A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out.
And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.
I'm the sort of person who would happily spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of Greece and frown upon anybody who tried to Google it. I like the fun, social 'game' of trying to work out random stuff from a few first principles . Having someone Google for it and tell me is like someone telling me the ending of a movie. Sure it saves me the two hours having to sit though the movie, but it kind of misses the point. It's not like I actually care about what the population of Greece is.
Now I wish people online would put a huge disclaimer saying "I'm only interested in arguing for the fun of it, not in finding an actual solution" before their posts. That would have saved countless hours of online typing wasted for nothing.
I mean, nothing wrong with finding it fun to discuss. But I wish I could accurately tell when that's the person's goal, versus whether it's a person who actually finds solving real problems more fun than talking, like I do.
Well, anyway, already learned something new today. My day is complete.
edit: wow this is bigger than I thought, now I've been reading through older HN posts where I was mind-blown about "why would he even post that? What's his motivation?". Now I feel like I can finally make sense out of it. I feel so stupid for never noticing something so simple. The world is different now.
I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though, where Googling clearly has benefit to help the conversation achieve its goals faster.
I say this not to you, but to people on the board in general. Given that I've seen self-centred comments like "I considered the project a success because I got paid and I had fun doing it", rather than thinking about the bigger picture, I can totally see people thinking thoughts like "Don't tell me how long it would take them to make and deliver 15 pizzas, I want to figure out on my own when is the latest we should give them a call, who cares what time people will arrive for the party? The important thing is having fun figuring out how late I can call the pizza place."
Sorry I can't think of a better example.
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/07/27/anchoring-effect/
Is the population of Venezuela greater or fewer than 65 million?
Go ahead and guess.
Ok, another question, how many people do you think live Venezuela?
I'm talking about cases where trying to solve a Fermi problem wasn't the context.
Most of my conversation are about ideas and strategies, not characteristics. Like 98% of them. Maybe a little less, let say 96.5%. Or 95%, what do you think?
It is incredibly annoying when I hear them repeating the wrong information later on.
"Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."
A lot of people I know argue against this line of thinking but they're usually missing the point. The "problem" isn't that information is readily available ("that's fine," he says) but that the exercise of wondering is often worthwhile and under-appreciated. There's value in not knowing and wondering why.
and on and on.
Finally one of them opens a horse's mouth and counts...
They couldn't give two shits that I had wikipedia.
In modern architecture after the boisterous 1920's when design was seeking to incorporate the concept of the machine and industrial life into our domestic living, designers found themselves in the 30's longing for more organic expressions. Life had changed. The economy had crashed and values shifted.
Just because technology is available does not mean it is always what people want or even that people will use it to its utmost capacity. Sometimes we just want to hang out.
Is using a phone for browsing (I guess that's the only way you could) during a conversation that common?
If you tell them that their facts are wrong then their only choice is to disregard that knowledge, else they could be wrong.
"Please, continue arguing! Don't let reality get in your way."
You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain.
I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips?
This is also why I love man pages.
Edit: Just in case anyone is not aware check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
I was asking if anyone knew of the easiest way and I see some options below. Thanks, I'll look into those.
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20120802/
Your choice whether to get the current snapshot or an archive of all edits from the beginning of time.
Amazing how 7zip can achieve 100-1 compression, so that all articles plus all edits are only 62 GB compressed.
Not sure why dumps don't occur more often though.
Try the wget command line tool; it's generally useful for site-mirroring. "wget --mirror" will recursively download an entire website; if it is impractical to download all of Wikipedia, you may test with the option "-l <recursion depth limit>" to get only a part; then "-p" will make it get all images and whatever needed to display the pages in question. And if you want to only get the text pages/reject the images, the "-A" and/or "-R" options may be useful. Consult the man page and experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Eng...
(Further explanation regarding the use of robots, spiders and 'wget -m' here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Ple... )
It's an art now though. You have to pick little tidbits that SOUND plausible but you can never really verify.
I, for example, told my (American) flatmate months ago that no living person other than current sitting monarch can appear on a British postage stamp. Had to backtrack when the Royal Mail announced every British gold medal winner at London 2012 would get their own stamp.
... and click "Save" :)
It's unbelievable how many "facts" nowadays lead to some lone blog or wiki article with no references.
Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of 500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit.
> Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error.
I don't even know how com sci algorithm courses pose a challenge anymore. Google was barely a thing when I took it and when we occasionally stumbled on obscure papers with it (or Excite), it was like finding the teacher's answer book out in the open.
> Where you had to actually call your friends or family to see what they were up to.
