I Google everything | Hacker News Reader

I Google everything

wernah.com

154 pointswernah120 comments

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 seconds to just find it out.

And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.

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 movie. Sure it saves me the two hours having to sit though the movie, but it kind of misses the point. It's not like I actually care about what the population of Greece is.

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 finding it fun to discuss. But I wish I could accurately tell when that's the person's goal, versus whether it's a person who actually finds solving real problems more fun than talking, like I do.

Well, anyway, already learned something new today. My day is complete.

edit: wow this is bigger than I thought, now I've been reading through older HN posts where I was mind-blown about "why would he even post that? What's his motivation?". Now I feel like I can finally make sense out of it. I feel so stupid for never noticing something so simple. The world is different now.

"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.

Arguing an idea vs arguing a fact are different things. ("Reply" is meant to bring the comment in right thread, not to counter the previous comment)

> But I wish I could accurately tell when that's the person's goal, versus whether it's a person who actually finds solving real problems more fun than talking, like I do.

I think you're still missing it. Have you never enjoyed a movie with a surprise ending (as the GP pointed out)? Would it have been just as fun if someone had given you a 30-second summary of the plot? What about working out puzzles, brain-teasers, etc.? I like all of this stuff; I also solving real-world problems. I think the point is not that there are different kinds of people [1], but that there are different kinds of discussions. And, yes, it is good to know what kind one is involved in.

[1] Although there are. :-)

I think there may be a generation gap. Most older people I know don't even think to look it up. Many younger people instinctively look it up

I'm not denying it can be fun to debate and guess but there are plenty of times it just better to look it up and then move on to deeper more meaningful conversation

There's a difference between bandying around ideas and simple facts. 'Population of Greece' is a simple fact. 'Ramifications of overpopulation of Greece' is an idea. Making a conversation out of trying to guess at simple facts is like making small talk, in my opinion. Sure, it can grease the wheels if you don't know someone well, but among friends, it's a waste of time.

That's nice if the purpose of the conversation is only to figure out the population of Greece and to pass the time.

I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though, where Googling clearly has benefit to help the conversation achieve its goals faster.

I say this not to you, but to people on the board in general. Given that I've seen self-centred comments like "I considered the project a success because I got paid and I had fun doing it", rather than thinking about the bigger picture, I can totally see people thinking thoughts like "Don't tell me how long it would take them to make and deliver 15 pizzas, I want to figure out on my own when is the latest we should give them a call, who cares what time people will arrive for the party? The important thing is having fun figuring out how late I can call the pizza place."

Sorry I can't think of a better example.

It's also useful for exercising and perhaps improving ones ability to postulate based upon limited information. In a situation where you can subsequently check the result.

In the "real world", people end up doing a lot of such postulation. Or, they end up being pushed around by those who do or who have inside information.

P.S. Addressing the OP article itself, my version is/was "don't memorize what you can deduce in 30 seconds". For example, in physics, many of my classmates seemed to spend a lot of time memorizing all the formulae in the three chapters being tested. I would be familiar with them but also recall the few, um, "fundamental" formulae. Or, put another way, those formulae or expressions in which the relevant fields were usually summarized. During a test, it was trivial to start with these and manipulate to what I needed. But many of my classmate either had that variant memorized cold, or they got stuck.

The problem in the computer/tech world is that much of the detail we need to get things done, is partially or entirely arbitrary. What flag(s) did author/programmer X choose for their utility that I'm using? Maybe it was purely a personal choice. Or maybe they were influenced by environment/mentor/community Y. (In turn influenced by Z...)

Where you can track those influences, or simple memonics ("r" for "recurse" -- but wait, is it "r" or "R"...), there may be some rhyme and reason that builds up particularly over time and with increasing familiarity and breadth.

In other cases, though, X seemingly simply liked to use e.g. "s", and there may be no way to "deduce" or "infer" this.

If you're in a conversation where you will get pushed around by people who have inside information, and that matters, I hope that you're prepared with your own inside information and game theory predictions before you enter into the conversation.

I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though

If I'm in a situation where the demographics of Greece actually matter to an important decision, then chances are I knew I'd be in this situation beforehand and have spent plenty of time collecting, verifying and correlating every nugget of demographic fact and statistic I could lay my hand on.

