorized the knowledge faster. That 's
| difficult to believe.
| dougabug wrote:
| It's not just memorization of the rules, in a game like Go
| that would only be a tiny fraction of the memory utilized.
| Remembering large numbers of examples assists in
| recognizing patterns and developing strategies.
| cgriswald wrote:
| That doesn't really resolve the underlying problem. Given
| the same set of examples, the guy who memorized them
| faster isn't necessarily the guy who wins. There is more
| going on than just "effortless memory."
| dougabug wrote:
| Presumably, human memory involves a significant
| associative aspect. If you couldn't recall a relevant
| fact within a useful time frame, this might impact
| comprehension or the ability to make connections. Imagine
| trying to read a book, while only have a vocabulary of a
| few hundred words, or lacking the ability to remember
| more than the last few sentences.
|
| There are also fidelity issues. Suppose half of the facts
| or ideas you recalled were corrupted, or most of your
| retrieved memories were misassociated or irrelevant?
| andai wrote:
| I was at the supermarket one time and tried to remember
| something. In the act of trying to remember it, I instinctively
| reached into my pocket (to Google it), and found that I'd left my
| phone at home, and suddenly felt like part of my brain was
| missing.
|
| At that moment I realized the Internet had become part of my my
| "memory". The feeling wasn't "I can't look it up", but literally
| "I can't remember."
| _0ffh wrote:
| Seems like the time of the exocortex has arrived faster - if in
| a more primitive way - than we anticipated.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| the interface is just slow, but if we have time, it'll
| probably catch up
| kazinator wrote:
| I'm sorry, this is complete nonsense.
|
| Something you recently Googled is your knowledge, for the time
| being. It is not external.
|
| You may have an inflated sense of being able to retain it going
| forward, but that doesn't make it external.
|
| It's no different from any kind of learning.
|
| If you're able to recite the information without looking at an
| online reference it's internal, and if you looked at it a month
| ago, it's even long-term memory. It might vaporize in another few
| months, but that doesn't mean it had been merely external.
| Animats wrote:
| With Google available, there's no upper limit on programming
| complexity. Before search engines, programming had to be simple
| enough that people could learn all the necessary parts. That
| restriction has been removed.
| drcongo wrote:
| I've seen almost this exact study before somewhere. As a side
| note though, how do we pronounce that domain name?
| suchow wrote:
| You say each letter separately; it's an acronym and stands for
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
| jacquesm wrote:
| All those people in this thread turning to their Significant
| Other for help with coding problems: you are so lucky to have
| that option.
| bhouston wrote:
| This means sense and has for some time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis &
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
| abeppu wrote:
| I think the "extended mind" view makes sense but also gets way
| more complicated in the presence of computers that have
| capabilities beyond just information storage and retrieval
| (i.e. knowledge "that"). Knowledge "how" to do something can be
| much richer, especially when the things we partly know how to
| do are often about interacting with computers.
|
| People learn arithmetic in school, but often become
| functionally dependent on calculators or computer. When this
| happens, I don't have the sensation that I "knew" the right
| answer, or that I did the calculation; clearly the device did
| the work. The separation is apparent.
|
| What about when a script or tool you use every day does
| something you could in principle do on your own, but the
| computer is far faster and more reliable? Do you feel you
| "know" how to typecheck your code? Or to resolve dependencies?
| bhouston wrote:
| There is the further idea of an "exocortex" that ties into
| your brain at a deeper level and shares cognitive processes
| more directly:
| https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Exocortex
|
| I guess that is sort of where you are going?
| zaat wrote:
| This line from the abstract:
|
| > When information is at our fingertips, we may mistakenly
| believe that it originated from inside our heads
|
| reminded me immediately of Chalmers standing with his iPhone in
| his hand, arguing that there is nothing special in the skull as
| a location that is required for establish ownership of an idea.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It should be "Many people repeat facts written online without
| understanding it."
| t43562 wrote:
| But don't we copy almost everything we know from outside anyhow
| and then think it's ours without remembering who mentioned it or
| where we read it? Are we really original thinking machines or do
| we copy most of the time?
