I Google everything • Hacker News Board

Re: I Google everything

#81

Post by minikites » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

blaabjerg wrote: post #70

minikites wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch out for the Anchoring Effect: 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?

That's interesting, thanks for the link. Apparently I'm not like most people, as I guessed 20 million. Maybe the fact that you made me aware of potential cognitive bias affected the outcome, I don't know.

It's cognitive biases all the way down. :)

Re: I Google everything

#82

Post by wazoox » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:14 PM UTC

Memory is an essential, invaluable tool to support knowledge. Knowledge isn't an accumulation of facts, and it's important to chain them into coherent ensembles to be able to understand them, therefore training and enhancing intelligence. I both try to remember everything of significance (NOT factoids, or phone numbers) AND google everything. This is absolutely not contradictory.

Re: I Google everything

#83

Post by dripton » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:17 PM UTC

tyler_ball wrote: post #46

I have friends that don't even type URLs anymore, they just type 'youtube' into google every time and click the first result.

Now that some browsers have merged the URL bar with the web search bar, you will end up doing this whether you want to or not. And even if it's obviously a URL rather than a search term, Chrome (by default) sends every URL you type to google.com for autocomplete. (For the ten minutes between when I found this feature and I found out how to disable it, I was really angry at Google.)

Re: I Google everything

#84

Post by mej10 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:41 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #27

Great article. 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 secon…

In my experience, people primarily bring up "factual" information when trying to argue some point.

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."

Re: I Google everything

#85

Post by bwang29 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:55 PM UTC

Very interesting read. It makes me wonder if it is all about access time and the complexity of the query, then to what extent could "Google everything" be able to outsource our brain space?

Re: I Google everything

#86

Post by stfu » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:59 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #35

vecinu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.

For what it's worth me and all my friends have post-secondary education and we all consider looking stuff up on the phone at the pub bad form and only to be done if after we've either come up with a valid guess or are completely stumped after having given it our best shot.

Some companies, mostly in the consulting sector, are even making these kind of question part of the job interview. The idea is about coming up with close-enough numbers based on a series of realistic assumptions.

Re: I Google everything

#87

Post by Claudus » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

illuminate wrote: post #80

Claudus wrote: post #49

I'm a free thinker. 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…

All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge. 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.

What a nonsensical comment.

> 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.

Re: I Google everything

#88

Post by __abc » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:33 PM UTC

Anyone else hit 'command + w' to see what it does to then have the damn window exit on them ..... ARGH!!!! :)

Re: I Google everything

#89

Post by Karunamon » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:36 PM UTC

Who's the overly-PC type who removed the "fucking" from the title that was originally here?

Re: I Google everything

#90

Post by cinch » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:42 PM UTC

vibrunazo wrote: post #60

dagw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 movi…

That's interesting. I didn't know people would think like that. Your post explains a lot, now the world makes much more sense. Thanks for posting it :) 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…

"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."

there's many things that get expressed "between the lines". arguing for the fun of it has benefits. for one, ideas get exchanged, validated and who knows: maybe something useful comes out of it.