Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesausageking | Hacker News Reader

> I was truly the last general to experience what true boredom was like as a kid

Old guy chiming in. Every generation feels like this. Socrates lamented that becoming literate would "create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories." In the 16th century, Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, warned that the overabundance of information caused by the printing press was "confusing and harmful". In 1940s, radio had caused children to develop "the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker." In my time, similar concerns were raised about cable TV and the walkman.

View on HN

Pretty much all of the critics you mentioned were right in some small way. Relying on printed material does have downsides compared to memorization - for a modern example, consider the disadvantages of googling for information vs. actually learning it.

There’s a difference between Googling and comprehension. Google is a great substitute for remembering facts and details. It means there’s more room in my brain for concepts and things that can’t just be Googled for.

Treat Google as an augmentation of your brain. You both do what you’re good at (facts vs. concepts) and you end up better overall.

I don't know if I completely believe the more room for your memory part. That's my excuse for not memorizing things that take a few minutes to look up. I don't necessarily believe it as a truth. I've heard the memory of people in countries where paper is scarce tends to be amazing. This was before the everyone had a phone. I think we would have to measure how much memory is achievable for certain tasks before we can calculate room saved for concepts and where the threshold becomes an advantage. Anyway I'm a skeptic either way.

Concur: anything to lessen cognitive load.

It's depth vs breadth.

Depth is good but it limits breadth. Before internet, and then before printed books, being narrow-minded was easier.

With that, the easy accessibility of information also helps depth in those who care.

I feel I don't really understand the last line, in that I cannot find any disadvantages-

Google being so widely available means that people stop caring about memorizing things that are easily googleable, but that is pretty orthoganal to "actually learning". Google being available makes this distinction clear. If it can be easily googled for, it's a fact and remembering facts is for paper and bits. Most things aren't on google. Use your brain for the hard stuff.

The real challenge will be if you suddenly find yourself without Google one day. One big solar flare.. [1]

[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110302-sola...

There are people who believe an EMP — either intentional or otherwise — will one day bring the planet to a "The Day the Earth Stood Still" halt.

I disagree. It's more about how often or how deeply you need to leverage information. Having facts in one's brain for immediate integration and synthesis matters to the translator or chemist, for instance.

By having information in your brain, your subconscious self will have worked out how to apply it in clever and novel ways as an extension of your problem solving capacity.

You can see it in your daily life too - for instance, you might occasionally find yourself programming with a new container or data structure library. The interface is hopefully simple enough to figure out at a glance, and you can look up things you don't know. But you'll likely move slower than if you had known the tool like the back of your hand. And more importantly, the lack of familiarity prevents your brain from being able to fully work at the level of the problem, since it's now forced to juggle with all the new information about the shape and behavior of the API.

Googling something once to figure out how to do something is an advantage. But, if you constantly google the same task over and over again you should probably put in the effort into learning it.

Mindlessly cutting and pasting from the search results such as from stackoverflow can be anywhere from a waste of your time to extremely dangerous. But, on the other hand when it works it makes you much faster than if you tried to solve the problem yourself.

Consider the advantages to googling: I can get expert advice on areas I know nothing about and use that advice to complete tasks that I would otherwise need specialist help with.

Example 1: I only cook occasionally, yet I made great Kimchi the other day by watching a YouTube video.

Example 2: I replaced the big end bearings on a small petrol 2 stroke by using a YouTube video.

We learn how to choose good instructional material and we learn how to apply it.

Learning is expensive in terms of your own time and the time of an expert teaching you. Imagine spending years to learn a foreign language to understand a single article on the internet vs just using google translate and accepting the low quality. It's best to have as many substitutes to learning as possible.

There is a problem when people literally can't remain unoccupied for more than 30 seconds.

What people?

The President of the United States of America for one

All the people looking at their phones in grocery line, while riding the train, waiting for anything, while paused at a stop light in their car, it's everywhere.

"Can't" is different than "don't want to."

Is reading on your phone on the train fundamentally different than reading a book? Is chatting with your friends while in line at the grocery store bad?

Your point about the stop-light is true, though, because it's unsafe.

Why is this a problem?

other than miserable looking dates at a restaurant now just looking like distracted dates.. whats the issue.

They can't, or choose not to, remain unoccupied with their own thought. This has disadvantages. It's all about the things they spend their seconds on.

Endless bejeweled games are likely as bad as idle, empty thoughts. Reading, learning, even solving puzzles is a good use of the small shards of time like being in a line.

What’s wrong with idle thoughts?

They are likely as wrong / right as simple games with which they are replaced.

Can be a good thing to help you wind down, if applied in moderation. Can waste your time otherwise. All non-trivial activities take some learning to do efficiently; thinking is no exception.

I think you’ll have to define the measure of correctness here as I don’t think I understand what right/wrong means at all in this context.

If we are talking about leisure time as understood by the subject, then it’s difficult to see how a non-harmful activity is a ‘waste’ of leisure time. You can’t waste leisure except by trying to get some sort of work done during leisure, I think.

Other than that, idle thoughts are a wellspring of creative ideas, leaps of deduction and what not. Games like bejewelled are not similar at all; in me, they quickly lead to obsessive hyper focus and a Tetris effect, which is why I don’t play them. But idle thoughts are quite the opposite experience.

Do you really think that sitting down watching the grass grow, clouds, bunnies playing... whatever, is actually a bad activity if done for an extended period?

If you have no responsibility that is being compromised, how can this be a bad thing or is time wasting?

You seem to be saying that everything you do needs to have some purpose or needs to be productive?

I suspect that the problem that society has is that we have decided that everybody needs to be productive and working towards something, even in recreation. Time to spin your wheels in an unstructured way is one of the great things about modern life. We don't have to be spending every minute of the day just trying to get our next meal.

Those are all specific complaints that don’t appear to be wrong if they are not proxies for more general complaints. These examples are only instructive to someone who thinks that a recent generation was perfect and perceived so by the people who lived through it, which is not the case here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com