| dkarl wrote:
| Personally, I'm starting to identify a lot of cases where looking
| things up in an external resource is a deeper mental disruption
| than remembering it, even if the lookup is just as fast or even
| faster. (Or, it's possible that the external lookup only _seems_
| faster because the several mechanical steps compress my
| perception of time, like keyboard navigation can seem faster than
| the mouse, even when it isn 't.)
|
| For example, I find that when I'm working with an API enough that
| I am frequently looking up the same operations, investing twenty
| minutes in identifying and reviewing the important operations, as
| if I were preparing for an exam where I wouldn't be allowed to
| consult external resources, pays off in fluency and immersion.
|
| Another example is that when I am reading a history book, before
| I start, I review relevant names and contemporary dates. Then
| when I find myself thinking, "Wait, at this time, how long ago
| was X? Has Y happened yet?" I can answer from memory. This gives
| me a richer reading experience than if I needed to remove myself
| from the context of the book to look up those dates.
|
| I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical
| standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and
| discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to
| understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it isn't
| such a negative experience in itself, judicious application of it
| has a lot of power to make your work easier and your learning
| experiences richer.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Yep. Having to look up every API call, versus taking the time
| to memorise the (relevant parts of the) API, makes the
| difference if you want to be a 10x coder.
|
| Knowing how to look up and apply things is nice. Being able to
| discern which of the things you looked up are worth memorising,
| and then actually doing so, is even better.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > I know memorization is seen negatively from a pedagogical
| standpoint, and schoolchildren find it alienating and
| discouraging, but I think when you have enough experience to
| understand the value of it, so that the work to achieve it
| isn't such a negative experience in itself, judicious
| application of it has a lot of power to make your work easier
| and your learning experiences richer.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-m...
| - Article I read years ago on this, I think it helps to frame
| the debate of memorization vs anti-memorization. In particular
| this sentence:
|
| > I define memorization as _learning an isolated fact through
| deliberate effort_. [emphasis in original]
|
| I'll emphasize _isolated fact_. A lot of people who say
| memorization and rote learning are bad or ineffective are
| probably framing it in the same sense as this author. They
| (mostly, there are exceptions) aren 't arguing against
| committing information to memory, but of committing information
| to memory with no (or minimal) understanding attached to it.
|
| If you _just_ learn isolated facts, you become a meat sack
| Chinese room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). You
| can't connect the dots and perform the real interesting work of
| synthesis (combining information and ideas) or derivation (from
| what you know, determine new results). The author talks about
| students "knowing" that the sine of pi/2 is 1. What do they
| _actually_ know, though? What can they do with that fact on its
| own without any understanding of what "sine" itself means and
| the contexts in which it is used?
| dkarl wrote:
| Yep, defining memorization as learning "isolated" facts
| presupposes that the teacher is too lazy to draw connections
| in the classroom and explain the relevance of what the
| students are learning. It defines memorization as something
| that only an incompetent teacher would utilize, like defining
| engagement with primary sources as having students read
| material in dense technical or archaic language they don't
| understand, without assistance, or defining classroom
| discussion as asking the students to talk about the material
| and then going to the teacher's lounge to have a cup of
| coffee. No teacher would defend the use of techniques framed
| that way.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I partially judge the novelty of the problem I'm solving by the
| level of access to information about it I have. You realize
| you're on the edge of knowledge when you're deep down in the
| research papers and there's only a couple papers on the subject
| and you implement from there. The solutions you come up with from
| that tend to be the most rewarding and unfortunately relative to
| all the mundane work few and far between. I think I run into that
| type of problem a few times a year, if even.
| bondolo wrote:
| I started developing software in the days before the Internet. It
| was indeed very different. My choices about what to remember and
| how I remember things have changed significantly since the
| ubiquitous availability of searchable information. I no longer
| have tomes of K&R, processor manuals, Inside Macintosh or Java
| books on my desk. The only technical book which happens to be on
| my desk at the moment is "Anti-patterns".
|
| I have been "weeding" my paper books, especially technical books
| over the last couple of years and gotten rid of an entire
| bookshelf of books. I still have an entire bookshelf with Knuth
| TAoCP, math books, type theory, graphics, graph theory, control
| theory, physics and some nostalgic books like my original
| Motorola 68000 processor guide, Rodney Zaks Z80 book, "Adventure
| game programming in BASIC", Commodore 64 Innerspace Compendium,
| etc.
