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Comment by nul_byte | Hacker News Reader

Access to information has been a double edged sword as well.

I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time.

Experts back then, were really experts. There was a clear line between expert, hobbyist, and passing interest.

Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.

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Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.

I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched a YouTube video about the origins of cavalry and how long it took after the domestication of horses before anyone tried riding into battle on the backs of the horses. Chariots, on the other hand, were widely used much earlier. Just from that 20 minute video I learned a lot about an important part of history, and I know that if I wanted to I could spend a few hours, right from home, learning far more about it than I could have gotten from days or weeks of research in libraries when I was growing up.

Lindybeige is a fantastic explainer when it comes to that sort of thing - it also highlights how quickly a person can go from knowing nothing to practically hobbyist levels of knowledge in 20 minutes post internet

I was wondering if anyone would catch the reference :)

Scott Adams - creator of Dilbert - was recently ridiculed for suggesting that someone could become an expert on a topic after an hour of talking with the brightest minds in that field. While "expert" needs to be defined, I don't think it's far fetched.

How many times have we had that conversation with someone who knows their topic backwards and forwards and after minutes, we have a deeper understanding of it than almost anyone around. Expand that out to an hour with a few key/relevant questions to frame the conversation and it is totally believable.

I recently attended a lecture by Hadley Wickham on his latest tools built for R. It was both edifying and deeply saddening. I learned a great deal about R in a short time from (IMHO) one of the masters, and I realized that if Haldey is typical of a Rice University professor I should have challenged myself to get a better education than I did.

As an aside, if you're interested in history and you don't yet follow Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, you're really missing out. He's great at finding sources, his historiography is sound and just heterodox enough to be appealing, and the man can tell a story like nobody's business - definitely worth the time of anyone with an interest in the subject.

Yes indeed. Libraries. Walking around the stacks looking for books in college and not necessarily knowing what would be in the book other than what was briefly described by the card catalog. You couldn't wikipedia a topic, so you had to really know how to scan a books contents and decide if it was worth the time to read. It was such a huge time commitment to learn anything at all from books back then. I love learning but I don't think that books/libraries were a better way to find information than the internet is. Every book should be digitized in my opinion.

Interestingly the internet (and computers in general) has made libraries better as well. I can search for pretty much any book using my local library's website, click a button and have it available within a few days for pickup at my local branch. The library will send me email reminders and will auto-renew books a number of times when they are about to come due.

We had bibliographies and reviews even before the internet. Back then you filled in your interlibrary loan request, the library would sent it out to its correspondence libraries, and only within a few days the postcard would come, telling you that your book was available for pickup.

That said, bibliographic databases have been around since computers. They were just restricted to librarians, mostly because of infrastructure issues.

If its a double edged sword, the positive edge is massive and sharp and very useful, and the negative edge of the sword is like a little needle, that perhaps provides a slight pain in the arse now and then. I remember before, and after is so much better.

The negative edge is what allows Donald Trump to be a viable candidate for President of the United States. It allows people with extreme views who before would have not had close contact with more than a handful of people with similar views (and then often only through inefficient means like a monthly newsletter and its letters column) to find each other and effectively organize in groups large enough to have an impact.

The same goes for the anti-vaccination folks, the "climate change is not real" folks, the anti-fluoridation folks, the anti-bike lane/trail and anti-public park people [1], and more.

[1] Yes, they are real. Bike lanes and public parks, they believe, are part of a UN agenda to make cities more attractive so that the population will concentrate in the cities, which will make it easier to impose martial law and confiscate guns. Before the internet this would have been a total joke. Now those people can organize, and show up in large groups at city council meetings considering parks and bike lanes, and get those projects killed.

Yeah, it's amazing how a tool that let's you find all the facts led to people finding all the facts they want and already believe and using that to further dig themselves into a hole that they believe is real.

Though it was easier to just control the masses with TVs and radios - they cant talk back, so you can spout whatever you want at them and they'll follow.

Pretty sure that Trump would've been just as popular today if the Internet was not around.

If the media liked him, he could have been a far more popular presidential candidate without the internet. In those places where the local press liked Trump, people would think he was the only viable candidate.

The internet has made people wiser and more savvy too. They've stopped one interest group from being able to make their views and messages seem like the only one.

I read Umberto Eco's guide to writing an academic thesis in early 00's; I'm too young to have first-hand experience how people did academic research before internet, but the book was from late 1970s, and the description of importance of using bibliographies and other such sources and indexes was intriguing.

I thought it was a useful source for Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1920s, where investigators are supposed how to use libraries effectively.

Link to review of English translation: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis

And oh, I recently tried starting a habit of keeping an up-to-date directory of greppable markdown notes with links to the papers and books I've read, directly inspired by Eco's index card system and his gigantic private library.

One of the goals of technology is to increase the speed of knowledge transfer. So someone today can get to "expert" level of knowledge in a subject in a fraction of the time that it would have taken three decades ago. That's a good thing.

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