[HN Gopher] Google Isn't Grad School
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Google Isn't Grad School
Author : prudentpomelo
Score : 17 points
Date : 2023-07-06 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Google is limited - but I don't have to pay for it.
|
| Grad school is laudable, but it's too damn expensive!
|
| What's a person to do?
|
| EDIT: Why did you delete your thoughtful reply 34wtg?
|
| EDIT EDIT: https://archive.is/EWAOO
| dragontamer wrote:
| > EDIT: Why did you delete your thoughtful reply 34wtg?
|
| New account. Somehow the flagging / banning system caught them.
| I vouched for his comment as it looks pretty good and relevant.
|
| Vouching is basically an "anti-flag" on Hacker News. If you've
| got your settings to be on "show all", including banned
| comments / erased comments, then you have the ability to vouch.
| I think its a feature that unlocks above a certain karma, so
| you may have missed it in your settings the first time you
| registered for Hacker News.
| 34wtg wrote:
| The articles isn't really about grad school. It's just the
| headline.
|
| The article is about how the internet allows non-experts to
| confidently assert inaccurate information. It suggests that we
| scrutinize the actual credentials of the people giving us that
| information, and go to the original source whenever possible.
| It also suggests that we all cultivate humility, and remember
| that we are not experts because we watched a video or read an
| article.
|
| So that's what a person is to do. According to the article.
|
| BTW, Here's my advice for cultivating humility on Hacker News.
| Go do a search for threads about FTX, Theranos, WeWork, and
| Moviepass from a few years ago, and see what the average Hacker
| News user had to say about them. You'll find skeptics, of
| course. But also plenty of users absolutely certain that
| there's something to these companies, and that the founders are
| merely playing a game of 5d chess, or something like that. It's
| a good reminder that we can all get things wrong, even when
| we're really sure about something. And a reminder that nobody
| is immune to being duped.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I admit once I saw the paywall I stopped.
|
| Here's a link for those interested:
|
| https://archive.is/EWAOO
| habitue wrote:
| Not saying everything in this article is wrong, but I actually
| think the opposite is more true.
|
| Google + Wikipedia + chatgpt + youtube are imperfect sources of
| knowledge, but they are vastly better than the no-knowledge
| people had in the days when credentialism was born.
|
| It used to be an simple argument: "Is your job $PROFESSION? No?
| Then you probably know almost nothing about it." There's not much
| subtlety here, you literally won't know that profession's
| knowledge. There's maybe some osmosis if you're family with
| someone in the profession, but by and large: you just didn't know
| anything at all about it.
|
| Now the argument is more subtle: Do you know this thing at a
| shallow wikipedia-level only? Is this thing a shallow subject
| that you could plausibly learn without being a practitioner?
| What's the difference between someone who has watched 30 videos
| on YouTube about installing a bathtub and someone who installs
| bathtubs professionally? It's some difference, but is it a lot? A
| little?
|
| I get where this article is coming from: we all suddenly have
| this broader knowledge than we ever would have in the past, but
| it's not robust deep knowledge. But the answer isn't to counter
| it with "make sure you see their credentials or they know
| nothing". The answer is we need our model of expertise to accept
| a spectrum of expertise, rather than a binary choice like "got a
| degree in it or not"
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(page generated 2023-07-06 23:03 UTC)