|
| When a puppy chewed up my copy of "Linux in a Nutshell" I was
| tempted to buy the new edition but decided to try it online for a
| month with O'Reilly Safari through work and have not bothered to
| replace the paper copy for more than 2 years.
|
| I would categorize the main change in style of memory as a shift
| from focus on remembering details and facts, which I can look up,
| to using memory for decision trees, processes and methodologies
| which either can't be looked up or are significantly personally
| customized. I consciously "outsource" the simpler and to me, less
| valuable, aspects of memory. Some of this is handled
| automatically by the IDE I use and the rest is done with mostly
| Google searches.
| 6chars wrote:
| I could use a new technical book to read. Is this the one
| you're referring to?
| https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130/thean04c-...
| tony-allan wrote:
| Some additional references
|
| Does Googling Perpetuate the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202...
|
| One with the Cloud: Why People Mistake the Internet's Knowledge
| for Their Own (2013) -
| http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11004901
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| There's an SNL skit here.
| bregma wrote:
| A frequent mistake is to confuse knowledge with intelligence or
| wisdom. It is neither, but a prerequisite for both.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Stackoverflow makes me think I know C++.
| joshstrange wrote:
| When I was younger I worried a little bit about this but now I'm
| perfectly happy to use my brain as an index instead of a data
| warehouse. As in, I don't bother committing to memory things that
| I can reach out and grab if they fall out of my "cache". As
| others have noted, I regularly reach out to SO/Internet to
| "remember" how to do basic language features if I haven't worked
| in said language recently or I've just forgotten the syntax. I
| can speed 5min+ racking my brain and/or reading docs or I can
| search and find it in a few seconds. Often I just need to see an
| example to "remember" or kick start myself.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| The problem for me now is my mental index can suffer from link
| rot. For programming its okay because this doesn't happen
| often. But for other topics when a site or blog with the
| details of how something works disappears from the internet its
| very disorienting. Like you unlearned it. I guess this is why
| people get into archiving content.
| svnt wrote:
| Evernote's web clipper and notebook system is quite good for
| this. It is the only service I've consistently paid for over
| the last decade.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| You're right. It is. I'm thinking about setting up some sort
| of archiving web proxy on my home network to archive most of
| the pages I visit. I'm not sure if that will turn out to be
| any more useful than searching the Google index, but, at
| least it'll be a fun project. :-)
| monkeybutton wrote:
| That could be really interesting to analyze after a year or
| so. Look for trends in usage like a Fitbit for your
| browsing habits.
| mindcrime wrote:
| The things I wind up having to Google / SO are things like "How
| to setup a Spring Boot app with Spring Data JPA for data
| access". There are just so many fiddly details: the exact list
| of dependencies to put into your pom, the various required
| annotations (@EnableJpaRepositories or whatever, etc., yada
| yada), the various properties that have to be configured for a
| Datasource, etc. There's no way I'm committing all of that
| stuff to memory, especially when it's easy enough to look up
| (or better yet, build a trivial "hello world" project with
| everything already done, and store it off to the side as a
| template).
| awillen wrote:
| I think this is the bigger point - the difference between
| internal and external knowledge has become much less important
| because the external knowledge is always easily available. I
| have a friend who prides himself on knowing all manner of both
| sports and history trivia - he could walk you through who won
| every NBA championship and who was in their starting lineup for
| the finals off the top of his head. Meanwhile, I'm a Lakers fan
| and I remember they had a threepeat in the early 2000s, but I
| don't know the years off the top of my head. Who cares? I can
| Google it if I need the details.
| Razengan wrote:
| Is there ANYbody today whose knowledge is all their "own"?
|
| How many people really learn something completely on their own?
|
| Even tools count as the sum of somebody else's knowledge, like
| the computer and language you use even if you teach yourself how
| to program.
|
| Everyone builds upon the knowledge of billions who came before.
| It's not a competition.
| moosey wrote:
| I often hear a thought process to the effect of:
|
| > Why learn something in depth when it can just be looked up?
