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Comment by scifibestfi | Hacker News Reader

> They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions.

Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they will be doing most of their life.

Because early school-age children haven't honed their bullshit detectors yet. Seriously though, I'm currently fighting that with my two kids.

They're now old enough that they're becoming netizens of their own and searching for things and learning on their own, but after having to correct a few misconceptions, I've had to sit down with them and explain how they can't trust everything they find in a search and how to perform their own research and validate.

However, getting them to really grasp that while young isn't super easy.

The same applies to school and teachers. Everyone is taught some bullshit in school. I just think the difference is quantity of bullshit (the internet has more).

True, but one hopes (perhaps foolishly) that there's enough oversight between various parents talking to their kids about what they're learning, other teachers, and standardized testing.

It worked for most of us, but politics is creeping into everything and budgets are getting cut all over the place.

Are you suggesting I'm also a school aged child? Because, that's the only way your point works as an equivalency.

Learning isn't just about solving problems it's about understanding concepts. Teaching concepts is fundamental to understanding methods. Googling is a method to solving a problem. You're suggesting teaching methods in a discussion about corrupting conceptual instruction; which is the exact thing the school is doing.

My daughter's homework included the question "without an atmosphere would there be gravity?". At the time Google's featured snippet for this phrase claimed without an atmosphere we'd all float off into space. Worse, my wife (a primary school teacher) believed this to be true "because Google says". Regardless of Google's stated desire to organise all the world's information, they appear to be further from this goal than they were in the "10 blue links" era.

Google is a tool like a knife. If you don't know how to use it, you can cut yourself.

In a world, there children can't avoid knifes, children should be thought how to use them safely.

Google returning nonsense results can be exploited as a teachable moment. That is why non-practical questions such as the one about gravity and atmosphere are useful, they encourage developing more widely applicable skills (healthy skepticism) while stakes are low.

> Don't you Google answers to questions?

No. I don't use it at all.

> It's what they will be doing most of their life.

Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.

What do you use? Or you don't search the internet at all?

> Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.

Why?

Yes, and depending on topic, I discard 10% to 90% of the results out of hand.

This is par for the course. When doing a library course in university, I learned that you typically end up discarding up to 99% of sources. (very rough rule of thumb: you get say something like 1000 hits, review the top 100 titles, read the top 10 abstracts, and select the remaining article(s) as a source. Wash rinse repeat)

If your 1000 hits is roughly reasonable to you, mind if I ask how you find so many sources? In something I'm interested in, I rarely find even a dozen hits on things that seem vaguely related. And for more than half of those, I can't even find access.

Maybe you're counting differently? If near the end you have a dozen papers that you're sufficiently interested in that you're actively trying to access them already, that sounds pretty decent really.

Can you give an example of something you've been searching for?

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