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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

This concept is essentially the reason why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer.” The former treats a piece of information as an independent, context-free item, while the latter allows you to “digest” the information and understand the answer at a deeper level, to the point where it changes the types of questions you ask.

Unfortunately our society doesn’t seem to recognize this and actively encourages not learning certain facts because they are easily googleable.

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Fortunately, Google exists so you can learn new things and develop foundational knowledge. Its all about what you do with the knowledge, and has little to do with the fact that you're Googling.

For example, I was Googling how to create a VM hypervisor last night in FreeBSD. I know very little about hypervisors, but I've read many blog posts and now I know what they are, what they do, how to setup failover clusters, etc.

The point is, people don't really sit and read the things they look up. That's the bigger problem.

>>Google exists so you can learn new things and develop foundational knowledge

I know this is a shorthand heuristic but Google helps you _find_ other people that can help you learn new things and develop foundational knowledge.

The map is NOT the terrain.

Isn't it quite difficult to convince online strangers to really help you, for more than an answer in a forum ?

I think what he means is other people that have produced substantial works like books etc that are the actual resources you need to consume in order to gain the knowledge. Google helps you find peoples opinions of what good resources are to dive deep on a topic so you can then acquire and consume them.

Sometimes you can get linked directly to a great resource but IMHO the best stuff costs money and is usually worth it for the results that that particular incentive structure engenders.

There is also, practically, a massive gulf between:

1) Being vaguely aware that something exists and knowing you can Google for it.

2) Having such a deep, intuitive understanding of said thing that you can actually use knowledge of that thing to solve complex problems.

You can google for two, no?

Seems like a good deal of my job as a software engineer.

The new way to "google" something might become the next gig market.

"The next gig economy will be on-demand knowledge" (2019)

https://qz.com/work/1527544/the-next-gig-economy-will-be-on-...

This seems to be written by the CEO of a company that provides the exact service the article describes. That doesn't necessarily invalidate it, but I'd read it more as a business pitch than an honest, unbiased opinion.

You're being generous. Thinly veiled as a blog post advertising is such a common thing and so so transparent. I wouldn't treat this any differently than a banner ad on a website.

Google itself tried to validate the idea but ended up shutting it down in 2015. Google Helpouts used Google Hangouts to connect people with experts. If someone could make it a two-way street, and use credits instead of cash, it could become a time bank, which is what I'd really like to see proliferate.

If you know what to google for. It happened many times to me that I was unable to even know what/how to search for something or didn't know someone already solved that problem in ingenious ways and every specialist knew that, but I wasn't a specialist.

I'm a programmer but when I watch machining videos on YT I discover solutions to problems I've never thought would exist.

Ok, that's true when you are in a new domain and don't know the terminology well enough to google effectively.

This is circle of competence, another common topic on Farnam Street. It's knowing what you don't know so you can find out rather than puff up and fake it.

In cutting-edge domains, a lot of that won't be written down, so ungooglable by definition.

For example, in deep learning research, good labs were using good initialization functions before somebody bothered to write a research paper explaining why it was good idea. If you didn't work in one of those good labs and so were never told to do that, you would just struggle and say "yeah these deep nets suck they don't even converge".

There is also different of usage of Google.

There is a big difference between copy-pasting shit from stackoverflow and reading the whole documentation to understand why the hell this method was written this way.

I'd say the latter is much more "buffetian".

Precisely. I work in Ops with a dash of devops thrown in. My coworkers will "document" something by copying and pasting the commands used into a confluence page and calling it done.

Which isn't very useful when you come to something 18 months later wondering "why" rather than "how". Because "why" is often more useful than "how" when you are trying to troubleshoot something.

I guess it could be condensed to wisdom over knowledge, but how do you tell people that wisdom is valuable when they clearly don't want to hear that? Wisdom takes time and effort, knowledge is a copy and paste away.

Totally. Everyone that says "I hate maths" would shit their pants at how much they loved math if it didn't hurt their feelings and they could see it's raw power.

It's not deep part of your mental model if you have to Google for it. Though sometimes just having an awareness of something so that you can recognize this is a situation where it's useful and now is when you should Google for it is useful.

Learning shit deeply is such a game changer. There is no substitute.

There is a balance here.

Yes, I'm incredibly more productive in Python because I know the stdlib and most frameworks and tools API by heart.