|
| And the answer is that you can't daydream about something or
| think about it deeply unless that information is easily pulled up
| from your memory. Daydreaming, out the "default mode" of the
| brain organizes and helps is too understand information. If I had
| taken the care to study and memorize information regarding, well,
| everything in school, via a tool like Anki, I would have a lot
| more information that I could use to connect disparate ideas
| together. The brain can't do this to the full extent possible
| unless that information is memorized.
|
| That being said, it's important to know that memorization has a
| cost in time. The time for a single data point is low, but 20-30k
| data points in Anki is a serious time commitment.
|
| If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it
| will help too ward off mental declines later in life.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge,
| and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life.
|
| I slightly disagree. I do agree that the end goal of having the
| information memorized is important, but drilling flashcards
| never worked for me. What makes information stick is drilling
| practice problems that touch on the knowledge to be memorized
| until it's established. It's more useful for recognizing when
| those facts will be relevant, too, compared to having a memory
| silo of 10,000 stored facts.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Anki and similar systems can be used for practice problems,
| not just "read card" or "read card, say the reverse side,
| check if correct". There are some add-ons for math that
| actually generate problems, or you can construct the cards in
| a way that they promote use and not mere recall. "Io
| {parlare} con mia moglie" can be one of many such cards that
| prompt you to conjugate, or set the article, or properly
| determine the plural. Or can be combined with reading
| comprehension or listening comprehension scenarios (play or
| show some sentences, follow on with questions about what was
| heard or read).
| the-dude wrote:
| "Never memorize something that you can look up." -- Albert
| Einstein
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9810.Albert_Einstein
|
| and there is :
|
| "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from
| its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his
| own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking"
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-true-is-Einsteins-statement-that-R...
| amelius wrote:
| Does the second quote apply to "reading HN"?
| Jensson wrote:
| You should see your memory as a library of functions, not a
| database of facts. Facts helps you answer test questions,
| library functions is how you solve problems.
|
| Every piece of knowledge has things you can do with it, things
| that relates to it etc, understanding how to work with the
| knowledge is the important part to learn and what you don't
| really learn by just looking it up on the internet. Basically
| you build interfaces and connects them and create a large
| structure of things you can do and apply to all sorts of
| things.
| danielrpa wrote:
| Isn't internet access at your fingertips a form of transhumanism?
| So maybe it's ok, people do indeed "know" more in an objective
| sense.
| legrande wrote:
| > Isn't internet access at your fingertips a form of
| transhumanism
|
| Well to some degree. At some stage we will forgo having a
| smartphone and have Google hardwired to our brain. I think
| that's where we're heading eventually. Tech companies want to
| be inside our head (if they're not already). Musk talks about
| the bandwidth problem of accessing information. If it was super
| readily available (i.e hardwired to our brain), then we could
| be superhuman.
|
| This is why we're to some extent already cyborgs, just not in
| the cyberpunk aesthetic way of being half machine half human,
| but we're already half-way there with smartphones.
| svnt wrote:
| > Musk talks about the bandwidth problem of accessing
| information.
|
| Has he thought about using the eyeballs? I have it on good
| authority that the eyeballs have a standard fuckton of
| functional bandwidth.
| rellekio wrote:
| Issue comes in when it gives you the experience of knowing more
| than you think and making judgements based off of that feeling.
|
| My concern is the difficulty of tracking down sources years
| later without a means of reference. Unless you are actively
| archiving and organizing those links in a useful way. What we
| have is more prone to forgetfulness, but also at the time that
| is our strength. Still a pain though
| mistermann wrote:
| > My concern is the difficulty of tracking down sources years
| later without a means of reference.
|
| Also when the "facts" in one's sources change, as we've seen
| in journalism in the past few years.
| nescioquid wrote:
| As I understood the abstract, participants are given general-
| knowledge questions (e.g. who was the fourth U.S. president),
| participant looks up the answer online, sees "Madison" and then
| thinks they must have know that (Washington - Adams - Jefferson -
| Madison). The participant will then predict that they will do
| well on subsequent questions without using the internet for
| reference (at least that's how I interpret "... [participants]
| predict that they will know more in the future without the help
| of the internet").
|
| That's a foible fit for satire. I'm curious whether there is a
| process of rationalization like I just imagined, or whether there
| is just a fundamental confusion by the participant about whether
| they knew the information prior or knew it from the recent
| internet search. If the later, that could be horrifying (imagine
| you needed to find out how long Oceania and Eastasia have been at
| war).