But obviously sometimes haste if of the essence and then Google is great, but if I'm hanging out the pub with my mates, haste is almost never of the essence.

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. :)

I did guess the same. Are we both affected the same way by those cognitive biases?

To save someone else the time of looking it up, it's about 29 million.

Yes, Fermi Problems are a favorite past-time of programmers everywhere. Including me - I love them.

I'm talking about cases where trying to solve a Fermi problem wasn't the context.

If we discuss an issue that depends on the size of the population of Greece but isn't about the Greece population, there's no point to waste time for a guess. We should get the right number from Google in a second, and move on to the core issue.

Most of my conversation are about ideas and strategies, not characteristics. Like 98% of them. Maybe a little less, let say 96.5%. Or 95%, what do you think?

This reminds me of a book we used in grad school in the mid-90s. Taught us methods of estimation without knowing all the facts. Something about a cow, etc. FWIW, Google didn't help me find the book. The book discussed techniques of estimation that sound like the typical Google/MS/Facebook interview. This was pre-Google, so we had to use our intuition and estimation skills. Very valuable

I can see your point but I noticed a problem with this (at least with my friends circle). The problem is that I find my friends (and girlfriend) will often come up with the wrong answer and use it as fact from that point on. Unless I make an effort to show them they are wrong it will become the truth and I will forever have to tell them they are wrong.

It is incredibly annoying when I hear them repeating the wrong information later on.

I'm obviously not advocating willful ignorance or refusing to check your work. All I'm saying that I find value to trying to solve a problem "by hand" first, instead of instantly looking up the answer, no matter how easy it might be to look up the answer.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Tom Waits' quotes:

"Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."

A lot of people I know argue against this line of thinking but they're usually missing the point. The "problem" isn't that information is readily available ("that's fine," he says) but that the exercise of wondering is often worthwhile and under-appreciated. There's value in not knowing and wondering why.

I think of this as analogous to the way computers have increased productivity at work. It's not necessarily that you get your work done faster, it's that you can have a better product in the same amount of time. So instead of wondering about the stuff that's easy to look up, wonder about deeper things. I love Tom Waits, but he's off the mark here: like so many other things, a "deficit of wonder" is a social problem, not a technological one.

It's almost as if they were more interested in having a conversation than in looking up trivia...

There is an old tale of greek philosophers debating how many teeth a horse has. - "They have a small mouth that cannot fit very many teeth - they must have less than 20." - "They chew a lot so must have big strong teeth - big teeth take up more room so I agree they must not have very many." - "I disagree, they only eat grass their teeth do not not need to be strong. But they need very many teeth to chew it effectively!"

and on and on.

Finally one of them opens a horse's mouth and counts...

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.

That's interesting, but completely counter to my experience. I finally discovered that my most intelligent friends (programmers, teachers, businesspeople) enjoyed the challenge of reasoning to an answer, and felt a sense of triumph and join accomplishment when they got the answer (however close or far they were when they grabbed an iPhone to check their work). They cherished the shared experience, and remember it fondly.

They couldn't give two shits that I had 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.

That's part of the point. Almost everyone can drive google to get the answer to a question (doing so efficiently is a useful skill though). I think that some of the IGG (Instant Gratification Generation) believe that being able to provide an answer (or being the first to) somehow makes them special, despite them not actually doing anything really clever to get that answer. What bugs me (taking the XKCD spark plug example) are people pretending they know something without revealing the actual source, because they don't attribute their source.

It's also great fun to see how people react to technology questions in interviews when they don't have access to the Internet. It doesn't take long to find where the edge of someone's comfort zone is and start probing there. I consider bullshit or waffle as the worst possible answer, followed closely by confidently giving a wrong answer. At the other end of the spectrum are answers of the form "Not absolutely sure but I think it is..." and/or "If I had to look it up I'd look in <book>/<man page>/<documentation>/<website>/etc." Being able to quote possible sources is good as it is a useful indicator of breadth/depth of knowledge.