But it took me 10 years of practice, and my daily rate is way more than it used to be. I'll also refuse a lot of gigs outright.

You want juniors to be able to work too, and you can't expect them to know the entire world. Yet they can be useful, worth the money, and a great addition to your team.

Besides, even I don't know all the answers. I can't. The field of IT moves too quickly. I have to select what to learn, and what I set aside as "something I can google". There is no other choice, because we are limited in time and space.

But beyond that, you may want to sacrifice efficiency in some (or many) areas to preserve your energy, divide it in several activities, or just keep it to do something else that is not learning related.

That's if you limit the scope of the article to IT only though.

If you extend the scope to your entire life it's vastly different. It's easy to feel smart because you have all the (written) knowledge of the world at the tips of your fingers at any time.

I know people who constantly talk about articles they read earlier in the day, etc ... information get diluted from 10s studies, to an article, to a recap of the article this guy read, to this guy talking about the 10% of the article he remembers.

Sure it's fun and interesting but it's not "learning" or "knowledge", in 2 weeks he won't even remember it.

Actually, I find having a superficial knowledge of a lot of topics pretty useful as well. It opens perspectives, and opportunities. And there is not enough time in a day to read everything, listen to everything, watch everything, practice everything. Shortcuts are fine.

But as you say, "It's easy to feel smart". That's the real problem: you don't know what you don't know, and you should not get cocky.

> It opens perspectives, and opportunities.

I completely agree on that, but as you said, there is just so many things to read / watch / learn, and it's so easily reachable that we often end up with "choice paralysis".

I don't have a crystallised opinion on the subject but instinctively I'd argue that picking a few topics and getting a good in depth knowledge of them is more valuable than splitting your attention span on so many things that in 10 years from now you won't really have anything to show.

Personally I see that as any other kind of distractions, it's easy to hop on from topics to topics, learn the absolute minimum about it, get our quick fix of dopamine making us feel good about "learning something" while you haven't actually learned anything valuable and will most likely forget about it in the next days or weeks. Not saying that we should avoid that at all cost, but it's nice to be aware of it.

Edit: seems like I could end all my posts by a quote from Seneca.

"Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read. "But," you reply, "I wish to dip first into one book and then into another." I tell you that it is the sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied, they cloy but do not nourish. So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...

Google is inherently a shallow net, it does not trawl the depths of information. It's made for finding what's easily seen on the surface, what's most interconnected/viewed by others/what Google wants to be on the surface.

If you learn to use Google scholar, for instance, you'll quickly find a skilled scholar searcher can find really great, really specific material. The question then is can you integrate and internalize that information, as Buffett does?

True. Both for the importance of Google Scholar, but also the question of integration .

One way of course, is using your internal memory. But it's rather limited. Unless you're buffet like.

But what about creating an external memory ? Maybe not as usefull as your brain, but much more usefull than Googling ?

I've tried to do so with evernote. It somewhat work. But surely , it's not the person best that's possible.

The "knowledge graph" and "personal knowledge base" community is working on it! Although in a lot of little projects; nothing unified that I know of. Here's a project I worked on for a while, which lets you maintain a Neo4j database via an Emacs frontend:

https://github.com/synchrony/smsn

Here's something I'm working on now -- extremely expressive, but no app yet:

https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...

I'm working on this problem myself [0]. The app allows you to map out topics of interest as though making a mind map, building out subtopics that are as specific as needed to really become acquainted with an area of knowledge. And later on you'll be able to come back and refresh your memory about what you reviewed, and possibly drill down into some of the articles people recommended but you didn't have time to read at the time.

Interestingly, I chose the name "Digraph" independently of the repo that a sibling comment refers to, after observing the way the topics relate to one another.

[0] https://digraph.app/

It's shocking to me how every thread about anki and spaced repetition is full of people questioning if remembering information has any value.

Yes that is interesting, remembering stuff is LITERALLY what our brains are supposed to do yet the very idea of spaced repetition is treated with immediate suspicion.

Worth mentioning that looking things up vs. learning and then knowing everything isn't a binary choice, there are degrees.

Just as an example, there is a difference between knowing roughly what to google and then looking up everything you need to know for a task, and knowing exactly what you want to do and googling to look up the execution details which you don't remember.

This is only correct reasoning if you assume that every time someone google's something, they do so from a clean slate.

They are not either or. You do not need to know facts. You need to know how to recognize good and bad answers.

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