This is not such a loss. I think back when you had to call people, your conversations had to be more deliberate (i.e. I'm calling Jane to break up with her/give condolences about her dead mother) and planned. Not planned out in what you were going to say, necessarily, but planned out in that you wouldn't just call up a non-close friend and have a lengthy conversation with them. Whereas with online chat and Facebook, I've had long rewarding conversations with people whom I may never had the temerity to cold-call about anything.
Talking bullshit would mean knowingly lying. John paid me for a service I told him I could perform, but I was bullshitting him when I said that. I can't actually perform the service. The mayor campaigned on lower taxes, but he knew he wouldn't be able to change that law.
as an example, I find when I have to look up the syntax for each.. and... every.. function... my programming proceeds at a snails pace. Just an example.
Someone shows him a blueprint and he just happens to know X because (I can't remember, something he did last week) and that's such a little thing, but everyone is "wow!" and then someone else asks him a question and really, Y is the obvious answer because square root Z is (something something something) and everyone says "wow".
It ends up that Feynman worked on a lot of stuff, all the time, and remembered a lot of it.
I guess Feynman wouldn't have remembered his phone number unless it had some interesting characteristic.
When you're in a meeting or conversing with someone who just knows things, the conversation moves so very much faster than if you have to guess or be vague due to a lack of knowledge.
I Google like crazy for answers about things, but I consider not knowing a failure on my part, and endeavor to learn the thing I had to google, so I don't have to "fail" again. I think everyone should think of this problem in a similar way, lest we fall into a habit of saying whatever we want and assuming we'll be corrected if we're wrong (or some other ill).
Interesting consequence, one person, who had just created a new web page using a GUI website building tool a moment before, tried to get to the site by googling it and was surprised that it did not show up in the search results. I explained that the site was just created and Google hadn't indexed it yet. The person just gave me a blank stare.
Access to information will tell you a number, or an answer, or even give you an amount of text about something. But knowledge lets you understand the bigger picture - how something came to be, or why.
At some point we become the needle on the gramophone, rather than the record. All we can say is what we've heard or read. It's the opposite of thinking, and it makes me worry.
Check out his short story Fast Times At Fairmont High[1] and the short Synthetic Serendipity[2].
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor...
[2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...
eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".
You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every chapter.
And then you've got two problems :) https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%...
I don't really appreciate people who want to "sit around and wonder about shit they can look up". I'd much rather sit around and think or discuss things that cannot be looked up, to define myself as a person based on opinions I form within documented knowledge...
Do I personally subscribe to absolute or relative morality? Thanks to documented knowledge, I have a decent grasp of the concepts, so I can have an informed think about the question. On the other hand, I could sit around arguing with a bunch of hipsters trying to figure out what the difference is (if there's enough time left after the preceding argument over whether or not water boils at lower temperatures in high altitudes).
And honestly, I've always looked things up, I had a set of old encyclopedias I bought from the library for about $10 when I was a kid, and if they didn't have what I was looking for I could go to the actual library and look through drawers of cards or microfilm to find the answer. I remember looking stuff up on computers about 20 years ago on SIRS, and even before that via BBS files.
Finding information is mainstream now, and all the pseudo intellectuals are crying because their power base of personally invented knowledge is crumbling and they lack the mental faculties to think freely on a higher level and reason for themselves.
There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts. Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out.
> All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge.
What? First, sophistry, has little to do with anything I wrote. Second, I'm most certainly endorsing knowledge.
> There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts.
Really? Do you have little slots for them on your spice rack? Logic and facts are the fabric of reality. This a comment I'd expect from someone desperately wanting to be right despite being pathologically wrong.
> Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out.
How was I focusing on one? Logic and facts are complimentary, and even if you somehow exclusively focused on one, how would that lead to extreme open-mindedness? And how is being open-minded bad? (You are also misusing the "being so open-minded their brain falls out" quote which is meant to meant to convey that you should be open-minded [good] but not foolishly accepting of poorly formulated ideas [bad]) What do you even mean by this comment? It is nonsense.
I think you read my comment, self identify as a hipster or "bullshitter", had an emotional response of wanting to retort and instead wrote a post that illustrated one of my points.
I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C programming.
I think it's utterly awesome. Combined with viable wearable computing I know everything ever put online. Just might take me a few moments to remember it (search time/connection speed).
It is the #1 reason copyright limitation, net neutrality, information freedom must be fought for.
Tweets are more instant and just more human IMO. It means you can better leverage your understanding of human behaviour when you try to search for things.
Similarly, we used to have to wonder about simple facts. Now though simple facts are at our finger tips leaving us to move directly to the deeper more interesting topics.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboac...
It's behind a paywall, but you can read a number of commentaries, e.g.: http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory
I've become that guy, that whenever a sticky fact comes up for debate, people just turn to me because they know I'll be looking it up.
What I really enjoy is when some asshole refutes the evidence and stops talking to me. For good.