Back to the look-it-up or not debate; from my anecdata I'd guess at there being a better correlation with age rather than education level. IME, the younger people I work/socialise with are, the more likely they are to look things up. I seem to be on the cusp of the "look-it-up" camp which may be related to the fact that Google wasn't ubiquitous during my education (a Comp Sci degree finished in 1999), nor was the technology/access to look things up whenever I wanted (I had to go into a University building for Internet access - I only got fixed line dialup access in my final year and even then it was expensive and slow).

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.

Refusing to use one's phone to access information during a conversation is not necessarily Luddite (not that you said it was).

In modern architecture after the boisterous 1920's when design was seeking to incorporate the concept of the machine and industrial life into our domestic living, designers found themselves in the 30's longing for more organic expressions. Life had changed. The economy had crashed and values shifted.

Just because technology is available does not mean it is always what people want or even that people will use it to its utmost capacity. Sometimes we just want to hang out.

What I find funny in that is that when I'm in a social circle, we usually don't have quick access to the Internet.

Is using a phone for browsing (I guess that's the only way you could) during a conversation that common?

At work when sitting down with co-workers for lunch every single one of us programmers will grab our phones when it comes to fact looking up time. We won't spend time arguing about it, we won't spend time trying to reason through something, we simply look it up, and move on to the next topic of conversation.

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."

"facts" are not the primary use case for language.

The stuff that can be looked up on Google constitutes a very small sub-set of the interesting things to know about the world, because a vast majority of knowledge doesn't exist yet (e.g. google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example). The Einstein quote is a perfect case-in-point. He didn't memorize the stuff in books, but he also didn't spend his life looking up stuff in books (modern translation : the internet). Make and invent people. It's much more fun than gooyouface.

  > google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example

... and then you switch to google scholar ;)

Which stops being helpful after year 4 : )

I hate this fact. Not because the internet is in peril of going down, or because it's not convenient (of course it is) - but because we're confusing access to information with knowledge.

Access to information will tell you a number, or an answer, or even give you an amount of text about something. But knowledge lets you understand the bigger picture - how something came to be, or why.

At some point we become the needle on the gramophone, rather than the record. All we can say is what we've heard or read. It's the opposite of thinking, and it makes me worry.

Trivia is not useful knowledge in today's world. The most important thing is problem formulation. Once you have figured out the right question to ask, answering it is usually easy.

This is why I'm so fascinated with Vernor Vinge's "wearables" future, and why I think parts of it are such an accurate representation of the near future. For instance, high schools have classes called "Search and Analysis" -- basically advanced Googling & result interpretation. People have recognized that the ability to formulate the proper query is almost as important as being able to understand the results.

Check out his short story Fast Times At Fairmont High[1] and the short Synthetic Serendipity[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor...

[2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/

You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain.

I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips?

This is also why I love man pages.

Edit: Just in case anyone is not aware check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

I was asking if anyone knew of the easiest way and I see some options below. Thanks, I'll look into those.

There is an iOS app called "Wiki Offline" which gives you a local copy of the English Wikipedia that has been compressed to around 3.5GB.

You can get a monthly XML extract for the English Wikipedia here:

http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20120802/

Your choice whether to get the current snapshot or an archive of all edits from the beginning of time.

Amazing how 7zip can achieve 100-1 compression, so that all articles plus all edits are only 62 GB compressed.

He who controls wikipedia controls the future.

http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page

Not sure why dumps don't occur more often though.

I also like this http://thewikireader.com/

That's awesome! I wonder if there are any options with a bigger screen, or if any of the ereaders can be made to store wikipedia locally.

> I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips?

Try the wget command line tool; it's generally useful for site-mirroring. "wget --mirror" will recursively download an entire website; if it is impractical to download all of Wikipedia, you may test with the option "-l <recursion depth limit>" to get only a part; then "-p" will make it get all images and whatever needed to display the pages in question. And if you want to only get the text pages/reject the images, the "-A" and/or "-R" options may be useful. Consult the man page and experiment.

Please don't do this; Wikipedia provides dumps for exactly this purpose:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Eng...

(Further explanation regarding the use of robots, spiders and 'wget -m' here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Ple... )

> I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not be audited by wikipedia on the spot.

Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of 500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit.

> Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error.

I don't even know how com sci algorithm courses pose a challenge anymore. Google was barely a thing when I took it and when we occasionally stumbled on obscure papers with it (or Excite), it was like finding the teacher's answer book out in the open.

