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Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Knowbody — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:45:39 -0000

I'm going to stop using Google. I'm also going to stop buying food at grocery stores because it's made me forget how to plant a garden. Oh, and I'm going to stop shopping at the Gap because I've never learned how to sew.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

xian — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:26:38 -0000

Or, perhaps, the blogger decided to write this because people still find joy in intellectual discourse. As well as the cathartic power of writing and the sheer pleasure of articulateness.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Dimitri — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:26:11 -0000

.... Are we stupider? Or just more efficient?
..... more efficient consumers

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Akathorn — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:15:46 -0000

We used to know how to make fire.
Now we have lighters.

We used to look at the sky to know the time.
Now we have watches.

We used to know how to grow our food.
Now we have supermarkets.

Are we stupider?
Or just more efficient?

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Tony — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:53:19 -0000

Agree, I use Gmail alot and there is certainly some truth in it.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

aussiebones — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:26:54 -0000

To balance things out, how about a French version...Googaul....whatever you try to look up...it just tells you how stupid you are

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Dimitri Rytsk — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:39:19 -0000

Applying a system control theory to human-internet-reality chain we may consider such a system as a filter. It is an active filter with deep positive loop (response time delay close to 0) by only few parameters (clicks, popularity) of the filtered vector (human identity vector). A negative (stabilizing) loop is still very slow! (None electronic methods of human connections: conventional laws, morals, and word of mouth with a response time up to few years!). Such a phase and dept of positive feedback lead to induction by the looped value (clicks=popularity). The world becomes popularized! That is why we have got spike of popular (majority=peasants) values: over consumption, pornography, drugs just after given Net to public (HTML) and net searches based on popularity in late 90s. A system is in at the beginning (exponential stage) of oscillation (less then 90 degrees phase). Uncontrolled, the spike should last up to a limit of energy source (oil, food). If alternative sources of energy not found a spike should go to 0 (death). If found, oscillation should continue trough negative phase and spike and so on so on â€¦ of cause we have fluctuations of other none looped (by the net) values too but not as much. That is why we think and feel same as years ago. But Google already took projects in human design as well (biomechanics).

In simple terms â€“ Google is a self-inducing loop, a disastrous cancer of the Internet. It is like when your put mic near a speaker your will get very load noise trashing the musicâ€¦. The scary part is â€¦ the amplifier (Earth) is overheating now. We do not have time for a kid to learn how to play before the gig began. The stage was not erected for him. Do we have a main fuse or cut off switch at least?

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Mohsin — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:05:49 -0000

I think its all how u take the things. The perspective we look at. We cant say tht Newton and Einsten came up with all theories using google. They used their pen and paper. Even after lots of evolutions in many years now, do you think we are coming up with more sofisticated theories now also just because we have got good technologies and google. No right.
Not all the NASA scientists use google to do their calculations. But still their are doing their jobs perfectly and very well. Do u think if these people start using google they would hav done more better. I think NO.

So using google help us to make things easy not dumps.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

video4u — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 09:06:11 -0000

anyone heard of new movie rental releases ??

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Ralf Klamma — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:07:11 -0000

I agree that google is changing the way we think like the calculator changed the way we do calculations.
My decisive question was and is always what do I need to know to survive on an island as a castaway, not alone but with a group of people (hey, I'm a social being in the end). My inspiration for this is the novel "The mysterious island" by Jules Verne. You can read a summary at wikipedia :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... (another mind changing technology). BTW, the mysterious island together with some other elements like the X-Files is the blueprint for the TV show "Lost". I was fascinated by the fact that the group was able to engineer and produce very powerful goods like gun powder only from their theoretical and practical knowledge in a hostile environment. The likelihood of getting lost on an island is very small but you may ask yourself after reading the novel if you could similar things.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Dimitri — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 20:31:53 -0000

Despite brilliancy of google seachengine, Google Inc themselves is dumb and having no idea what is happening in they own department, same as in any corporation.
Googlebay exercise is to test whether ignorance of customer support to resolve $50 AdWords issue is a local or global corporate vulnerability.
Details see at http://rytsk.com/googlebay/

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Cactus Wren — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:09:54 -0000

I am amazed at the number of people who would rather Google than think. They won't be among the survivors when the electricity goes out.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Nitin — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:38:43 -0000

Yes but must to think better we have to get out from bed

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Alzheimers — Sun, 27 May 2007 16:11:36 -0000

Completely disagree. There is a difference between remembering things and problem solving. I try to use my brain for handling problems that I can not solve using exiting tools. If computers could compose the music I compose or solve the math problems I am working with I would immediately switch to some other problem area.
Pardon me for not reading all preceeding posts.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

IAMTHEWIN — Thu, 24 May 2007 17:51:54 -0000

Today I googled for 10 minutes to find a way to fake Red Hat on CentOS.

Without google I would have ended up installing M$ 2003 (which is pretty darn far from open source). Thank you Google - I love you.

All problems are simple once you find the solution. This is what google is about - solve your problem in the shortest ammount of time. Does Google make people dumb? Don't ask me, ask Google.

Sincerely

Jan

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Nathan — Mon, 21 May 2007 09:53:42 -0000

I'd have to go with no.

Google is a fantastic reference.

