Are books killing the oral tradition? The ability to recite long tracts from memory, from The Odyssey to bread recipes, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be looked up in a book?
"It's a damn shame" say out of work poets everywhere.
nope, I skimmed and got the impression that it was making the point that people don't distinguish between offloading knowledge and offloading responsibility for how the knowledge is used. To jump from a few examples of that to the headline is too big to swallow. thus my quip.
I've read up on debates about this subject before, and there are far better arguments on both sides than this article presents.
The article just barely touches on the main point: without general knowledge in your head, you can't put things into context.
One person cited in the article proposes that the trade-off is between learning to analyze vs. learning facts. That doesn't sound plausible, since facts are what you analyze and general background facts are the main things that enable you to analyze well.
The real trade-off is simply between which millions of facts people are learning as they grow up. The Internet, in the last 10 years or so, has pushed toward learning facts of immediate currency, like celebrity gossip and scandals and pop-culture memes. This is because the Internet continually dumps more information than anyone can take in, and the economy is based on competition for current attention.
The real shift is from contextual understanding to tactical skill, or you could say, from wisdom to immediate payoffs.
Answer: Google is killing many kinds of Trivia. For example, I always have to look up how to link external CSS.
Google is also teaching people more than ever (e.g. I know many more definitions of words than I ever would have looked up without Google). Google (more Wikipedia) gives me instant summaries of complex topics or figures or events, which I remember.
Not sure what point you're making here. It doesn't really say anything about a programmer if he/she forgets the semicolons when writing out a C++ function by hand. Especially if this person is constantly juggling many different language syntaxes, some of which have line terminators and some not.
The function logic is wrong; yes, that's a problem. But forgetting the semicolons has no significance whatsoever.
Take another look at that code. If someone makes that many mistakes in a short space, then even if any one of those mistakes is forgivable, it reveals that they are not a good programmer.
there's some truth to that, but if you're interviewing for a job where you'll be doing a lot of CSS and claim you've been doing a lot of CSS, its also pretty reasonable to assume you can remember the things you do every day.
I always think its really lame when an interview candidate claims they can't possible show me an example of iterating over a collection in the language they use every day because they don't have intellisense, autocomplete or google.
I always have to look up how to link external CSS.
Your framework doesn't just do that for you?
Edit to downmodders:
I'm not being flip or sarcastic. In all seriousness, if you're writing repetitive boilerplate - and particularly if you have to look that repetitive boilerplate up - you should be using some kind of templating system that does the repetitive (and hence programmable) stuff for you.
It could be as simple as a text file web page template with the proper doctype and generic css / javascript imports already typed out. You'll save yourself time and aggravation and reduce the incidence of silly mistakes.
You're right and you're wrong. I don't know if on balance you should be downmodded.
Yes, your framework should have a shortcut for boilerplate like that, so you don't have to type it every time. I have worked with numerous frameworks, and I am in fact building one myself: jperla webify. Please notice that to include this feature in my framework I had to look it up using Google because I didn't know!
I have to look it up every time precisely because my framework usually does it for me.
But also, what is your framework's magical shortcut function to link the external CSS? I don't know because 1. it's not standardized across frameworks like html is, 2. it's often coded in automatically (e.g. rails asset-packager) so I practice it little and never learn it. Like I said, I know a number of frameworks intimately, but not this trivia. I have to look it up. Google does, however, teach me the high-level concepts about the benefits of using a web framework and asset packager.
Finally, sometimes I just bang out a quick 1 page of static html with 1 statically linked CSS file (for debugging or mocking or random wanton fun) for which a framework would be wasteful overhead.
"...should schoolchildren be taught the capital of Colombia? "
Should bodybuilders lift weights?
Should basketball players run on off days?
OP never mentions what learning facts really is: exercise.
The purpose of education isn't to know the capital of Columbia. The purpose of education is to learn. Which requires exercise. Just like the body, the mind needs exercise, too.
There are as many ways to exercise the mind as the body, some better than others. Like taking the elevator, using a search engine may get you the answer faster, but not much mental muscle is built.
The trouble is that I often don't know what a "useful fact" is even after I've learned it. I certainly don't expect to be able to figure that out before I've learned it!