|
| I've read about teachers struggling to convince students of the
| need to actually memorize things despite the ubiquity of easy
| reference: you just won't make new connections or insights if you
| don't have any information already in your head. I would say this
| study would suggest the teacher's task is even more difficult if
| people misattribute recent searches for prior knowledge.
| mc32 wrote:
| There is another tangential problem with relying on online
| information stores.
|
| At least with news media, if there was a significant error in
| reporting, that would go out in an upcoming edition. Both would
| be recorded.
|
| In recent times, news outlets, and other publications,
| _silently_ update things without issuing a correction or making
| it obvious there was a correction and the only way you can find
| out is by the internet archive, if it was there.
| msla wrote:
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus
|
| > At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god,
| whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is
| sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as
| arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and
| draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of
| letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the
| whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper
| Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god
| himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed
| his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be
| allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and
| Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of
| them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.
| It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to
| Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came
| to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and
| give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory
| and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the
| parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the
| utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.
| And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a
| paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to
| them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of
| yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because
| they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external
| written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific
| which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to
| reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the
| semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will
| have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will
| generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the
| show of wisdom without the reality.
|
| So this is not a new concern.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| No internet connection is required!
|
| Q: You won more than US$2.5 million dollars over 75 episodes of
| "Jeopardy!" How did you do it?
|
| Jennings: I've always considered myself to be a very curious
| person by nature. If I don't know the answer to something, it's
| like a mystery I need to solve; it spurs me on to find out more
| information. I read just about everything I can pick up, I watch
| a lot of movies and I also like to enter my questions into
| Encarta; it's a great digital encyclopedia with the answers a
| mouse click away.
|
| https://news.microsoft.com/2004/12/06/q-what-are-ken-jenning...
| nathias wrote:
| There is no knowledge on the internet, only data.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| eh.
|
| data point of one.
| hogFeast wrote:
| If you word a question correctly, you can also find evidence for
| almost any belief with Google (it is Nietzsche, you ask Google,
| and Google asks you). It is actually quite bizarre to have a
| conversation with someone online, that person has literally no
| real knowledge of the topic, they pepper you with "sources"
| (usually those sources do not provide evidence for what they are
| saying, they don't know enough to know that), and then (and this
| is very 2020s) act outraged when you point they are wrong and
| have no actual knowledge of the topic beyond Google.
|
| In my experience, these people have usually integrated Google
| fully into their own perception of knowledge. They view
| themselves as totally rational, their views are all evidence-
| based because they can type the magic phrase into Google and get
| justification...but, of course, the feeling comes before the
| source and they have no real understanding of what "evidence"
| actually looks like. It is very odd trying to have a conversation
| with someone who is totally irrational but believes heavily in
| rationality (this is the "source? source? source?" meme of
| Reddit).
|
| I think this is distinct from the SO stuff. Programming languages
| are very explicit so it is easy to forget exactly how to do
| something basic if you do it infrequently (for example, I can
| never remember how to get an env variable in Python, I do it in
| every project but usually only a handful of times per
| project...it is easy to forget) Once you get into more complex
| problems, you can look stuff up on SO but you still won't be able
| to do it unless you actually understand what you are copying (in
| my experience, I have usually copied something, something is
| slightly different, and then I spend time going through
| it/reworking/understanding).
| beloch wrote:
| There is an inherent and not entirely unfounded bias evident in
| this article that external knowledge is inferior to internal
| knowledge. It is certainly true that reaching the point where you
| don't have to look something up usually means you have a deeper
| understanding of it and are more competent and fast using it.
| Quality of knowledge matters, but there are limits to how much
| knowledge a single person can internalize.
|
| Quantity has a quality all it's own.
|
| Having vast amounts of external knowledge available for rapid
| access offers unique capabilities. Skill at searching as well as
| quality of search tools can enable people to do things that would
| have taken far longer just a couple decades ago when any given
| search would have involved dead-tree books.
|
| Perhaps we should start thinking of google and other such tools,
| not as poor substitutes for knowledge painstakingly internalized,
| but rather, an augmentation of human intelligence that grants
| humans rapid access to _far_ more knowledge than any single human
| could possibly internalize in a lifetime. As these tools improve,
| this augmentation effect will become more pronounced, as will the
| deleterious effects of being cut off from the internet.
