The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#2I've often wondered whether McArthur Wheeler - the lemon juice disguised bank robber discussed in this article - actually had some mental challenges rather than lacked common sense. It seems a whole branch of academia has grown off his unfortunate back...
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#3I've often wondered whether McArthur Wheeler - the lemon juice disguised bank robber discussed in this article - actually had some mental challenges rather than lacked common sense. It seems a whole branch of academia has grown off his unfortunate back...
Is this real? It is unbelievable.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#4Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not understanding why the winner won.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#5Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not understanding why the winner won.
I think a variation on this is a key factor of life and culture in engineering - at some point, either what you made works, or it doesn't. You can argue, debate, philosophize and talk, but at the end of the day - there's either a working thing someone else can look at, or there's not.
(I imagine this is true in other places - sales, business, design - it just gets increasingly hard to tell "if it worked")
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#6There's another category that fits beautifully with this article. Critical thinking. The article focuses on knowledge domains. It would also benefit from discussing the ability to correlate facts or deduce conclusions based on prior knowledge.
I often talk about domestic violence because it's a fundamental issue of ethics: why all western media outlets only focus on fully grown white women, ignoring government bureaus of statistics that dispel such an obvious fallacy that drives victims to be starved of funding and support based on their sex. What we see is that the ability to critically think, to correlate information, to ascertain truth (even when presented with hard numbers from an authoritative source such as governments) is compromised.
There's a deeper issue beyond knowledge domains. Is this linked to a change of emphasis/importance in our virtual society? Are we becoming encyclopaedias of partial truths (ie. knowing lists of discrete information without aggregation and without deeper understanding)?
The Internet opened up a new world. There are many fewer older people on the Internet. That collective wisdom that comes with age is often lost. I don't know if it's this collective loss of knowledge on the Internet, whether it's Facebook's filters that only tell a person what they want to hear, whether it's information overload, or a combination of factors that appear to have changed our focus from gathering knowledge to gathering information.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#7"The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand Russell
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#8Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not understanding why the winner won.
Some players end up being non-transitive though.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#9I see this sort of thing on Hacker News all the time. Programmers that are, I'm sure, the top of their field comment in threads about biology or something out of their field with the most silly and wrong answers. A thread about nutrition or something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain. That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it. :)
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#10Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not understanding why the winner won.
I think a variation on this is a key factor of life and culture in engineering - at some point, either what you made works, or it doesn't. You can argue, debate, philosophize and talk, but at the end of the day - there's either a working thing someone else can look at, or there's not. (I imagine this is true in other places - sales, business, design - it just gets increasingly hard to tell "if it worked")
You're right, but sales, business and design have too many variables involved in the apparent success of what you make, so you're not able to safely verify what "worked".
Even in engineering, two people can make something that "works", but which one is better? Maybe the worst product had the better marketing, so it sold more and in the end there are more people praising it, then you'll think it is better.