A segment I once saw on Reading Rainbow (airdate: 1986) recently changed my life. Trivial factoid for 2 decades, then boom, useful data point. Nobody could have predicted the set of experiences I'd have that would create a context in which this was useful.
When my dad was in college, a classmate of his complained that he'd never need something taught in a particular course. The professor's response was "The only way to be sure of that is to take the course!" (If you still think it was worthless on your deathbed, I'll give you a refund...)
If you can figure out a priori what's going to be important without knowing it, I'd like to see your stock portfolio. :-)
And who should be the judge of "useful", student or teacher?
I've never had to run from a tiger (fortunately). But I'm sure glad I put in the roadwork to be healthy enough to catch a bus or pick up my luggage. If I didn't know any better I would have thought I was wasting my time back then.
I strongly dispute the idea that memorizing facts not useful to oneself is useful "exercise" for memorizing facts that one finds useful.
I, for one, did relatively poorly in secondary school not least because I was primarily learning about computing and programming, in my spare time, when I "should" have been doing homework. Most of school time spent "learning facts" was a * * waste of time * *.
I'd call that a poor excuse. The bodybuilder can name and point to the muscle he's exercising. He doesn't practice by lifting some random heavy object (piano, car, girder) that might not even use the muscle group in question.
When I see education justified with that excuse, I'm tempted to say "OK, replace that with a targeted exercise", because I know the reaction would be horror. Exercise is the way you sell the task to skeptical persons. The actual aim is to require them to learn the capital of Colombia. Just because.
no, using a search engine saves you from having to remember things, freeing the mind to focus on the actual mental agility of processing the facts, reasoning, finding connections etc.
The mind needs exercise, but remembering facts that are trivial isn't helping much.
Think of Google as the calculator for knowledge. A calculator saves you from having to find the square root of a number, allowing you to figure out something useful and meaningful from the answer.
no, I thought about it. It's not a conclusion, its a supporting comment. Think what gives your brain the most exercise, remembering the 15th decimal place of PI or working out in your head how much extra light enters an aperture when you increase the radius by 20%.
using a search engine saves you from having to remember things
Being able to pagefault into Googling something is very different from knowing it off-hand. You're easily able to relate and see patterns in immediate knowledge, but not in things you'd need to look up.
If anything, I know more now than I would have without Google. I tend to look up words and interesting facts I don't know on my palm when I am out and about and run into something I don't know much about.
I think 'general knowledge' is a moving target. Like any other power tool google changes your abilities to a different level, the brain cycles you were using before to remember things can now be applied to other items of interest.
Whether you do so or not is up to each individual.
A parallel development is the address book in mobile phones. I used know all the phone numbers of all my acquaintances by heart, now that my phone remembers them that 'skill' is absolutely atrophied.
The only phone number I remember now is my own...
If anything google is enabling people to find general knowledge, not kill it. The trick about information always was to be able to find it and use it, not necessarily to remember it, even though a good memory is obviously an asset.
Google is just a backing mechanism from which we can page-fault into memory. If we have to do it repeatedly, it'll end up in long-term memory, but that long-term working set of memory will be different for everybody, so the value of trying to teach it in school is somewhat lessened.
That's apart from school's other purposes, such as light introductions to topics you otherwise might not look into, and state-controlled cultural and political indoctrination.
In essence, Google / the web has added another layer to the human cache hierarchy, in between long-term memory and the written word (traditionally on paper and incoveniently non-colocated).
You know it's really crazy, but imagine how it will be in the future? What will it be like when we have some technology where it will be possible to get an answer from google in the space of a second no matter where you are?
We're getting close with cell phones but I'd say it might take about 20 seconds to get the answer. That's still a big enough barrier to keep you from asking it everything. But eventually we'll have some sort of device that will have us connected to information at all times. I don't know how it will manifest itself (wearable computers, maybe a wristwatch?) but it's surely coming.
now for some content-addressable memory of that size...
Our brains are not really comparable with digital computers in one respect though: Just like TTL logic does not have resistors or diodes but only transistors our brains do not have cells specializing in remembering, controlling or evaluation but only processors.
Each of them is very simple but the quantity of them and their amazing connectivity is what gives us our amazing pattern recognition abilities.
"It's a damn shame" say out of work poets everywhere.