> Where you had to actually call your friends or family to see what they were up to.

This is not such a loss. I think back when you had to call people, your conversations had to be more deliberate (i.e. I'm calling Jane to break up with her/give condolences about her dead mother) and planned. Not planned out in what you were going to say, necessarily, but planned out in that you wouldn't just call up a non-close friend and have a lengthy conversation with them. Whereas with online chat and Facebook, I've had long rewarding conversations with people whom I may never had the temerity to cold-call about anything.

"Talking shit" can mean exactly the same thing as "talking bullshit", in the UK at least.

In the US, talking shit means saying something negative about someone. John said I stole money from him? He's just talking shit. This could include truths; perhaps I did take his money, but there's more to the story than John mentioned. John paid me money for a service I performed but he thought it wasn't worth what he paid. John said I'm a cheat when I beat him in poker, but that was just the way the cards fell. He's talking shit about me again.

Talking bullshit would mean knowingly lying. John paid me for a service I told him I could perform, but I was bullshitting him when I said that. I can't actually perform the service. The mayor campaigned on lower taxes, but he knew he wouldn't be able to change that law.

Here you can "talk shit about" which has the meaning you use (e.g. "I was just talking shit about my colleagues"), whereas just "he's talking shit" is similar to bullshit, except maybe a little less angry and more dismissive.

Yes, that's the same thing I was referring to. Talking shit (with no modifier) is, in my experience, an uncommon phrase to use in a sentence; the only time I can recall hearing it is when person1 is telling person2 that person3 was talking shit about them. In that situation, the "about you" part is implied, and you can leave it off. "Don't worry about it man, he's just talking shit." That implies person1 is saying person3 said something negative about person2.

Now, what I would be doing in a bar is "shooting the shit". This means you're just telling bullshit stories (wild, made up, inaccurate, designed purely for entertainment). I caught a 30" bluegill is bullshit, and I would only say that when I'm in a bar shooting the shit.

> Yes, that's the same thing I was referring to. Talking shit (with no modifier) is, in my experience, an uncommon phrase to use in a sentence

No, no, no! In the UK it is not uncommon! People over here are talking shit all the time, often not about anyone.

Language is a wonderful, complex, irritating thing. The same words in the same language meaning two different, completely context-sensitive things. The same word being used in completely different ways. Not being able to describe the use of a word without long, protracted arguments giving multiple examples of the usage. Even in the same county, the same language is used differently based on geographical region.

It amuses me to hear a US citizen use words and pronunciations I know are from the UK, just due to exposure to the BBC. In the US, Hyundai is pronounced "hun-die" or "hun-day", but I have a coworker who is very much an American who pronounces it "high-un-die" because the only time he hears the word is when watching Top Gear.

The Internet makes it difficult to tell which dialect the author is speaking, spawning these arguments and fostering communication between people 3000mi away from each other. That's a wonderful thing. Now if only I could figure out what a curry is and why everyone seems to love it over there.

I'm actually pretty surprised about the curry thing. Here in the UK we get so much US media (films and TV) that I feel like I have a fairly good grasp of what they have in America. Not having curry has shocked me though.

Do they not have curry or just not call it curry? Admittedly I don't think I'm ever eaten anything like that when in America, but never really thought about it..

I think that's why he qualified the statement with "in my experience", which means he's talking about usage in the US.

Indeed, we often like to talk shit every Friday night after work, typically over a few pints.

Though you may encounter the odd person in everyday life who is 'full of shit'.

Such is the British way, we tend to use these as terms of endearment just as much as genuine insults.

Similarly, my best friend is absolutely "a little shit" and I love him for that fact.

I think this chain just points out that fact that "shit" can be used in many contexts. Still doesn't answer the fact that the way the author used it is ambiguous.

Bullshitting is not necessarily lying. It's saying whatever you think you need to say to advance your objectives. Truth or falsity is irrelevant[1].

[1] Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

I think it's OK. Someone can still talk shit at a pub and say something worth auditing on Wikipedia.

I think it's ambiguous, but the article probably meant shit-talking.

Or even just shit like urban legends. Like when my sister-in-law says, "you know Chipoltle is owned by McDonald's, right?" and in the time frame it takes for me to think I doubt that I've already looked up the truth on my phone.