Lawyers don't memorize all the laws. They have books to reference. Accountants don't memorize every formula, etc. they keep reference books so they can look it up when they need to, Google is used in the same manner. Most things we use Google to do in a reference sense are things we've already had experience with. If anything, Google allows us to be more productive by allowing us to focus more specifically on the task at hand.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

John Hancock — Thu, 17 May 2007 08:12:15 -0000

Thanks for the clarification, Stan. Yes, my reply was a bit off the real point of your post, which was that we are losing the skills of memory. As a member of probably the last memorising generation in the developed world, I have to agree with you.

One of the characters in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.â€™s "Breakfast of Champions" (a boomer classic!) is a young African med student in the USA. Back home, in a pre-literary culture, he had been the person of his generation who, according to tradition, had to memorise all of his familyâ€™s ancestors, going back over 100 generations. The young med student is far from his native village, in an alien land, homesick and horny, but he was able to cope because he was constantly â€œâ€¦swimming in a river of ancestorsâ€.

Compared to this kind of monumental, prehistoric intelligence, looking up our family tree on a website doesnâ€™t make us â€œdumberâ€ than Vonnegutâ€™s African med student, but it certainly makes us more banal. It doesnâ€™t change the way we live or who we are, in the way his total recall of thousands of forebears made him profoundly different from his classmates.

Returning from past fiction to present reality, I and others my age seem to spot â€œthinkingâ€ errors in spreadsheet analyses and financial reports more easily than our young associates. Most of the oldies agree itâ€™s because we learned arithmetic by rote memorisation, then performed long calculations by hand, using pencil and paper. We developed mental images of the logical and arithmetical â€œshapesâ€ of complicated problems, frankly to help us spot errors without having to go over every single calculation.

We also developed â€“ and many of us still carry â€“ mental images of geographical, historical, and scientific information. Returning to the Google issue, those mental images allow me to find more information, better information, faster on the net than the youngest and most web-savvy kids in the office. Things I memorised 50 years ago in primary school make me a far better proofreader than the spell-checker and grammar-checker tools in any word-processing package.

Your thesis is that carrying this stuff around in our heads makes us baby boomers â€œsmarter.â€ (At least those of us who didnâ€™t forget everything during the â€˜60s or subsequently dumb down by abusing Google.) Iâ€™m still uncomfortable with â€œsmarter,â€ but I do believe anybody who has memorised a lot of facts and stories is a bit like Vonnegutâ€™s young African med student. We enjoy a â€œricherâ€ or â€œdeeperâ€ experience of what we see, hear, and read, than do those whose educations focused on accessing single-use information, whether online or through other media, then discarding it from their memories after it had served its purpose.

Anyway, thank you again for letting me participate in this discussion thread. Whether itâ€™s made me smarter or dumber I could care less. It has certainly enriched my life.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

simon — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:03:01 -0000

umm... isn't this how google is making us dumber, rather than why google is making us dumber? or are they doing it intentionally?

i should google it to find out...

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

the count — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:27:48 -0000

But beware that different search engines return entirely different result sets - try your google searches in altavista and note the differences. I've found some really great sites on altavista that google never found.

Not just that maybe google returned it as the 1 millionth entry that I never got around to, but searches that return a few dozen, or even a few hundred, and I actually do go through the whole list, and the results are just different.

Google may claim to index the entire web, but clearly there is something going on there that causes them to not display every site meeting a given search criteria.

The point being that just because you googled for something doesn't mean you necessarily got all, or even the best, results possible. There could be other websites out there that would better serve your needs that google won't/can't tell you about.

Rely too heavily on google at your own peril. At a minimum, use multiple search engines for anything really important to you.

(Although obviously things like currency conversions and metric to english conversions don't need to be double checked)

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Srinivas — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:18:26 -0000

Exactly, exactly! When I first started writing, I wrote with a chalk, and then a pencil, even when fancy pens were a plenty.
My kids will still learn tables, still learn the conversions and capital cities..But late in the night when they are asleep and when I have to confirm what the capital city of Yemen is, I'll go Google it up!

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Srinivas — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:13:48 -0000

Oh yes, that's why I have three gmail accounts!
My wife's very happy every time I get a new gmail account, LOL.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Marco Mugnatto — Tue, 15 May 2007 10:20:21 -0000

"Back in the old days, everyone wrote HTML by hand. Then these fancy (crappy) programs came along to write HTML for you."

This allowed people to concentrate on coding, and made the web more interactive (this is what's called the Web 2.0). This is the way any evolution goes.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Marco Mugnatto — Tue, 15 May 2007 10:10:48 -0000

This hasn't changed in centuries

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Christopher P. Kile — Tue, 15 May 2007 10:09:20 -0000

You note this change as if it started happening just yesterday. Before the printing press made books cheap enough for everyone to have access, your ability to use book knowledge depended on your memory of the book. Back then, scholars and savants built their "memory house" and wallpapered it with remembered pictures, descriptions, concepts, procedures, and algorithms from the books they'd read; the best of these could actually read these pages from a "palace of memory" tapestried with every page they'd ever read (a skill rare in that time and very rare these days).

We don't require these memory skills as much as we used to, and it IS a weakness: Often when your survival or your well-being is suddenly put in jeopardy, Google isn't handy. Even when Google is handy, and as good as Google is, you have to learn how to get it to focus for you (just as you had to with earlier search engines) to get the best effect, and that often requires developing AND remembering "rules-of-thumb" to help you do this.

Re: Why Google Is Making Us Dumber

Marco Mugnatto — Tue, 15 May 2007 10:09:10 -0000

Totally agree. We are not robots. Evolution is this: things that were hard before become easy now, and it allows us to open new frontiers, and those new doors are as hard as the old ones, they are only different. Note: english in not my native language.