|
| The blurring of lines between internal and external knowledge may
| also intensify with future technologies. e.g. Wetware out of a
| William Gibson novel lets people with data jacks install modules
| of mental expertise at will. Will an article like this even have
| meaning once people can look up a module of deeply internalized
| knowledge and install it in an instant?
|
| One day, the Internet's knowledge may be indistinguishable from
| our own.
| pomian wrote:
| This is what the Internet started to do, and seemed to promise.
| But, as we all lament on HN, the Internet is no longer that
| which we yearn for. Walled gardens, embedded links, snippets
| instead of articles, titles instead of papers, ads ads ads. It
| is almost impossible to find the actual fruits of knowledge
| among the trash. It wasn't long ago, that you had free access
| to research, data, results, of studies from around the world.
| Knowledge unbounded. Its almost hopeless now. How to fix it?
| (And the best scientific paper resource is 'illegal '.)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It's problematic to not distinguish between things you know and
| thing you just googled, regardless of which is more accurate.
|
| The problem is similar to not looking and determining what the
| information of the article you Google is. This feeds into the
| now stereotype behavior of someone confusing a Google search
| with actual research. Google doesn't help with it's question-
| answer section, many of which are mis-categorized and from not-
| necessarily reliable sources.
|
| _Quantity has a quality all it 's own._
|
| A large quantity of poor quality of information is certainly
| not something that it would be useful to have automatically
| pouring through one's cranium, to say the least.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| > erroneously optimistic predictions regarding how much they will
| know without the internet
|
| People experience tools as extentions of themselves. If you
| always have the tool, does it matter whether you've misattributed
| (and if you have the tool, _have_ you misattributed?)
|
| Are we not tool-users?
|
| Carpenter don't perform as well without hammers; cyclists without
| cycles; surgeons without scalpels; engineers without mathematics;
| writers without language.
| buescher wrote:
| Even before the WWW, I remember being taught that the next best
| thing to remembering something was knowing how/where to look it
| up.
| faizshah wrote:
| I feel like people take for granted the ability to ask the right
| question with the right words. I get that this study is talking
| about general knowledge questions but I can't tell you how many
| times I have tried to search for an answer for something in
| another field only to find that I need to find the right keywords
| for the question first. For example a social network in
| humanities is a complex network in physics is a graph in
| mathematics is a network in ML (but sometimes its also called a
| graph) this is very annoying cause all these fields have
| different ideas on "community identification" (clustering). I'm
| sure people must have the same problem for general knowledge
| questions as well.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Small correction: in mathematics, such a thing could also be
| called a graph.
| nsonha wrote:
| knowledge is part of reality, my mind is just a cache
| ksec wrote:
| I am not sure if this is related.
|
| It isn't the access of information ( Internet or not ) that is a
| problem. It is the access to "answer" that is the problem. Or
| more precisely access to answer without explanation why this is
| an answer. People no longer "think" if this answer is correct or
| not ( misinformation ), but presume it to be true. And then they
| built up a mental model using that information. Which leads to
| all sort of wrong conclusion. In the old days access to
| information ( library ) tends to be much better because quality
| of information is likely millions times higher.
|
| This leads to "way" less thinking. And "thinking", the process to
| digest information is critical to gain knowledge. The more access
| you have to answers, the less thinking you have to do. Which ends
| in a negative feedback loop.
|
| I have been teaching kids these days and making this point
| extremely clear. It is not the answer that matters, it is how you
| arrive at the answer that is the most important. Especially in
| the day of Google. But generally speaking they do ask a _hell of
| a lot_ "why" :) Part of the joy of working with kids.
| lvl100 wrote:
| I think of it as my own RAM. Search used to be quite slow and you
| had to have knowledge stored in your RAM to be proficient. Memory
| was valued but you also had to deal with human limitations.
|
| Fast forward to today and search can be done quite a bit faster.
| And your internal RAM effectively multiplied or perhaps your
| storage (SSD) became faster and bigger. In that sense what's
| become more valuable is not necessarily how much information you
| can physically retain in your brain/memory but how FAST and
| EFFECTIVELY you can look up things.
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