McDonalds owning Chipotle isn't an urban legend, it was true but is no longer. In 1999, Chipotle was a subsidiary of McDonalds (http://www.chipotlefan.com/index.php?id=chipotlemcdonalds), but McDonalds was fully divested around 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipotle_Mexican_Grill).

You should probably have used an example where you weren't smugly wrong, it WAS true at one point.

McDonald's once having partial ownership in Chipoltle like a decade ago is nothing like "McDonald's owns Chipoltle" ... But maybe you had to be there.

When you hold a bunch of information in your head, you benefit from your brain's penchant for making weird collisions and connections. Serendipity rules.

These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get that far, the rest is easy.

eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".

You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every chapter.

> If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".

And then you've got two problems :) https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%...

See my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410649

I know taking issue with Einstien is not a good idea - but I'll do it anyway. Learning - and putting as much relevent material in your working memory is beneficial to seeing the bigger picture and quick informed decisions. A collection of one line facts (what you get when you look something up) does not make wisdom. Sure, most of us have extremely small working memories, but it does not negate the benefit for learning and retaining material on a subject.

as an example, I find when I have to look up the syntax for each.. and... every.. function... my programming proceeds at a snails pace. Just an example.

Feynman makes a good point when he's describing why he isn't a genius.

Someone shows him a blueprint and he just happens to know X because (I can't remember, something he did last week) and that's such a little thing, but everyone is "wow!" and then someone else asks him a question and really, Y is the obvious answer because square root Z is (something something something) and everyone says "wow".

It ends up that Feynman worked on a lot of stuff, all the time, and remembered a lot of it.

I guess Feynman wouldn't have remembered his phone number unless it had some interesting characteristic.

With a very possible "interesting characteristic" being the measurements of the lady who answered the phone.

This is a great point and can't be understated.

When you're in a meeting or conversing with someone who just knows things, the conversation moves so very much faster than if you have to guess or be vague due to a lack of knowledge.

I Google like crazy for answers about things, but I consider not knowing a failure on my part, and endeavor to learn the thing I had to google, so I don't have to "fail" again. I think everyone should think of this problem in a similar way, lest we fall into a habit of saying whatever we want and assuming we'll be corrected if we're wrong (or some other ill).

The comedian Pete Holmes did an amazing routine on exactly this phenomenon, on Conan O'Brien:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ

The ability to 'Google it' does not mean you have the ability to understand it. There is a difference between looking up Jeopardy facts and building a fundamental understanding of the subject and being able to discuss it, or build upon it to come up with new ideas.

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” —Plato, Phaedrus

"Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error."

I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C programming.

Is it bad? No. Is it acceptable? No. Where is the line? It's okay to spend your whole day trying to get tutorials out of Google because the documentation sucks or you just have no idea how the f you can start with that idea. But you must be able to digest them effectively and extends those tutorials beyond just tutorials, and make something out of them. Otherwise, if you just reuse tutorial codes from top to bottom everywhere, then you are not learning. You are copying.

That (externalizing our memory) has been ongoing for long time. Going back in time; Computerized searching, Indexes, Libraries, Books, Written language, probably something like counting stones in pre-history.

I think it's utterly awesome. Combined with viable wearable computing I know everything ever put online. Just might take me a few moments to remember it (search time/connection speed).

It is the #1 reason copyright limitation, net neutrality, information freedom must be fought for.

filetype:pdf has been my secret weapon. I use it like fifty times a week looking for white papers, case studies, etc for various subjects. The wealth of information hidden in these little gems is invaluable.

I tell people all the time.. "Do you remember when you could bullshit anyone." Now they just type your BS into their smart phone.

It was a simpler time. You could misinform just about anybody about anything. Yoko Ono? Sure, her influence in the Beatles would arguably ruin them forever, but after John Lennon's death she went on to invent Skittles.

It's an art now though. You have to pick little tidbits that SOUND plausible but you can never really verify.

I, for example, told my (American) flatmate months ago that no living person other than current sitting monarch can appear on a British postage stamp. Had to backtrack when the Royal Mail announced every British gold medal winner at London 2012 would get their own stamp.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_on_stamps_of_the... what you said did used to be approximately correct.

Implies that conversations will no longer center on facts. Will we find ourselves talking more about politics, love, art and philosophy?

It seems to me that it implies conversations will center around truths (or at least googled tidbits) rather than assumptions.

Pre-seed google with your BS and SEO it to page 1.

Now they just type your BS into their smart phone...

... and click "Save" :)

It's unbelievable how many "facts" nowadays lead to some lone blog or wiki article with no references.

The only thing comparable to Google searching is Twitteer search. Case in point: this morning after reading the sad news of director Tony Scott's death, I inevitable felt morbidly curious about what the circumstances or motivations might have been. Plenty of other people will too, so eventually it will find it's way into the press, but only after days or maybe weeks. So, I opened Twitter on my iPad and searched for 'Tony Scott rumours' and there was the likely answer among the first few results. Of course it was only unconfirmed conjecture but enough to satisfy my curiosity so I wouldn't spend any more time thinking about the event.

Tweets are more instant and just more human IMO. It means you can better leverage your understanding of human behaviour when you try to search for things.

The OP should Google "@viewport" so his site can be accessible to mobile devices.

Heads up to the author. This site is pretty horribly broken on chrome for Android. The left menu bar is fixed width and I can't even scroll to see the text.

Thanks mate, i'll check it out

I find this similar to the math vs arithmetic issue. Math is not arithmetic. We used to have to spend a lot of time on arithmetic to do math. Now we skip the arithmetic since a calculator or computer can do it leaving us free to do the fun and interesting part, math

Similarly, we used to have to wonder about simple facts. Now though simple facts are at our finger tips leaving us to move directly to the deeper more interesting topics.

The problem with this is that while it's super easy to look up facts, it's also super easy to spread false information on the web and make it look official and correct. It's quite amazing how many conspiracy videos are on youtube (along with 'true believers' sharing them on facebook). You can look at it as enabling niche information to get out, or you can look at it as a mass fleecing of a generation.

There are trolls on Twitter who make it their mission to make big media fall for big-ass lies, like the death of heads of state, etc.

Whatever you do, never look up Velikovsky or Von Däniken. It will shatter your ideal image of the pre-Internet era as one when idiotic nonsense didn't spread.

I also like to Google everything, even individual words or proper names I already know the meaning of, just because I can. I use the Google Dictionary Extension for Chrome. Just double-click anything on the web and it pops up. Pretty awesome stuff.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboac...

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.

A year ago there was a study conducted on that topic: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.abstract

It's behind a paywall, but you can read a number of commentaries, e.g.: http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory

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

Yes. I have seen this a lot with friends and co-workers. They always google the site instead of typing in the URL or even creating a bookmark. Even for sites they go to 20 times a day.

Interesting consequence, one person, who had just created a new web page using a GUI website building tool a moment before, tried to get to the site by googling it and was surprised that it did not show up in the search results. I explained that the site was just created and Google hadn't indexed it yet. The person just gave me a blank stare.

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.)

That is crazy. I thought that was behaviour reserved for people my dad's age. My dad does that all the time. I tried to teach him what a URL is, I don't think he got it.

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

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?

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

As a side note, your blog looks very nice, but is unusable on a Nexus 7 in portrait mode.

I personally etymonline.com everything.. root fetishist.

The problem with Google is that it's mostly out of date.

Great article.

> Shit-talking in the pub.

I've become that guy, that whenever a sticky fact comes up for debate, people just turn to me because they know I'll be looking it up.

What I really enjoy is when some asshole refutes the evidence and stops talking to me. For good.

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 can have an informed think about the question. On the other hand, I could sit around arguing with a bunch of hipsters trying to figure out what the difference is (if there's enough time left after the preceding argument over whether or not water boils at lower temperatures in high altitudes).

And honestly, I've always looked things up, I had a set of old encyclopedias I bought from the library for about $10 when I was a kid, and if they didn't have what I was looking for I could go to the actual library and look through drawers of cards or microfilm to find the answer. I remember looking stuff up on computers about 20 years ago on SIRS, and even before that via BBS files.

Finding information is mainstream now, and all the pseudo intellectuals are crying because their power base of personally invented knowledge is crumbling and they lack the mental faculties to think freely on a higher level and reason for themselves.

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.

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